[Some organisations] hold meetings that have little purpose and no clearly defined end-state. At the other extreme, some organisations are so fearful of the waste of meetings that they refuse to use the “M” word at all. This, too, has its downside. The middle is the only safe ground. – Peopleware

To do meetings right, we must first identify what type of meeting a meeting is. There are two types according to Peopleware: ceremonies and working meetings. If a meeting is ended by the clock, it is a ceremony. If it is ended by a decision or the completion of work, it is a working meeting.

The ceremony

The purpose of a ceremony is to disseminate information, e.g. all-hands, stand-ups and alignment meetings. Good ceremonies call upon the right audience and then keep everyone engaged throughout.

Ceremonies are best held sparingly because nothing actually gets done in them. For the organisation with too many ceremonies, Peopleware suggests introducing more focused conversation, e.g. one-on-ones, and creating opportunities for unstructured interaction, e.g. through open spaces, so that information can disseminate naturally.

The working meeting

A working meeting is much harder to get right. Once we have just the right set of audience in a room, Rands, author of the wonderful book “Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager”, suggests that we add these two critical components:

  1. A referee
  2. An agenda

The referee keeps the meeting on track and ensures that all participants are able to contribute. The agenda defines the format, the objective and the end state. When the end state is reached, the meeting is ended. When either a referee or an agenda is missing, the odds are stacked up against the meeting for it to be productive.

Rands additionally defines a set of meeting habits that should be applied to all meetings.

  1. Designate someone to take notes in the meeting.
  2. If this is a recurring meeting, start by reviewing open items from the prior version of this meeting.
  3. Close the meeting by repeating the decisions, the issues that remain open, and the owners of those issues.
  4. Send the notes from that meeting to the broadest possible set of appropriate humans via a convenient medium after removing confidential or sensitive topics.

If those four bullets don’t feel instinctively the right thing to do for every meeting then you’re like me for the first decade of my management career when I did none of them.

Like Rands, for the longest time, I too thought that taking notes and repeating outcomes was overkill. That people would just “know” what the action items were and who was to follow up.

How wrong was I.

It turns out that everyone experiences each meeting and interprets the outcomes, as Rands puts it, slightly differently. If what was discussed in the meeting was truly important (we wouldn’t have called up the meeting otherwise, right?) then we certainly don’t want to be leaving the outcomes to everyone’s unique interpretation of them.

Oh, and one more thing…

Nothing, figuratively speaking, bothers a knowledge worker as much as a fragmented day. Paul Graham describes the phenomenon in “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule”. The piece needs no supplement, so I’ll say only a little more.

To be productive, knowledge workers must get into what Peopleware describes as “a state of flow”. Preceding this state is an immersion period of 15 minutes or more, where one isn’t really doing any work. Any interruption to the state of flow incurs an additional period of immersion. High momentum tasks such as design and development are therefore best done during long periods of uninterrupted time.

Understanding the nature of work of one another and scheduling meetings accordingly, e.g. in case of knowledge workers at other interrupt points in the day such as lunch or end of day, an organisation can go a long way in improving productivity for everyone.