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.
> 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!
> 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.
> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour.
I've never seen this pressure.
> meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change.
It's like I live in an entirely different world.
Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just starts the classic treadmill. You might have that one friend that you tell to show up half an hour before everyone else. They mentally add the half hour back because you're always giving such early times. Better IMO to just keep things simple. Let people leave when they need to. Show up on time.
My bosses (leadership) are in meetings literally all day long. Them showing up 5 minutes late to an internal meeting has nothing to do with them "learning". It's entirely about priorities. Teaching them to "show up on time" does nothing and only hurts me for being obtuse with them.
Well, yes, but also the critical attendees (people with something substantial to add) of the meeting aren't there on time, so the meeting cannot start on time, which leads to a culture where no one shows up on time. I was flummoxed yesterday when an SVP scheduled a large meeting and was the only critical attendee, and started exactly on time, within seconds. I showed up at the top of the hour + 49 seconds and missed at least 30 seconds of content.
I find it interesting when people such as the writer of the linked post take their experience and think it can just be applied to everyone else, and it'll always be a positive outcome.
In the early 90s I had a new department director who would bring a kitchen timer to every meeting. Meetings started on precisely on time and the timer was set to 22 minutes. When that bell rung, you could finish the thought, but the meeting would break at the 25 minute mark. If you didn’t accomplish the agenda, another meeting could be set, but it needed to be at least 2 hours after the one that just broke. Even meetings without him had to follow the rule. He also had a request that were were supposed to follow if we could, which was to allow ourselves to only schedule one meeting in an hour.
Obviously it was pretty chaotic at first and I recall us being pretty brutal in our assessment of his “crazy meeting quirk”. However after a few weeks something pretty interesting happened:
- Brevity and productive discussion became common. People usually went with their best opinion
- we usually finished the agenda (probably because we set reasonable agendas for 22 mis) and rarely needed that rollover meeting
- we spent more time at our desks actually doing instead of just talking about doing. I recall that team being really productive overall.
Later when I moved into leadership roles I attempted to bring this methodology but my own leadership generally was not supportive enough to allow me to be as rigid and I didn’t see the same success with the method…but to this day 32+ years later I still think it had merit.
I had asked him where he had learned it. My recollection is that he formulated it after reading that the average person’s attention span in a meeting was 27 minutes and he figured no one was productive after that, so he decided it was pointless to go longer.
A team I once ran made rules their meetings would end 5 minutes early, to create some space. We didn’t have the power to change the whole org, but we could control team meetings to create space before other meetings. Since the whole team was on board with this, there was always someone who would call out that it was time for the meeting to end, to prevent them running long.
At the same time, we had a rule that meetings would start when they say they start. This was after being incredibly frustrated by a guy on another team who would schedule his meetings to start on the hour, but then display a message that said we’d start at 5 after, to give people time to join, assuming other meetings would run long. This felt like he was wasting everyone’s time who showed up on time, and had the net effect of everyone showing up late to his meetings. If people learned they should show up late to his meetings, they can learn to show up on time to our meetings. Then we can stop waiting around hoping that everyone shows up. When someone shows up late to a meeting that’s already well underway, that sends a strong signal that they should be on time for the next one.
Sounds like the issue is back to back meetings then.
Also every meeting taking the exact time it was scheduled for is a bit of an org smell too. If you have your meeting etiquette dialed in you should hopefully be finishing meetings early more often than running over. If you are running to the minute or over all the time you might just be having crap meetings.
My org had the opposite problem in the Covid remote transition. At one point we successfully enforced meetings ending 5 minutes before the hour, but then somebody would just open the next meeting 5 minutes early.
Good idea, after trying it a number of times, it has some downsides. Most calendar applications cannot clearly display 5 minutes past, and the meeting appears to start on the hour visually. One of the attendees ends up dialling in at the hour, and then everyone gets a notification that the meeting has started.
Half of the people who get the notification click "join" without checking. This ends up with a half-populated meeting room. The issue becomes obvious, and somebody says, "Let's dial back in 5 mins", and drops off. Half of the people like the idea and drop off, while the rest decide to stay and chat.
