Meeting best practices (including remote staff)

Planning a meeting

Understand the reason for the meeting

• Meetings can share information, solve problems, or make decisions
  • Generally, each meeting should only do one of these functions at a time

Have an agenda

• Include the agenda in the invitation
• State the purpose and/or desired outcomes
• Choose a meeting format based on the purpose
  • e.g. "Go-around" (where everyone speaks), vs. Presentation vs. Discussion
• Estimate the time each agenda item might take
• For longer non-recurring meetings, consider building in a very brief (e.g. 5 minute) in-meeting retrospective
  • Was the meeting effective? How could it have been better?

Invite the right people

• Require key stakeholders
• Use "optional" where appropriate
• A meeting that is generating ideas or collecting information can proceed even if missing some key people; a meeting that shares information or makes decisions cannot.

• Choose the meeting duration
  • [Need guidance here]

Scheduling a meeting

See: https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_tips

Timing that accommodates everyone

• Use the Google Calendar "Speedy Meetings" option
  • Half-hour meetings end after 25 minutes
  • Longer meetings end 10 minutes early (or five minutes if the start time was 5 minutes after the half-hour)
• Choose the meeting day and time
  • Use the "Find a Time" feature in Google calendar
  • Be VERY aware of time zones
    • Encourage everyone to use the Google calendar feature to warn about creating meetings outside your working day
  • Also be aware of daylight savings differences

Leverage Google Calendar

• Make the meeting editable by all attendees (checkbox in Google calendar)
• Reserve a room if necessary
  • Appropriate size (not too big, not too small)
  • With screen/camera/speakerphone if needed
  • One person often doesn't need a room--can use ad-hoc space
• Engineering admins are available to help
  • Can schedule the meeting, negotiating availability of people and rooms
  • Give them all the information they need to create the invitations
    • Meeting title, who to invite (required/optional), duration (specify that you want "speedy"), preferred dates/times, brief description including links to agenda and/or minutes
    • Ask them to make the meeting editable by all attendees

Before the meeting

Prepare schedule and note-taking

• Figure out a consistently good time for all members of the team (e.g., PT mornings to include Europeans)
  • Or if there is no consistently good time, try rotating times so everyone gets to share the pain of being on super-late or super-early
• Attach a Google Hangout to all meetings regardless of whether you know someone will be remote, you never know who will work from home
• Set up note-taking
  • Public notes should generally be published on wikimedia.org, but synchronous collaborative note-taking requires etherpad or Google docs. Decide which to use and how and when you will publish the notes.
  • Include a link to the notes (minutes) in the invitation
  • Put the date and a word or two of team name and purpose in the document title
  • Create an etherpad or google doc, which serves as both Agenda and Minutes
  • Note that etherpad is PUBLIC and anything entered CANNOT be fully erased
  • If a google doc, share it ("Can Edit") with whoever is appropriate
    • For non-sensitive topics, sharing with WMF is usually fine
    • For sensitive topics, share only with the attendees

Team Practices Group standards for sensitivity and publication

• Decide the sensitivity at the beginning of the meeting:
  • Certainly non-sensitive
    • take notes in a new etherpad
    • Notetaker moves them to Wikimedia.org ASAP after meeting.
  • Possibly sensitive
    • Take notes in Google Doc
    • Notetaker emails all meeting participants after meeting with deadline (1-2 days) for people to either review and redact notes, or ask for more time.
    • After deadline has passed, notetaker publishes notes to Wikimedia.org.
  • Not for publication
    • take notes in Google Doc
    • save Google Doc to team's meetings folder in Google Drive

Prepare materials and agenda

• Before heading to the meeting, remind yourself of the purpose and agenda
• Prepare any necessary materials (e.g. slides, images)
• Be aware of any major political or interpersonal issues that might arise

Starting a meeting

• If in a room, arrive at least 5 minutes early
  • If the room is still occupied 5 minutes before the meeting, let them know you will need the room soon
    • And consider evangelizing "speedy meetings" to the organizer (later)
• Start the video call before the official meeting start time
  • If the video call won't start, try the other browser (Firefox vs. Chrome)
    • Sometimes rebooting also helps
  • Explicitly set the speakers/microphone (sometimes it is automatic, sometimes not)
    • Click the Gear in the hangout, and set speakers and mic to the specific device (e.g. Chat-150 or Jabra)
• Open the chat panel (by clicking the icon at the top of the left sidebar)
• If the keyboard/mouse batteries are low, email techsupport@wikimedia.org

