In our organization, remote meetings don't suck. It more or less just happened organically because we are a fairly flat organization but in a traditional industry.
Mostly no cameras. I don't even own a webcam.
A meeting is called for a reason (even if it's recurring). We have no "this is the morning meeting" kind of meetings.
There a single person in charge of the meeting. This is most often the person who wants to get resolved the thing the meeting is about. This isn't enforced it's just a natural consequence of someone booking a meeting.
Most meetings are between 2-5 people. Large recurring meetings are maybe max 12-15 people. In the large meeting, there is a rough agenda and everyone speaks to their part of the agenda in turn. Anyone can speak up if they have something relevant to add but otherwise they are muted. This is usually when I get my laundry folded.
- Meetings must have a purpose. (to echo you above)
- The meeting must have a result, some sort of action or next step. Only one.
- When the meeting has created a result to address the purpose, the meeting is over.
- Someone runs the meeting. They decide when the result has been achieved. (to echo you above)
- Someone (explicitly not the meeting runner) takes notes, action items, etc, and records the purpose and result.
- The rule is, you invite people who are required to achieve the result. Other people, marked as optional, may attend if they feel they are necessary. Otherwise, optional attendance defaults to not attending.
- No recurring meetings, no "informational updates", those we call something else. A hangout. A discussion. A presentation.
Typically I leave my camera off during meetings. (Well, the boring ones anyway.)
Which means I just keep on working during the meeting listening with half an ear.
This is especially applicable to reoccurring meetings where the manager is talking to the team, getting progress reports, working through the jira list and so on.
This actually makes for a really productive meeting. I can fill the dead time with admin tasks, but I'm also somewhat aware of what else is happening. Last month it became clear one team member was struggling (for days) trying to do something outside their experience. I offered to make an example, and got him onto the right track.
It's taken a long time to get used to these regular progress meetings (and I imagine pre-covid they were done in person and insanely frustrating) but now I gave the rhythm of them I just keep working.
One tip I noticed, if Roger should comment on what I'm about to say then say "hey roger" at the start of the piece not " what do you think roger" at the end. :)
> One tip I noticed, if Roger should comment on what I'm about to say then say "hey roger" at the start of the piece not " what do you think roger" at the end. :)
I do this without thinking. I even add some fluff or delay between the "hey roger" so that Roger has time to context-switch before I ask the question because you know everyone is multitasking during these meetings.
It's interesting to hear this from others. Years ago I would have expected that camera-on meetings would be more productive on average, but my own experience is the opposite. I have only worked at a few remote companies but the places where cameras mostly weren't used had far far less wasted meeting time.
David Foster Wallace was clever in his forethought here, though the reasons video calls have largely fallen out of favor in the real world may be different.
“Within like 16 months or 5 sales quarters, the tumescent demand curve collapsed like a kicked tent, so that by the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, fewer than 10 percent of all private telephone communications utilized any video image fiber data transfers … the average US phone user deciding that s/he actually preferred the retrograde old low-tech Bell-era voice-only phone interface after all.
…
Audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her ... video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.”
I definitely find camera-on meetings have people pay more attention. Whether that is more productive or not depends on your definition of productive.
The the “camera off lets me do other work”-theory that people in this thread adhere to says the meeting itself is unproductive and the less involved participants are the more chance they have of being productive.
Amazon is very much a camera-on kind of company. What I noticed is that everyone turns on their camera, then most people stare dead-eyed at the camera, not doing anything useful, but also making sure they don’t move or let their eyes drift from looking at the camera. And as soon as they join, they mute themselves or are automatically muted.
Only when they are called on do they then respond, and it’s usually a pretty perfunctory response. I mean, they have been listening and not doing anything else while listening, because they’ve been so focused on the fact that they are on-camera 100% of the time and they don’t ever want to be seen to be doing anything “wrong” during that time.
I do remember some folks had their camera aimed at them from the side (presumably from the laptop camera, while they’re using one of the external monitors as their main monitor), and they would sometimes be doing things while not looking at the camera. But they would quickly come back and respond, if someone called out their name.
In contrast, other employers have had a no camera policy, and that can get a bit weird to explain to external parties who are used to being on-camera 100% of the time. So, I’ve always tried to help explain that to the external folks.
For no-camera companies, it seems to me that those people are usually more engaged with actually listening to the conversation and responding in real time during the meeting, as opposed to waiting until their name is called. They’re also less likely to automatically mute themselves when they join the meeting, but also less likely to need to mute themselves when they join.
And the no-camera companies seem to be well aware of how much the meeting is costing in terms of how people are there and how long they’re all on the call, and then ending it early if they can.
It’s a big culture shift to go from one type of company to the other type.
> they’ve been so focused on the fact that they are on-camera 100% of the time and they don’t ever want to be seen to be doing anything “wrong” during that time.
> For no-camera companies, it seems to me that those people are usually more engaged with actually listening to the conversation and responding in real time during the meeting
This seems to be a dichotomy between "producing Being Present In A Meeting" (a short documentary film of a person staring directly at the camera, knowing that looking away will be interpreted negatively; a species of hostage video), and participating in a conversation.
I think one of the things COVID and the subsequent WFH discussion highlighted for me is how much there's a certain kind of person, often managers, who have a lot of meetings and use them for socialization. The irrelevant minutes of chatting about last night's football or whatever is an important thing for them.
And some of that is important! I'm not going to go full robot and say that all comms must be professional-only. But there's a tension between people who like that and people who don't, and cameras make it worse because you're under surveillance for whether or not you're doing something else instead of not participating in a chat you can't be bothered with.
>I think one of the things COVID and the subsequent WFH discussion highlighted for me is how much there's a certain kind of person, often managers, who have a lot of meetings and use them for socialization.
I constantly say that the push against WFH is all coming from extroverts that are mad that they can't steal energy from the rest of us.
They do it anyway, with excess meetings and increased amounts of BS. Example: How many "check-ins" can you possibly need for a 3 person project? It is mentally draining for people trying to get real work done.
Right, I'm on one project right now that 3 meetings a week, and one of them applies to my work and it really could be an email. Every simple project I'm on I quote 40 hours, where I assume it'll take me an hour or two to do the work and the rest will be meetings.
Mostly no cameras. I don't even own a webcam.
A meeting is called for a reason (even if it's recurring). We have no "this is the morning meeting" kind of meetings.
There a single person in charge of the meeting. This is most often the person who wants to get resolved the thing the meeting is about. This isn't enforced it's just a natural consequence of someone booking a meeting.
Most meetings are between 2-5 people. Large recurring meetings are maybe max 12-15 people. In the large meeting, there is a rough agenda and everyone speaks to their part of the agenda in turn. Anyone can speak up if they have something relevant to add but otherwise they are muted. This is usually when I get my laundry folded.