Preamble
Matt used to say meeting with us should be the best part of a client’s day. In order to make meetings better for everyone, we need to establish some ground rules and best practices to help hold ourselves accountable.
Part 1: Working expectations and availability
Aside from recurring / team-wide meetings, you can more or less set your own hours. This falls under our “be reasonable” approach. If you are on client work or collaborating with someone, you should probably be more available during shared hours.
What do we mean by flexible hours?
- Start time and end time is flexible
Part 2: Meetings
How-to...
...schedule a meeting
Inclusivity and remote-first
- Scheduled team-wide meetings within the universal overlap of hours (12pm EST to 5pm EST)
- Individually join meetings even if you are in the same space as other co-workers
- If not directly discussed, try to schedule meetings 24 hours in advance to account for various timezones
Remote meeting guidelines
- Be present, mentally and physically. This means in addition to being on time, you should be paying attention to the meeting at hand. If you are distracted or can’t give your undivided attention, decline the meeting.
- Location is key. If this is a pre-planned meeting, make sure you are in a known space that has good internet and reasonable noise level.
- Hardware. Join meetings from your laptop. If you have to be doing work and can’t use the laptop, decline the meeting.
- Decline and accept meetings! Attendance should be knowable from the calendar details.
- Provide info. Fill out the meeting description with a short agenda.
- Avoid phone dial-ins. The quality is inferior and it’s just harder to communicate without seeing someone.
- If you are doing a phone dial-in (let’s say you’re traveling to the airport or you hit a traffic/train delay), you should be a passive lurker to just listen in.
- If you’re supposed to be moderating / play a large part in the discussion, reschedule the meeting.