Comment by tanvach
1 day ago
During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour.
Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db.
I was serendipitously the lead DS for analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘starting 5 minutes past’. After joining and cleaning a lot of the data, the data showed:
1) at the start of the trial, meetings ended on time. Then after few weeks it slip to ending late, negating the usefulness. Other orgs did not see meetings running late. 2) ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time. 3) if I remember right, we had a survey data that showed pretty clearly that managers prefer the ‘starting 5 minutes past’ while ICs do not care or have negative sentiment.
The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
In the end we reverted back to normal schedule. It was just easier for busy people to bounce early.
I’ve experienced this all before in similar ways. The metric for meetings ending on time isn’t even very useful because when it’s needed people will ask “do you have a hard stop?” or similarly agree to continue the meeting. Often because of all the points you made, it’s the IC that stick around to talk about finer points or specifics of what was decided or discussed. It’s best to do this while it’s fresh and between people that can “talk shop” at a granular level (whatever that means for your org/team). It’s actually a good thing your ICs want to collaborate or align separate from management. If you’re a manager and you could technically continue on the meeting, consider opting out to give them space as peers. I often ask “do you all need me to stay one?” and most often it’s a No. It all means that it’s basically 2 meetings occurring and it’s the scheduling calendar artifact that is faulty.
>ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time.
That makes 200% sense. A couple or more ICs tend to want to stick around to go off topic or drill down on some thing if they don't have a conflict. People who aren't expressly relevant to that or have a conflict drop at that time.
You're basically seeing the post-meeting hall conversation of the ICs in your data.
Additionally, most meetings are worthless drivel from an IC perspective. The off-topic/drilldown is usually when ICs actually discuss topics relevant to them and get into a level of detail on issues that actually helps further the project.
Not to mention that managers are way more likely to have back-to-back meetings.
> The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
I have had a few senior managers (at Google) who ask for all the meetings _they_ attend to start 5 minutes late.
This seems 100% reasonable to me. No need for it to be an org policy. Just a affordance for the people who spend 95% of their working hours in meetings.
I've also had several senior managers at Google who _don't_ do this, but are 5 minutes late for every meeting anyway. This alternative is pretty annoying!
Or they can just drop off 5 minutes before their next meeting and avoid having everyone else adapt to their preferred start time??
Even better is they only need to use that method when meetings actually run full time rather than every single meeting they are in
The problem is that final decisions tend to be made in the last 30 seconds of a meeting. If you're a manager with a stake in the outcome, you can't leave the meeting until you've ensured that the outcome works for you. Leaving 5 min early is often simply not an option. While arriving 5 minutes late is. It's not an ego thing -- it's the fact that meeting leaders often let meetings run long.
> The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
Dunno if people here know this Paul guy, but he wrote about this: https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html =)
What are ICs?
Individual Contributors - not managmenet
I always read it as Independent Contractors. Based on that I thought they were looking for billable hours.
That almost sounds insulting. Like management is the only party with vision, drive and a goal and everybody else is just there to help. When often management just manages and true innovation really comes from people of all positions.
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What joy to bump into you in the comments section! I definitely preferred 5 minutes past, but my calendar was pretty awful.
What was really awful, however, was when your calendar was a random mishmash of starts at :00, :05, :30 and :35 :-)
In my experience, the best approach is simply to have as few meetings as possible.
People don't know what 'as few as possible' means though. It needs to be clearer than that. As a rule I encourage my reports to consider:
- Does it even need to be a meeting? Keeping meetings to things that need 'a discussion or decision', and keeping updates and announcements to chat or email works fairly well.
- Does the meeting give you any value, or do you bring value to it? If both are no they should decline it.
- Is there an agenda with expected outcomes? No agenda and no goal means it should be declined.
- Are you doing something that's a higher priority? Seeing one of my reports in a meeting when there's an active incident in progress gets me asking questions.
- Does the person running the meeting share notes afterwards? One thing I've noticed over the last couple of decades is that people are much happier to skip a meeting if they'll still hear about what happens afterwards. People don't skip them if being in the meeting is the only way to know about what was discussed or decided. I always encourage people to write some notes and share them if they've set up a meeting now.
>much happier to skip a meeting if they'll still hear about what happens afterwards.
If you're just a 'follower' of what's going on, that's fine. The problem shows up when you have some stakeholder or steering ability.
If you miss meeting about X and don't bring up discussion about Y then other person A may not talk about Z that affects X. But I agree that every meeting should have a point and total number of meetings should be minimized.
Between ICs and managers, which ones more commonly left the meeting room early vs. on time/late?
* During the lockdown.
Covid is supposed to have started in October 2019, and no one locked down until nearly six months later.
Was the lockdown not during the pandemic?
It was six months after it started and arguably after it ended.