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Best practices for Meetings

Meetings​

COMMUNICATION WORKSTYLE WORKSPACE

Make Meetings Optional​

WeSalute is an all-remote global company that is not always conducive in making all time zones asynchronous for meetings; however, meetings can be marked optional via calendar invites if the Team Members time zone conflicts.

Please be sure to focus on executing an agenda and syncing up with only available and mission-critical Team Members. Please do your best to be aware and respectful of other Team Members time zones when scheduling meetings. It is required of all Team Members to be proactive in setting up meetings with teammates to strategize and find resolutions to blockers.

Meetings Agenda​

Please come to meetings prepared. No agenda, no attenda! Use Fellow. All meetings should have an agenda for documenting discussions, decisions, and actions. It is important to have a layout for your agenda so you eliminate multiple meetings and you are time efficient. Please try utilizing our workspace tools to keep meetings organized like: Fellow, Miro, Google Workspace, Confluence, and Jira to have more effective meetings.

Workflow Agenda​

  1. Schedule meeting
  2. Prepare agenda in Fellow (discussion items, actions, Q&A, blockers, etc.)
  3. Start with recording the meeting and/or using transcription
  4. Utilize workspace tools to faciliate the meeting
  5. Share the meeting notes/recording in Slack

Meeting Coordination​

Consider the time investment you are asking others to make with meetings and a permission process. Try to avoid meetings, and if one is necessary, try to make attendance optional for as many people as possible. Any meeting should have an agenda linked from the invite, and you should document the outcome. Instead of having people ask permission, trust their judgment, and offer a consultation process if they have questions.

Record Meetings​

All video conference meetings should be recorded from the beginning. Team Members will be asynchronous when selecting the marked meeting invite as "optional" due to time zone differences.

Memorializing meetings with documentation is a good practice for post-meeting; however, recording meetings eliminates questions on how Team Members collaborated on decisions and how new projects may have been executed during the meetings discussion.

Avoid Hybrid Video Conferencing​

When hosting a video meeting confirm that participants have their own equipment (camera, headset, screen).

Problems that occur when multiple people share equipment

  1. It is difficult to hear because of background noise from attendees keeping the microphone on
  2. It is difficult to see facial expressions because there are too many attendee profiles in the screen
  3. It is difficult to allocate who is speaking when there are multiple attendees
  4. It is difficult to communicate when attendee sharing delay is longer.

Problems that occur because the attendees sharing do not have their own equipment

  1. It is difficult for attendees to screen share
  2. It is difficult to see attendees screen since their screen is further away from them
  3. It is difficult to scroll through deck slides at their own pace
  4. It is difficult for attendees to participate (view or type) in shared document with agenda and meeting notes

Problems that occur when multiple people have their own equipment

  1. It is difficult to consistently mute yourself to prevent an attendee's voice to come through the microphone, as well.
  2. It is difficult to hear an attendee delayed response when it comes over the audio

Theoretically, you can have multiple people in a meeting room with their own equipment, but practice is a better outcome than separate meeting rooms.

All of the remote disadvantages cause participants to travel to all be at a meeting to have a greater experience. Extra travel is inefficient because it is time consuming, expensive, bad for the environment, and unhealthy.