Meetings, bloody meetings

#1

It seems to me that Sutherland and Schwaber, like many of us, must have had an aversion to meetings. They avoided the word completely back in 1995 when they codified Scrum. The framework has a number of prescribed events that to the uneducated observer look a lot like dreaded “meetings.”

But yet we still get invited to 'em… loads of them.

I’m curious, what strategies do you have to “manage your calendar”, what ideas do you share with your teams in regard to meetings? What do you do when you find yourself in a bad meeting?

#2

At my last engagement they actually put out a memo called “Meeting Etiquette.” It was an attempt to get everyone’s out-of-control calendar(s) under control. The items were:

-No meetings before 9AM or after 4PM
-No meetings longer than an hour
-All meetings must start on time and should end no later than 5 minutes before the official end (to give attendees time to get to their next meeting)
-No meetings over lunch (12-1PM); any meeting during this time MUST provide food
-Every meeting should have an agenda/talking points published PRIOR to the start; if there is no agenda published attendees have the option to not attend.

It sounds like simple stuff but there was definitely a positive effect; considering studies have shown humans average about 47 minutes of concentrated attention before their minds wander unintentionally the 60 minute cap helped.

I personally try to never schedule a meeting longer than 30 minutes; meetings are like “work” in the sense that they expand to fill the space provided…I’m the king of taking meetings in inappropriate directions so the timebox keeps me out of HR :).

As for bad meetings…I usually politely say that we are not getting value in the session, should we take a minute to recenter or reconvene at a later time. Those are on my good days. On my bad days I have been known to excuse myself with “I have to return some videotapes.”

#3

P.S.-free night of drinking for the first person to get the reference in my last sentence.

#4

Managing a calendar is really hard, especially for people in management roles (which sounds counterintuitive). Overall, I am not very good at this (as anyone who has seen my calendar can confirm). However, the key approach I am using is reminding myself that I need to say “No”. Many of the meetings I am invited to actually don’t require my attendance. Also, I am adding “Thinking time” slots to may calendar (typically 1 hour per day) which is a protected time for myself to think about things I need to and to reflect about things I don’t normally have time for. Lastly, I an trying to do the creative work first thing in the morning so no emails, no transactional stuff, purely focusing on creative thinking/work before all the madness starts.

@JayHorsecow - re your reference - American Psycho?

#5

winner! next time i’m in the UK, pints are on me!

#6

@JayHorsecow Deal!

#7

Somewhat related: I have many direct reports o the development team. I conduct regular 1:1’s with all of them. Several from one particular agile team mentioned in quick succession “We are in too many scrum meetings!”. After hearing the second or third time in a day, I decided to do a quick whiteboard exercise to review the ideal number of meetings followed by an exercise to see how many they were in.

Turns out, backlog refinement/grooming occurred no less than 4 times a sprint. I then 5-whys the individuals separately. Turns out, the issue was not meetings, nor was it communication as you may be thinking now… The root that became apparent was that the Product owner did not understand the features of the product they had been decomposing and solving for. Because of the lack of knowledge there was great churn on the team. We got the PO more product training and comfort, and saw the meeting count drop off.

My point: typically meetings are a trailing indicator of something else. Bandaging the meetings does not solve the root cause and could potentially do more harm than good. I love the 5-whys, and would recommend it as an approach for others in a similar situation.

#8

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#9

I have a practice of blocking time on my own calendar for heads down work time, which works well. At my last gig the company had a rule of “no meeting Thursdays”…that most people tried to comply with. As far as teams, I encourage and remind the WHY about the meetings especially when it comes to sprint planning, daily scrums, etc. Also, I tell teams if the meetings aren’t productive then speak up and work to make them better…just don’t complain and offer zero solutions.

#10

Couple of points on this.

I like to set-up a meeting etiquette, so everyone knows what’s expected and how to behave. In my current organisation most meetings are over video chat, which makes things worse as if you don’t manage your time you can end up in back to back meetings most of the day. Some of our etiquette points:
- Check peoples calendar before booking meetings
- Give people 10-15 mins between meetings
- Set an agenda before the meeting
- Do not carry out other work when in meetings (we often have people disengaged working away on their second screen).
- Set yourself to away or DnD in Slack
- Do not share a Laptop, Mic or Camera (unless in dedicated video conf room).

Also regarding video meetings, we recently found (purely by chance) when switching to Zoom.us for our video chats, the free accounts set a 45 minute meeting limit. This is everyone’s favourite feature, there are even several warnings and a final countdown!

Another technique I’ve used occasionally is the money clock (https://tobytripp.github.io/meeting-ticker/) to encourage everyone to keep to time.

#11

All great points @paul.cutting

I struggle with a few of these myself. In particular

I find if one or two people are remote, and the balance are colocated in a dedicated conf room, it is really really hard to behave like “everyone is remote” - I’ve tried having everyone in the conf room use their laptops, but is really awkward and audio is problematic. No easy solution there.

If the meeting is short (<15 minutes) no problem. If longer, I am guilty as charged of multitaskling, half paying attention.

#12

Was watching a video cast with 3 Europeans. The Single definition of Agile Success for him was “no meetings” - I LOLed - thinking he is correct - but never would happen in US work culture. There is more consternation and ego over meetings than imaginable! Who schedules them? Who appears most busy (therefore in demand)? Who’s office? Who is note taking? It’s actually kind of amusing and funny! A recent customer I worked with I would just schedule meetings myself! (I use the GTD 2 minute rule!) I had more people swing by because the meeting request came from my name! “Why didn’t Role do that?” Type questions. My response was always: took less than 2 minutes - which was the truth - but that is not what people wanted to hear. They wanted the Politics.

#13

This was inspirational. While there are too many individuals that I have meetings with, I will definitely 5-why my meetings themselves and try to find common reasons for the meetings, to maybe combine them or work out how this could be handled without meetings. Thanks!

#14

Rules for managing day time, duration, frequency, and all that stuff for meetings are absurd to me. If you need to talk you need to talk.

Even worse, a perversion of such rules are tremendous mails, where people try to explain everything to you because they want to avoid meetings. I love to read such mails at 6 in the evening (that’s irony!).

I for myself have found two measures quite successful:

  1. ROTI - measure “Return on Time Invested” by a rating from 0 to 10 at the end and let every know
  2. Limit Work in Progress and accept only those meeting tackling your current concerns