Meetings suck!

Not because they do but because of how we do them.

They are long, not well-defined, and most people attending don’t know what they are doing here and would like to go back to their activities.

The typical meeting experience expects you to come into a room, be told about a subject, and you should start throwing ideas, and asking relevant questions on the spot…

It is not a delightful experience…

I don’t know, but I don’t work like that. Most engineers don’t. We tend to be analytical people. We prefer to think, to check some ideas first, and we like to sound smart…

Why do meetings suck?

Most meetings are useless. In my experience with some processes, we can cancel most of them.

Calling for a meeting should be forbidden if we don’t answer the following questions upfront.

• Agenda

  • What are we going to talk about? (why is it important)

  • Who will lead the discussion?

  • What outcome is expected?

• Participation

  • Why is your presence required?

  • What is expected from every participant before, during, and after the meeting?

• Documentation

  • Supporting documents that must be reviewed, and read before attending the meeting

  • List of questions, answers

  • Link to an internal chat channel to discuss the topic at hand

You should write down a document containing at least the meeting agenda when calling for a meeting. You should also explain why this meeting is essential, what outcome is expected, and the documents that must be consulted to support the meeting.

Your document should invite participants to write down their questions ahead of time so we can start the conversation asynchronously. That’s why I prefer to put a link to a Slack thread where the Q&A can happen. Then we put the final answers in the document.

Doing so the actual meeting may be no longer relevant.

Why do we need meetings?

Writing down the expected outcome, providing the documentation, and inviting participants to communicate is the essence of meetings.

We don’t need to sit together in a physical or virtual room to do that. At least we can initiate the process offline so that the actual gathering makes more sense.