Have you ever attended a pointless meeting? Does a "meeting" leader take 90% of the airtime, leaving only 10% for discussion and making the event more like a presentation? Was mandatory attendance required for something that was not your responsibility? Does your organization have recurring meetings that take space on everyone's calendars without adding value? Did your entire team get called into a live presentation to learn information that could have been communicated by an asynchronous email or video recording? Does someone dominate discussions without asking for others' advice or consent? Does a meeting leader disregard most of what they hear? Do you notice people doomscrolling or having distracting side conversations during your important presentation?

An article in Ars Technica, combined with some additional materials such as this YouTube video, and my own experiences, inspired this essay.

In my framing of the below list of suggestions, "meeting leader" is not synonymous with "hierarchical manager". The "meeting leader" typically is the person who is the main presenter at a meeting or who initiates the meeting, and there may be more than one for a meeting. For example, a vice president who wants a project status briefing may be a "meeting leader" in the sense of initiating the meeting, while the project manager may be the main presenter at the meeting and in that way is also a "meeting leader".

Here is my list, which substantially overlaps with the article from Ars but also has substantial independent contributions from my experiences and additional sources that I have read or watched over the years.

• The person who sends the meeting announcement should clearly communicate in that announcement what the purpose, format, general agenda, schedule, location, and key participant list of the meeting will be. People should not need to ask why they are being invited to attend something, need to ask for a join link, wonder if they will be expected to present information, be unclear what the format or goals of the meeting are, or be uncertain whether a key person will be present. However, refining the format and agenda closer to the meeting start time is usually acceptable.

• Meeting leaders and key participants should arrange their schedules so that they arrive early. This provides buffer in case of delays such as stuck elevators, slow computer boot times, or a missing microphone. Additionally, arriving early for physical meetings allows presenters to plan how to interact with people who may be in different parts of the room.

• Socializing before meetings, especially before virtual meetings, is good for a warmup. Consider scheduling the first few minutes of a meeting for people to greet each other and test their tools including microphones, cameras, slide decks, and demos.

• For larger meetings, such as all-hands meetings, consider offering the option to send questions ahead of time. The meeting leader, hierarchical manager, or similarly responsible person should make a point of answering the pre-submitted questions during the meeting, including difficult questions if possible.

• Schedule meetings so that they are not immediately after lunch when people may feel drowsy.

• Consider scheduling meetings to minimize overlap with family or personal needs. This may be difficult to do when participants are in diverse time zones and/or people who cannot meet during their regular work hours will meet. Consider using a spreadsheet or an online meeting tool to optimize scheduling.

• Offer a way for people to participate in writing such as a virtual discussion on IRC, Telegram, Discord, or your text chat tool of choice, including during in-person meetings. People who are less comfortable participating verbally or on camera may want to use this option. Additionally, this allows for what would could be whispered side conversations to be recorded and for optional whole-audience visibility of the side conversations, while the main discussion continues.

• Make clear at the start of the meeting what the purpose of the meeting is. Do not assume that everyone knows why they were invited, or that everyone is attending with the same motivations. Other important actions in the first minute may be, depending on the meeting, for the meeting leader to introduce themselves, do an introductory icebreaker or some other activity to get everyone's attention, and restate the meeting agenda. See also bottom line up front. Get people motivated to pay attention or leave. And a participant leaving is fine if their time would be better spent on tasks other than napping in a meeting which is unnecessary for them.

• Do not significantly divert from the announced meeting purpose, format, or schedule. For example:
  • a meeting that was announced as a round table discussion should not actually be in a question and answer format.
  • it is bad practice for a key person to miss a meeting where their participation is important for the meeting to achieve its announced goals, and the person agreed in advance to be present. Such a miss may undermine the purpose of the meeting, damage the credibility of that person, and damage the credibility of future similar meeting announcements.

• Meeting leaders who have little care for hearing feedback should reconsider that. Leaders should put effort into listening. See also active listening.

• Meetings which automatically recur and have little actual value other than taking space on everyone's calendars, may be best to cancel individually or rethink entirely as a series. And if an organization sees recurring meetings as a systemic problem then the organization may want to prohibit most or all automatically recurring meetings.