Meanwhile, some of those who dropped off see this as a great opportunity to grab a brew. That inadvertently triggers some water-cooler, kettle-corner chats, and they end up running late for the 5-past. The rest usually get engaged in something else to make use of 5 minutes, and miss 5-past since no new notifications are issued due to the people already chatting in the meeting :)
I want Teams to show me the dollar cost of meetings. Enter an approximation of the average salary for people involved in the meeting, multiplied by the number of people in the meeting, and broadcast the cost ticking up every second to every person in the meeting.
I don’t think anything else will be ans effective at reducing the number of meetings, reducing the length of meetings and reducing the number of people who are late to meetings.
Okay, but only if this is balanced by accounting for the cost of IC engineers’ solo time too. Sometimes it does feel like meetings waste a lot of time/money quickly, but I’ve also watched people burn money by not having meetings and going the wrong direction for weeks, watched teams over-engineer the crap out of features nobody asked for, watched people tear out huge swaths of working code they just didn’t like and waste years re-implementing it, only to have it be buggier for a few years and then end up with basic design flaws, sometimes the same ones as before, and sometimes new ones…
A blanket force to reduce meetings isn’t quite the right incentive; we need incentives to have the right amount of meetings and to make them more effective. The right amount of meetings is probably always going to be more than ICs want, and less than managers want. But if you have any reliable ways to make that happen, to keep meetings effective, that’s gold. Charge money for that knowledge and consult, or become a CEO, either way you’ll get rich!
I've worked a place that tried it. It does nothing. It's a random number that nobody cares about. Everyone quickly concludes that running a company is expensive and gets used to that. It's not their money, after all. They don't get to spend the saved money on a fancy lunch or something. It's just more money going into the pockets of owners/investors.
People have meetings because there's a need for a decision that requires conversation, and they're often late because they're coming from other meetings that ran late because they were having difficulty coming to a decision. Awareness of cost doesn't affect these at all. The decisions still need to happen.
I was bad in being on meeting discipline. The only thing that consistently works: start on time, end on time, and don’t wait for late arrivals. If someone joins late, they catch up from notes/recording.
There’s a famous example from the Lucasfilm/Pixar deal: a Lucasfilm exec used to arrive late as a power move, until Steve Jobs started the meeting exactly on time without him. The exec walked in 5 minutes later and had already lost the room. And Jobs gets the deal.
> The only thing that consistently works: start on time, end on time, and don’t wait for late arrivals.
Agree, but that doesn't solve the problem of back to back mtgs. In some cases people have to physically move from one mtg room to another, or they need to use the restroom, etc.
Having the 5 min gap really is needed for those types of things.
I work as an Engineering Manager ...
If you try to end at 1:55pm, you will likely talk until
2:00pm anyway, which then runs into the next meeting.
This is more a statement to the lack of respect for other's time than anything else, as evidenced by the presumption; "you will likely talk until 2:00pm anyway."
Engineering Managers which see value in giving coworkers a five minute break between meetings ensure the breaks exist. Those which do not and only pay lip service to the concept will burn through predefined breaks no matter where they exist on a clock face.
How about just be punctual, respecting the time others have agreed to meet with you? Simpler solution than what this article suggests. People will abuse that system just the same anyway.
How do you plan to show up on time if one of your meetings ends at 2pm, the next one starts at 2pm, the meeting rooms are 3 floors apart, and you need to go to the restroom because you've been in meetings since lunch and need to pee? You're going to clone yourself?
In my experience, the recipe for having meetings interface smoothly with the time that surrounds them is twofold:
1. Constrain the meeting duration to a slighly smaller blocks than natural time.
2. Be diligent and efficient in managing time within the meeting.
That means, for 60 minutes of natural time, 50 minutes of meetings.
You start on time, you end on time.
The first few minutes are for pleasantries (important!) and getting everyone focused on the topic and goals of the meeting. This gives people the possibility of running slightly late without missing anything too important, but they still come into an ongoing meeting and are noticeably late.
But: you quickly move on to the meat of the meeting, even if people are still missing, and keep things moving while having an eye on time. (Sometimes, you can even start without key people there and at least get everyone else synced and thinking about the topic.)
Once you get close to the end (that is, 40 out of 50 minutes of runtime for an "hour"-long meeting, but depending on subject and people), you make sure to come to a conclusion and wrap things up by the 50 minute mark. If it's clear that's not enough time, you move to wrapping things up enough and discuss how you will keep the discussion going after the meeting time runs out. In any case, you have some time for parting pleasantries, while the meeing is officially over on time and people are free to leave.
