Running Effective Meetings

Last modified on 2023-12-22

Importance of meetings

Meetings are an integral part of any work environment. As with any industry, meetings are critical in the world of software development.

Meetings help teams to communicate, align and strategize. Meetings often help to generate rapport among the team members in an informal setting. Meetings continue to be one of the effective ways for mentoring. Meetings are a great place to align goals of functional or geographically diverse teams.

Some meetings are required for compliance, e.g., HR meetings, All hands meeting, Town halls.

Why meetings are bad

Despite the benefits, meetings have gotten a bad rap in the software ecosystem.

• Recurring meetings tends to fill in calanders preventing employees from focussing on other critical work
• Staff gets invited to meetings, that they don't really have to contribute
• Often meetigns are conducted to collect status updates for the higher ups in the company
• Meetings are effectiveley a non productive time

The Lean principle says that meetings are a form of non-productive work and should be kept to minimal.

How do we fix this

Here are some ideas to fix this problem.

• Conduct less meetings if possible
• Collaborate over a realtime collaboration platform like Slack / Teams for simple queries
• Think thrice before setting up any recurring meetings
• Don't be hesitant to cancel a meeting if the agenda can be deliberated in a small group setting or over other communication channels
• One on One / small group collaboaration is much more efficient than a large group meeting. Eg., code reviews can be done by 2 or 3 individuals over a call rather than an elaborate 5 person meeting.

Cost of Meetings

At times it's beneficial to compute the cost of meetings, to get a sense of why it's important to reduce meetings.

Let us say, your average cost per employee is $200k a year; that is $125 an hour. If you set up a 2 hour meeting with 10 participants - it translates to $250 per person or $2500 for the meeting. As the organizer you may have to ask the tough question - is this meeting necessary?

If you are someone in influence in your organization, please ask your staff to compute this information for every meeting.

What is a good meeting

Here are a few steps on how to run a good meeting from a software development standpoint.

• Meeting has an agenda and it's circulated ahead of time
• Only mandatory participants who has a role to play are invited.
• Don't include participants who just want to know what is happening. They can read notes.
• Partcipants have researched the agenda and know what is expected of them in the meeting
• Clear timelines (start / end) for the meeting, not a recurring meeting
• Clear outcomes of the meeting is defined
• Organizer keeps the group stick to agenda
• Organizer sends out notes and follow up items

The perfect meeting doesn't exist. We also know that meetings are needed. The idea is to keep is simple and productive.