• A meeting leader talking a lot during the meeting is not necessarily an indication that the leader accomplished anything useful, even if they feel good about the meeting.

• Distinguish quality from airtime. A succinct and insightful question or comment may be more valuable than someone's half hour presentation.

• Consider whether asynchronous communication would be more efficient or effective. Especially consider asynchronous communication for longer presentations or information. Consider having questions and answers in a text chat or a short live meeting that is much briefer than the entire presentation plus Q&A would be.

• Do not weigh down presentations with excessive information. Consider including "nice to have" or highly detailed information in an appendix or supplementary attachment. While many people may need to know that there is a corner case which will require a lot of work to fix, probably most people do not need to read a chapter-length explanation of the problem, and the few people who do can find it in the appendix or attachment.

• Be careful and respectful if considering labeling a meeting as mandatory. People may have their own priorities, and often should be given discretion about whether to attend meetings that were created by others. Do we really want engineering teams who are planning for a major deployment tomorrow to be diverted for an hour today to a routine quarterly all-hands organizational status meeting? Also, labeling a meeting as "mandatory" and trying to require people to attend who are not your subordinates may not be appreciated by them or their actual manager.

• Provide adequate notice of meetings for other people to plan accordingly. A meeting announced 5 minutes beforehand is likely not to be received very well, and may be ignored because people are busy or in other meetings. Depending on your organization, considering scheduling meetings at least 24 hours in advance, with longer notice for non-routine meetings that involve more people. Some meetings may have legal notice requirements such as 48 hours advance notice, but try to provide more than the minimum.

• Consider how many reminders to send about a meeting. Sending several reminders may wear on peoples' patience, especially if the recipients of the reminders are not interested in the meeting. However, a single reminder shortly before a meeting may be acceptable, and may be appreciated by people who have signed up for the meeting.

• Meeting takeovers by someone who is not actually the meeting leader may need to be addressed, during the meeting or afterwards, to clarify what expectations are. If there is a pre-assigned meeting leader then they can address this. Consider also having a one-on-one conversation with the person after the meeting to discuss any concerns. In the moment someone may not realize how they may have been perceived by someone else, or how much time they are taking. Many issues can be easily self-corrected, sometimes with the help of feedback after a meeting.

• Contingencies, disruptions, and backup plans:
  • The meeting leader should plan in advance for what to do if the meeting starts to run behind schedule. Waiting until the very end of the allocated time to decide what to do is unwise.
  • For especially important meetings, the meeting leader should in advance develop a backup plan in case of technology failures or other problems that interfere.
  • For meetings which may be contentious or be interrupted by unwanted guests, plan in advance for how to keep the meeting orderly, and how to handle scenarios of participants not following the meeting plan. These plans may vary depending on the meeting format and technology. Common options include requiring advance registration, checking registrations at physical doors and/or online before admitting participants, muting all microphones except the microphone of the person whose turn it is to speak. If additional precautions are necessary then consider the best practices for your location or online meeting platform.
  • It is unwise to wait until the last possible moment to have a meeting about an action that must be taken immediately following, because in case of a problem which interrupts the meeting then that action may be delayed.

• Accessibility and language interpretation:
  • Interpretation and accessibility needs may be easier to address in online meetings than in person. Automated captioning especially seems to be getting better over time.
  • Live interpretation into multiple languages may be challenging. For some meetings it may be possible to recruit volunteer or paid interpreters, but do quality checks ahead of time. If an interpreter's skills are insufficient then that may lead to a bad experience for some participants, and theoretically could lead to people making disastrous decisions based on faulty information. Automated live interpretation is another option, but the quality of this may vary.
  • If you can foresee that someone may want to attend but will need accessibility or interpretation assistance then make an effort to arrange that ahead of time. Consider asking people who register for the meeting if they have requests for accessibility or interpretation. Be clear on what the meeting organizers can realistically offer for accessibility and interpretation assistance.

• For larger or more important meetings, the meeting leader should request feedback afterwards, including the option to offer anonymous feedback. The meeting leader should make a point of doing a post-meeting review including a review of this feedback.

Hopefully this list is helpful. Please feel free to add your comments in the Signpost comments section below. Hopefully your meetings already are getting good feedback!