This leaves a bit of slack, while people expect to start and end on time, and it crucially gives everybody enough time to move between meetings with some breaks, even those unfortunate folks whose jobs consist of lots of back-to-back meetings.
Starting on the (half) hour and ending after 50 (25) minutes works well, in my experience, and syncs well with the calendars of external meeting participants.
I know this works, because I have been in meetings like this, and I have run meetings like this. Of course, this will not work in 100% of all meetings, but it can go a long way in making a lot of them much better.
I've found myself watching and waiting for at least 3 people to join a meeting before I connect to avoid the inevitable minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion that always happens. Our meetings always start 5-10 minutes _past_ the scheduled time.
I know we don’t get to choose our coworkers and teams necessarily and experiences vary, but I am sorry you dread/dislike a little chit chat with your teammates:(
I do love that zoom feature that shows the avatars of who’s joined already. Although I don’t like the game theory of it when every attendee is watching those icons…
Those awkward 5 minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion are because other people don't join until 5 minutes past, and sitting in silence would be even more awkward.
Same! If I see the first people joining are managers or above, I just wait until I see other engineers join. I hate managers talk, I couldn’t care less about them.
It’s been shown before that a couple minutes of pleasantries helps the meeting. I’m guessing it helps regulate everyone on a similar vibe. A lot like saying hello to someone and maybe how are you doing before launching into any requests.
The teaching model is much like that proposed by the originator of this thread. Classes are 50 minutes instead of an hour (and similar for 1.5 hour classes). The start time is 5 minutes past the hour and the end time is 5 minutes before the hour. This gives students and professors enough time to get from one lecture to another (unless they have to commute across a big campus, in which case they simply do not sign up for classes that are too close in time).
I've served on a big committee on campus that solve the timing problem simply. It starts exactly on time. Every item has a designated number of minutes. And if it appears that we will not finish on time, there is a vote on whether to extend the meeting by 30 minutes.
I realize that a lot of the discussion on this thread involves bosses and employees, which is quite a different thing, of course. There's no point in starting a meeting at a designated time if the big boss is running late.
That is because the purpose of meeting is often only to keep the big boss informed of what their team is doing. The team can operate without the meeting. The big boss cannot. Their job is to know what their team is doing.
I do connect 5 minutes past, but after the start of the meeting, just to miss the 'how was your weekend', 'let's do an introduction round' and other nonsense (the email invite already has intro's; i know people don't read, but that's not my problem).
We mostly turned our internal and partner meetings around these days; meetings are organised and distributed by who thinks they are needed, everyone who could be needed is included (they basically have to answer when called upon during the meeting; that also keeps the meetings within bounds as no-one is going to answer anymore once the time passed) but they are called in only when needed which is to say, almost never in reality. This showed us the enormous waste of these meetings before.
I have found significant frustration since the pandemic in the most unexpected place: the new expectation of punctuality for online meetings. In meatspace, in the before times, if a meeting was set for 2pm in the board room, everyone understood this to mean 2pm was the time to come through the door and chat for a bit while everyone got comfortable. The actual meeting would start at 2:05-2:10.
Online, there is no equivalent to walking in the door for a bit of a chit chat. Everyone just materializes instantly and then we’re supposed to be ready to go by 2:01. I miss meatspace for meetings and the more casual, human-matched pace.
Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.
You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.
People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.
I'm absolutely baffled by colleague who somehow manage to be five minutes late to an online meeting while working from home. Because you're right, you get a reminder 10 - 15 minutes in advance, you just need to click the join meeting button, you're already at the computer. We have, for remote meetings, a five minute buffer at the start of every meeting, for people to "settle in" makes no sense, just start the meeting.
In general a lot of people just aren't being serious about meetings, which I guess is also why many hate them. So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
We got bunch of internal meetings starting at quarter past instead of full hour and mostly we can get it finished in 45mins.
Gives people room to breathe for those who are back to back scheduled full day. When they have calls with customers or other departments they are usually late anyway and don’t have time to go to toilet in between because as always other meetings run past time.