Attending a meeting

If remote

• Use a headset
• Choose a quiet environment
• Choose a non-distracting background view
  • If at home, make sure others know if they might be on camera
• Consider muting whenever possible
• If bandwidth is poor, reduce video quality
  • Click on the 5-bars icon at the top of the hangout
• Open the chat panel (by clicking on the icon at the top of the left sidebar)
  • If you type something important into the chat panel, make sure someone noticed it

If in the office but not using A/V equipment

• Use a headset
• Don't have the call at your desk--move to ad-hoc meeting space

• Always speak slowly and clearly
  • Language barriers, poor audio, or both, can be a problem
• Don't dominate the conversation
  • Seek first to understand, then to be understood
• Speak up when you have something relevant to say
• Stay focused on the meeting (minimize emails/IRC)

Facilitating a meeting

• Start the actual meeting on time "as a courtesy to those who were punctual"
  • If key stakeholders are missing, decide whether to proceed or reschedule
• Remind everyone of the purpose, and quickly review the agenda
• Use the Google Hangout chat feature in case there are connectivity issues so that the room sees it
  • Use IRC as a fallback.
• For recurring meetings, start with any issues left over from the previous meeting
• Be especially aware of when remoties want to speak
• Try to keep the meeting in good order
  • If more than one person is speaking at once, most audio channels get fuzzed and the end result is the remote person can't hear a thing
  • Boldly (but politely) ask if deep discussions and long tangents should be taken outside the meeting
• Last item in the agenda is dedicated to planning the next date/time.
• Take a log of what has been decided for each item and who is in charge (kind of an action list)
  • Send that log to participants and let them review it
  • After it has been reviewed, diffuse to other non-participants
• Stick to the agenda

Notetaking

Make sure someone is taking notes

• In some cases, "everyone" can share note-taking, but the facilitator still needs to monitor
• One person taking notes is usually better
  • Can be the facilitator, or rotating attendee, but whoever takes notes will be distracted
  • For recurring meetings, don't make the same attendee take notes every time
  • For important meetings that require intensive facilitation, consider bringing someone in just to take notes

• If using etherpad, don't enter anything that is private
  • Security vulnerabilities
  • Vacation/travel schedules, health stuff, family details
  • Passwords
• If notes will be copied to wiki later, enter them in wiki format to start with
  • == and === and ==== surrounding headings
  • * and ** and *** for bullets
• Write any dates unambiguously. Use ISO 8601 format YYYY-MM-DD.

Take a log of what has been decided

...for each item and who is in charge (kind of an action list)

• Send that log to participants and let them review it
• After it has been reviewed, diffuse to other non-participants

Ending a meeting

• Start to wrap up a few minutes before the official end
  • For a speedy meeting, remember the earlier end time
• Summarize key decisions and next steps
  • Do not let the summary turn back into a discussion
  • Agree on who will post the notes, and in what form
  • Have a plan for any open items with no clear next steps
• End the meeting on time (or early)
  • Don't let the meeting expand just to fill available time
  • Ending early is a Good Thing™, as long as the agenda was covered
  • If appropriate, offer to set up a follow-up meeting to continue the conversation

After the meeting

• Copy meeting notes to a wiki page
  • If in doubt, get permission from attendees first
  • Scan for anything that should NOT become public information
  • Circulate a link to attendees
• Make sure people follow up on their action items
• If a recurring meeting, set up the next meeting's notes
  • So people can immediately start adding to the next agenda

Additional thoughts

• Remote people like the staff mailing list. It helps them keep connected to the life of the office, and it's easier for them to contribute using channels that are asynchronous.
• Remote people like it when San Francisco people hang out on IRC. It helps them feel connected socially and casually
• Be deliberately, explicitly nicer in text (e.g. smileys), because people will default to a non-nice reading of your text
• If it's urgent, call your colleague on the phone. (And other items from this list.)
• Meeting creator in charge of policing participants:
  • make sure people speak one after the other
  • agenda is respected
  • each item is allocated its amount of time
  • meeting end on time...
• the shorter the meeting (less than 1 hour) the better. People start losing attention after 40 minutes or so

Summary/detailed-style notetaking

main article: Good_meetings

One notetaking format that can work for large discussions is:

• split screens
• left screen shows summary of meeting key issues
  • try to create NPOV summary of the discussion
  • one tactic that seems to work: reframing discussion as questions to be answered and/or unasked questions that were implicitly answered
  • keep it to one screen
• right screen shows more detailed transcript

More details can be found in the "Note taking" section of the [Good meetings] page

Notes

• http://oduinn.com/images/we_are_all_remoties_latest.pdf (slides from an April 2015 talk at the WMF office)
• Christopher Groskopf’s Tricks for Going to the Office without Going to the Office

See also

• Good meetings
• Team Practices Group/Team Norms#Meeting Conventions
• Working and convening remotely portal on Meta-Wiki