Meetings

Fixed Meetings

Meetings held on a fixed basis in the calendar and compulsory for team members to attend

• Annual Meeting Pulse (General, Company-Wide)
• Weekly Meeting Pulse (Teams)

Spontaneous Meetings

Meetings held on an spontaneous basis as consequence of daily work needs

• Rules
  • Duration: Meetings shouldn't take longer than 30'. Always be very strict to extend meetings from this duration if you are the organizer but also to accept them as an attendee. If you need a 60' meeting, think of a 45' one.
  • Number of attendees: Take care when including more than 3/4 people per meeting and always be very strict to call team members into a meeting. Note that a 10 people 60' meeting is not a 1 hour meeting, it is a 10 hour meeting.
  • Frequency: Beware of regular meetings piling up, taking too much of your week's time and blocking you for doing value/focused work
  • Availability: Embrace the concept of office hours. Set up a fixed and short space of time per day/week to be called into meetings and block the rest for your own work and personal time.
  • Agenda: Always include an agenda for anyone to be able to understand if they should attend the meeting or not. Team members are encouraged to not accept meetings that doesn't have a clear agenda, including: what is this meeting about, why should the meeting take place, agenda and what to bring.

Async Meetings

Sometimes it's impossible to find a common time to meet, or we are trying to respect everyone's time and while some kind of meeting is needed, it doesn't have to be live. Our async meetings can take place on Slack as a threaded conversation, or on a Basecamp chat.

On Slack, there should be one person running the meeting who will open it, and state:

• Attendees: list the attendees by Slack name
• Objective: what do we hope to get out of this meeting? what is the topic at hand? what is out of the scope of this meeting? is the meeting to collect opinions and information, or to have a discussion?
  • Having a discussion is not recommended in a threaded async Slack meeting as it can get very messy very soon. We recommend async Slack meetings to get thoughts and information on a given topic which will then be used to shape a post on Basecamp, where discussion will take place).
• Next Steps: organize these ideas into a Basecamp post, consolidate information that we need but may already exist in other documents/projects, set milestones and deadlines and involve others if needed.
• Deadline: indicate until what date/time attendees can contribute to the thread.

On Basecamp, it's normal to see async 'status updates' on the Campfire chat that is centered around a particular open project.

Using Loom/Vimeo/Screenity to quickly record something to include in an async meeting is also acceptable and encouraged, just be mindful of keeping it short.

Organizing Meetings

• Use  the shared calendar function to view availability schedule the meeting
  • Don't ask team members directly on Slack what their availability is, it's inefficient!
• Set up an agenda
  • Let rest of the team know what the meeting is going to be about
  • This way:
    • Team members can prepare for the meeting
    • Team members can cancel the meeting if there is no need
    • We avoid misunderstandings and wrong expectations