A norm of scheduling the “start” on the hour or half hour while really starting the meeting five minutes later also works. That way, attendees have an opportunity to arrive “on time” and chat if they like, building relationships in the process. The freedom to arrive at any point during the first five minutes also helps to create the kind of ease that’s conducive to serious discussion. This second part is particularly important when power dynamics might otherwise derail real discussion.
Because five minutes of pure chitchat can feel excessive to some folks, though, a three-minute norm probably works better—-especially because the off-centeredness has the informal aesthetic that, again, forms a better backdrop for serious discussion.
Whether it's planned or not, that seems like a pretty normal dynamic. "Let's give people a few minutes and then we'll get started." Especially with back to back meetings which are the norm for a lot of people, they need a few minutes to grab coffee/water, use the bathroom, etc. (And, of course, with in person meetings they usually need some time to run to the next room.)
A similar concept has been used for university lectures to start 15 minutes after the full hour. This was due to nobody having watches and everything being synced to the church bells ringing at the full hour. Then you had 15 minutes to get to the next lecture (in another building). Starting time was given as ct (cum tempore, with time) or st (sine tempore, without time). Usually only st was marked as everybody assumed the 15 minutes delay.
If you truly believe in this, just effectively block Teams between :55 and :05 every hour. You can always allow exceptions with presubmitted motivation.
Shifting everything from :00 to :05 is theatre at best, and a slippery slope more often.
I think unstructured chat with colleagues is undervalued, though I also respect people who want no part of it.
At one place where we were remote, we had a morning daily (I don't care to argue the usefulness of dailies, though).
When I joined as an IC, I added an emphatically-optional 15 minute "coffee chat" meeting preceding it on the same video chat link. Most people pretty consistently joined at some point before the start of the daily. Sometimes chat was about work, most often, it was just social.
IMO, it was worth it. It was low friction because it was next to a scheduled meeting at a time where a morning beverage was reasonable, and people felt no pressure to join.
At my job, when the meeting time is over it is over. So everyone knows that they need to work the thing during the allocated time.
People might skip or leave the meeting at any time or simply say they need more context before attending.
Zero BS
If there are conflicts, the technical points, pros and cons should be on the table, or at least raise that it seems likely that people will receive those soon.
If the meeting detects a failure, we find a way, if we already completely failed we raise to the upper levels and we refresh the plans. We trust people to be professionals though we understand personal matters can always be on the way.
The counterpart is no one has a career ladder, there is little to no feedback. People can't raise so they leave the company if they are not happy. The only way to take the lead is when someone leaves
For some larger meetings during the pandemic, managers started scheduling them 5 minutes after to give people time to join, but because people's reminders triggered at the same relative time all it meant was people started joining meetings 5 minutes later negating any perceived benefit.
For companies using Google Calendar as the primary meeting scheduler, one issue with this is that there's a setting for short meetings, but it only supports ending the official meeting 5 or 10 minutes early: "End 30 minute meetings 5 minutes early and longer meetings 10 minutes early".
But if you're in a meeting already, people are expecting that they have time until the hour or half hour point, so in spite of the meeting officially ending at H:25, it really almost always lasts until H:30 unless you have someone who wants to leave early and can enforce it by actually leaving.
It surprises me a bit that even engineering managers at Google agree with this policy and yet it's not an option in the Google Calendar settings.
It's equally silly to the method my mom used for clock in the bathroom when I was a kid: she would set the clock to be 5 minutes later, so we would rush to get to school on time. Needless to say, I just learned to subtract 5 minutes from it and that was the end.
Exactly. I had a manager who said "Standup with start exactly on time", and stuck to it. And after a couple of meetings with some people coming in a minute or two late and realizing he was for real... everyone started showing up on time.
this is exactly the way to do it. i have a recurring large meeting where the first 5 minutes is ALWAYS "lets wait for a quorum". Guess what time I show up to the meeting? 5 minutes late, of course.
I suggested this to management at my company and they shot it down almost immediately. Narrow-minded middle manager types generally aren't receptive to this kind of out-of-the-box thinking unless they think it's an idea they've come up with.
If you have so many back-to-back meetings, maybe put in a school bell that chimes at 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the hour. Please just put this in your conference rooms so those of us who know how to evade meetings don't have to hear it as well.
