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Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

Some tips I've been learning:

- Be ruthless about when you need to have a meeting. Its generally only if you need three or more decision-makers to come to a consensus on a strategy to solve some problem.

- Be ruthless about who you invite; it's usually only people who have something explicitly to contribute or who you know wish to be included.

- One person leading/driving the discussion, making sure to keep things on topic and within timeframes.

- A clearly defined agenda and goal, ideally written up in the invite message.

- Take very brief notes of decisions made and immediate actions, conclude with a rundown of these and follow up with them by email.

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This basically touches all the points that I came here to write, except I want to add:

- Check-in: Give each attendee 10-30s to just say how they're feeling, either in general or about the topic. This can do a lot to make individuals more likely to engage in the meeting, but also to help you assess the mindset of those attending and anticipate issues.

- Framing: Beyond having a defined agenda and goal, it is also important to establish some 'rules' early on. For example "If I feel we are off agenda, I will interrupt and ask that we freeze the discussion until the end of the meeting, if we have time left".

- Check-out: It is important that you don't equate silence to mean acceptance. Sometimes people will disagree with the results but refrain from raising the point as they feel alienated in the meeting or don't want to 'open it back up'. By asking people to each explicitly state if they're happy with the meeting results or if they feel some tension, you can get hints at where these issues may be.

These points may seem soft, but they are honestly incredibly valuable I find. They've saved me a lot of time with a few people who would otherwise stay silent then send me a 'derailing' email a week or two later.

The idea about check-in is awesome! Someone mentioned it further down but "dead audience" is a problem, people often start to code or do other things during meetings. This is only gotten worse during the pandemic. So this feels like a great way to start a meeting without taking too much time! Thank you for the idea. Do you do this in every meeting you run? Do people in your meetings get tired of it after reoccurring meetings (for example doing this every meeting seems less exciting)?

This comment has it all. A lot of other folks are missing the importance of a follow-up email. I always send a follow-up with notes/conclusions and action items assigned to people.

Too often I’ve attended meetings that might have well never happened because whatever got discussed was forgotten a month later and another meeting was held to discuss the same thing.

The point about meetings just being forgotten is a good point! I think that happens too often to me as well. I will try to do this in the future! It seems like that would be a good standard to follow for everyone.

These are are all essential but I think the only thing missing is that the person leading the meeting has to be controlling, their only job is to make the meeting productive through any means necessary. It is okay to cut people off and have that kick to offline or a separate meeting. The leader must control the meeting.

I think one thing that is missing in the Slack/no meeting discussions is that you can resolve things just as poorly (or worse!) via email/Slack/Teams. Effective communication is really really hard and requires significant effort.

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