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“Starting and stopping on time is easy. One person with power simply has to decide to care, the rest follows. Having recently survived a tragicomic 8 way international conference call, an experience worthy of the 4th level of hell, I’m here to offer 5 honest tips that would have saved the day.”
“Because the meetings were so long, someone on the team suggested we institute ’stand up meetings.’ Instead of sitting at a traditional conference table, we took the chairs out of the room and ran meetings while standing on our feet. Well, the length of the meetings DRASTICALLY dropped…”
“Most gurus and teachers spend their time telling people what to do. But if you’re already over-stretched and facing an unending future of still more pressure, that’s not likely to appear palatable. Here’s how NOT doing things can help even the most stressed person find ways to improve their working life.”
“People have a harder time coming up with alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new research suggests.”
“…while having fewer meetings is definitely the way to go in many workplaces, eliminating all meetings is not an option in today’s team-based work environment. This means that having good meetings become essential… If we really want open, fun, creative, participative meetings we need to go beyond the standard advice and venture into slightly-weird-land. Here are five easy ways to do it.”
“There are lots of rules for running a good meeting – always have an agenda, start on time, make sure no one is hungry. But this rule is more important than all others: Be a cheerleader for your objectives. When you run a meeting you have an objective and you are trying to convince everyone else to help you get there. Here is a list of five types of meetings and how to run them.”
“I spend most of my work-life in meetings. Note-taking is a survival skill. Yet, I am surprised at how few people bother to take notes in meetings. Those who do sometimes express frustration at how ineffective the exercise seems to be. In this post, I’d like to expound on why I think you should take notes in meetings and then offer a few suggestions on how to do it better.”
“The daily stand-up meeting (also known as a ‘daily scrum’, a ‘daily huddle’, a ‘morning roll-call’, etc.) is simple to describe: the whole team meets every day for a quick status update. We stand up to keep the meeting short. That’s it. But this short definition does not really tell you the subtle details that distinguish a good stand-up from a bad one. Given the apparent simplicity of stand-ups, I was quite surprised the first time I saw one that wasn’t working. It was immediately obvious to me what was wrong but I realised that it was not obvious to the team. I realised that my team was not aware of the underlying principles and details that would allowed them to diagnose and solve problems with stand-ups.”
“As someone who suffers from frequent encoding errors and buffer overflows, I love Adam’s idea to start a meeting by mapping the name and location of each attendant, along with their title, etc.”
“No one wastes time searching for a purpose at Marissa Mayer’s meetings–even five-minute gatherings must have a clear agenda.”