When the start/end doesn’t matter as much for my team as changing the default duration to 25/50 minutes. This way even if a meeting would start at the quarter hour you would always end up with a small gap between.
The problem with these kinds of advices is that it requires ALL teams to have buy-in to this idea.
As soon as a few teams start booking meetings on the hour or half-hour, this whole idea goes out the window and downsides begin to outweigh the positives.
The other downside, as others have mentioned, is that eventually meetings begin to run late.
The best advice about meeting is, in my opinion:
1. Don't have back to back meetings
2. Try to have at least 1 clear point for the agenda
3. Give at least some heads up. Don't pull people into meetings suddenly.
Our org does 5 minutes past for a 30-minute window, and 10 minutes past for an hour or longer. Works great once everyone gets it. Can be confusing for new hires.
Maybe I’m just a silly lab engineer who doesn’t know how big companies work (i did work at a startup for a time but that’s even more anti meeting than a lab) but I feel like maybe if you have so many back to back meetings that you need to plan around them you should have fewer meetings?
Also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time? What is even going on? How are you getting work done?
At large companies, there's just a lot of coordination needed. Which means a lot of meetings typically. Probably more than there is needed but one of the points of a large company is having a critical mass of people pulling in roughly the same direction(s).
>also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time?
Depends on company, culture, and individuals. If you get through the purpose of the meeting, the meeting organizer may well say "Let's give everyone 20 minutes (or whatever) back." I do think that it's a worthwhile goal to default to <1 hour meetings.
In any case, agendas and thinking about how the meeting time should actually be spent is worthwhile.
At least at my multinational company, we have teams iny department that are 12 hours ahead of us. That makes the window of overlap time we have small, so we often have blocks of meetings during that overlap time that compete for time slots for staff that make higher level decisions.
You can tell this is written by a manager who has never written a line of code in their life. For me as an actual programmer, meetings were always the time where I had to stop working. It's staggering to me that managers still think real work happens in meetings.
Where I work, we have company-wide breaks between 10.00-10.15, 12.00-13.00 and 15.00-15.15. These cannot easily be enforced with external parties, but running an internal meeting over a break will need an explanation. What I noticed is that back-to-back meetings are more likely "capped" at 2 hours, so it's easier for people to show up on time and energized.
I don't remember the last time i had a meeting that was productive. Last time i worked in the office, the hallway discussions where the productive ones and now working remote most of the time is just being able to work with good people that understand text and work by messages that works good. Even video meetings with good people tends to be waste of time.
> You might fear that people will start arriving at 1:07pm, but I have seen the opposite. They respect the new time. They arrive by 1:05pm, ready to work.
We do the :05 thing and this is exactly what happens every meeting: all of them end up starting between :07 and :10 since people leave their desk to find the room at :05.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel like I’m surrounded by idiots.
Waiting for attendance is simply scheduled into the agenda. The first 5 minutes of the agenda is reserved for quorum. There is absolutely no need for making it any more complicated, or playing games with the scheduled time like the post suggests. Childish nonsense.
You are treating the symptoms by doing this. If you are a serious manager then you should be serious about time management. Making sure your team has discipline is a manager problem and consistently being late shows that there are fundamental, principle discipline problems with your team.
When I have 5 hours of meetings in a given day, I'd much rather have them back-to-back, rather than with a half-hour or hour in between. I try to pack all my meetings for the week into a couple of days, so that I have the rest of the week to do non-meeting work.
And join early of it's convenient, but actually spend those first 5 on social interaction. Because one problem with online meetings is they feel "all business" without explicitly making time to just be humans.
We've been doing this at Qualcomm for a while, and I really like it. While meetings do run over sometimes, the practice has still built this acceptance around short breaks between meetings. No one bats an eye if we've got two consecutive meetings together, the first one ends late, and we wait five minutes before starting or joining the next one.
In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.
This works even better if your neighboring teams start their meeting at hour or half hour. Then towards the end of the meeting you can say "I'm getting kicked out of the office".
I don't know about others but if I'm gonna have 3 meetings in a day, I'd take them back-to-back anyday. Then the rest of my day is available for focus work.
We start the meeting at 2 minutes past. Meetings end at 10 minutes before the hour (or half hour) - yes, "30 minute" meetings are only effecitvely 18 minutes, but we leave a few minutes of buffer.
Any meeting that goes over an hour has a mandatory 10 minute break at the 50 minute mark every hour.
If you're not on time..tough sh*t we're starting without you. Use the AI minutes or something to catch up.
There's no substitute for leadership establishing a culture of meeting discipline. By and large, every org will follow the example leadership sets.
If leadership blesses this cutesy little five-minutes-late maneuver, implicitly accepting that meetings don't end on time, then meetings won't end on time at 5 after the hour either.
Some meetings are more important than others. So losing 5 minutes of a useless meeting is better than not going over 5 minutes for the important meeting.
Everyone wants to think their time is valuable, but this is relative.
this rule makes all worse sorry. our PO/BE tries to do this but no one cares anymore. why not just start/end at a given time? meeting starts at 9, be there, it ends at 10, rage quit.
some teams at my org start 5 mins past some don't... result, some people hop on early and keep waiting and some meetings ppl don't show up for at least 5 mins.
I've always wondered at the company cultures between Google and Microsoft - Gcal supports ending meetings five minutes early while Outlook supports starting five minutes late.
At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc.
Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality? I just don't see that working with human nature of "one last thing" and the urge to spend an extra few minutes to hammer something out.
It's just laughable to me to bother with a "ends five minutes early" option. It just doesn't work - you know you're not cutting into anyone's next meeting by consuming those last five minutes. But you can't know that if you push into the next half hour block - maybe they have a customer call up next that starts on time, so you have to wrap up.
> while Outlook supports starting five minutes late
This contrast is an incorrect assumption. Outlook does allow starting meetings late as well as ending meetings early, with somewhat arbitrary durations. [1] I have definitely seen these options in Outlook settings (on web, since I hate Outlook).
However, I haven’t used it because the teams one works with need to be alerted and reminded of it before it sticks in their minds (if nobody else is using such settings).
> Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality?
Whenever I'm having remote meetings with people using a Google meeting room, right at the hour they'll say "I'm getting kicked out", because the next person is waiting to use the booked meeting room.
The solution I like best is to "pin" issues that would cause the meeting to run long, with select personnel needing to stay late to address the pinned issue but everybody else leaving on time.
My 2 cents, just make the damn meetings 20 minutes or 50 minutes, and start at sharp. I absolutely hate the 5 minutes past, as I am ALWAYS late on them, or 5 minutes early.
Fixed time makes it so much easier to reason than random stuff.
Well, I simply don't accept nor attend meetings that are setup directly after another meeting. There must be also time to pee, poop, drink, prepare, etc. in between them.
At least 30mins gaps between meetings is a must have for me.
tanvach|1 month ago
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.
conductr|1 month ago
potato3732842|1 month ago
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.
bjackman|1 month ago
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!
earino|1 month ago
What was really awful, however, was when your calendar was a random mishmash of starts at :00, :05, :30 and :35 :-)
RedShift1|1 month ago
theshrike79|1 month ago
Dunno if people here know this Paul guy, but he wrote about this: https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html =)
steve1977|1 month ago
dataflow|1 month ago
nephihaha|1 month ago
Covid is supposed to have started in October 2019, and no one locked down until nearly six months later.
recursive|1 month ago
I've never seen this pressure.
> meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change.
It's like I live in an entirely different world.
Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just starts the classic treadmill. You might have that one friend that you tell to show up half an hour before everyone else. They mentally add the half hour back because you're always giving such early times. Better IMO to just keep things simple. Let people leave when they need to. Show up on time.
SkyPuncher|1 month ago
My bosses (leadership) are in meetings literally all day long. Them showing up 5 minutes late to an internal meeting has nothing to do with them "learning". It's entirely about priorities. Teaching them to "show up on time" does nothing and only hurts me for being obtuse with them.
irl_zebra|1 month ago
Freedom2|1 month ago
kcplate|1 month ago
Obviously it was pretty chaotic at first and I recall us being pretty brutal in our assessment of his “crazy meeting quirk”. However after a few weeks something pretty interesting happened:
- Brevity and productive discussion became common. People usually went with their best opinion
- we usually finished the agenda (probably because we set reasonable agendas for 22 mis) and rarely needed that rollover meeting
- we spent more time at our desks actually doing instead of just talking about doing. I recall that team being really productive overall.
Later when I moved into leadership roles I attempted to bring this methodology but my own leadership generally was not supportive enough to allow me to be as rigid and I didn’t see the same success with the method…but to this day 32+ years later I still think it had merit.
I had asked him where he had learned it. My recollection is that he formulated it after reading that the average person’s attention span in a meeting was 27 minutes and he figured no one was productive after that, so he decided it was pointless to go longer.
al_borland|1 month ago
At the same time, we had a rule that meetings would start when they say they start. This was after being incredibly frustrated by a guy on another team who would schedule his meetings to start on the hour, but then display a message that said we’d start at 5 after, to give people time to join, assuming other meetings would run long. This felt like he was wasting everyone’s time who showed up on time, and had the net effect of everyone showing up late to his meetings. If people learned they should show up late to his meetings, they can learn to show up on time to our meetings. Then we can stop waiting around hoping that everyone shows up. When someone shows up late to a meeting that’s already well underway, that sends a strong signal that they should be on time for the next one.
exegete|1 month ago
ehnto|1 month ago
Also every meeting taking the exact time it was scheduled for is a bit of an org smell too. If you have your meeting etiquette dialed in you should hopefully be finishing meetings early more often than running over. If you are running to the minute or over all the time you might just be having crap meetings.
wvenable|1 month ago
rendaw|1 month ago
chatmasta|1 month ago
I see two flaws:
1) This only works as long as nobody else does it. If the meeting prior to yours follows the same strategy then you’re in the same position as today
2) it starts 5 minutes later but has no plan for ending 5 minutes earlier, which means the next meeting will have to start at 0:10…
etrautmann|1 month ago
charles_f|1 month ago
DalekBaldwin|1 month ago
cagz|1 month ago
Half of the people who get the notification click "join" without checking. This ends up with a half-populated meeting room. The issue becomes obvious, and somebody says, "Let's dial back in 5 mins", and drops off. Half of the people like the idea and drop off, while the rest decide to stay and chat.
Meanwhile, some of those who dropped off see this as a great opportunity to grab a brew. That inadvertently triggers some water-cooler, kettle-corner chats, and they end up running late for the 5-past. The rest usually get engaged in something else to make use of 5 minutes, and miss 5-past since no new notifications are issued due to the people already chatting in the meeting :)
atoav|1 month ago
In academia (mostly European) this has been a concept for centuries to allow changes of classes to happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_%28class_timi...
So you can have a c.t. event (cum tempore = with time) or a s.t. event (sine tempore = without time).
teamonkey|1 month ago
I don’t think anything else will be ans effective at reducing the number of meetings, reducing the length of meetings and reducing the number of people who are late to meetings.
dahart|1 month ago
A blanket force to reduce meetings isn’t quite the right incentive; we need incentives to have the right amount of meetings and to make them more effective. The right amount of meetings is probably always going to be more than ICs want, and less than managers want. But if you have any reliable ways to make that happen, to keep meetings effective, that’s gold. Charge money for that knowledge and consult, or become a CEO, either way you’ll get rich!
Fysi|1 month ago
Alternatively you can build your own with MS Graph Data Connect but also it costs.
zmj|1 month ago
crazygringo|1 month ago
People have meetings because there's a need for a decision that requires conversation, and they're often late because they're coming from other meetings that ran late because they were having difficulty coming to a decision. Awareness of cost doesn't affect these at all. The decisions still need to happen.
zkid18|1 month ago
There’s a famous example from the Lucasfilm/Pixar deal: a Lucasfilm exec used to arrive late as a power move, until Steve Jobs started the meeting exactly on time without him. The exec walked in 5 minutes later and had already lost the room. And Jobs gets the deal.
RaftPeople|1 month ago
Agree, but that doesn't solve the problem of back to back mtgs. In some cases people have to physically move from one mtg room to another, or they need to use the restroom, etc.
Having the 5 min gap really is needed for those types of things.
AdieuToLogic|1 month ago
Engineering Managers which see value in giving coworkers a five minute break between meetings ensure the breaks exist. Those which do not and only pay lip service to the concept will burn through predefined breaks no matter where they exist on a clock face.
block_dagger|1 month ago
bialpio|1 month ago
baxtr|1 month ago
Otherwise, people will simply come 10 minutes past if you start 5 minutes past.
dxdm|1 month ago
1. Constrain the meeting duration to a slighly smaller blocks than natural time.
2. Be diligent and efficient in managing time within the meeting.
That means, for 60 minutes of natural time, 50 minutes of meetings.
You start on time, you end on time.
The first few minutes are for pleasantries (important!) and getting everyone focused on the topic and goals of the meeting. This gives people the possibility of running slightly late without missing anything too important, but they still come into an ongoing meeting and are noticeably late.
But: you quickly move on to the meat of the meeting, even if people are still missing, and keep things moving while having an eye on time. (Sometimes, you can even start without key people there and at least get everyone else synced and thinking about the topic.)
Once you get close to the end (that is, 40 out of 50 minutes of runtime for an "hour"-long meeting, but depending on subject and people), you make sure to come to a conclusion and wrap things up by the 50 minute mark. If it's clear that's not enough time, you move to wrapping things up enough and discuss how you will keep the discussion going after the meeting time runs out. In any case, you have some time for parting pleasantries, while the meeing is officially over on time and people are free to leave.
This leaves a bit of slack, while people expect to start and end on time, and it crucially gives everybody enough time to move between meetings with some breaks, even those unfortunate folks whose jobs consist of lots of back-to-back meetings.
Starting on the (half) hour and ending after 50 (25) minutes works well, in my experience, and syncs well with the calendars of external meeting participants.
I know this works, because I have been in meetings like this, and I have run meetings like this. Of course, this will not work in 100% of all meetings, but it can go a long way in making a lot of them much better.
daniel_j|1 month ago
aarongraham|1 month ago
kyleee|1 month ago
chatmasta|1 month ago
aidenn0|1 month ago
tkiolp4|1 month ago
tayo42|1 month ago
ergocoder|1 month ago
wiseowise|1 month ago
sys_64738|1 month ago
matwood|1 month ago
bluenose69|1 month ago
The teaching model is much like that proposed by the originator of this thread. Classes are 50 minutes instead of an hour (and similar for 1.5 hour classes). The start time is 5 minutes past the hour and the end time is 5 minutes before the hour. This gives students and professors enough time to get from one lecture to another (unless they have to commute across a big campus, in which case they simply do not sign up for classes that are too close in time).
I've served on a big committee on campus that solve the timing problem simply. It starts exactly on time. Every item has a designated number of minutes. And if it appears that we will not finish on time, there is a vote on whether to extend the meeting by 30 minutes.
I realize that a lot of the discussion on this thread involves bosses and employees, which is quite a different thing, of course. There's no point in starting a meeting at a designated time if the big boss is running late.
jmulho|1 month ago
anonzzzies|1 month ago
We mostly turned our internal and partner meetings around these days; meetings are organised and distributed by who thinks they are needed, everyone who could be needed is included (they basically have to answer when called upon during the meeting; that also keeps the meetings within bounds as no-one is going to answer anymore once the time passed) but they are called in only when needed which is to say, almost never in reality. This showed us the enormous waste of these meetings before.
ttul|1 month ago
Online, there is no equivalent to walking in the door for a bit of a chit chat. Everyone just materializes instantly and then we’re supposed to be ready to go by 2:01. I miss meatspace for meetings and the more casual, human-matched pace.
sublinear|1 month ago
People magically show up on time and pay attention and the meeting ends on time or early.
I have to assume this discussion is about the 90% of meetings that could have been a group chat or email chain.
VariousPrograms|1 month ago
You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.
People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.
mrweasel|1 month ago
In general a lot of people just aren't being serious about meetings, which I guess is also why many hate them. So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
ozim|1 month ago
Gives people room to breathe for those who are back to back scheduled full day. When they have calls with customers or other departments they are usually late anyway and don’t have time to go to toilet in between because as always other meetings run past time.
euroderf|1 month ago
Or are we all using catheters now?
chatmasta|1 month ago
wiseowise|1 month ago
ChiMan|1 month ago
Because five minutes of pure chitchat can feel excessive to some folks, though, a three-minute norm probably works better—-especially because the off-centeredness has the informal aesthetic that, again, forms a better backdrop for serious discussion.
ghaff|1 month ago
IndrekR|1 month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...
PeterStuer|1 month ago
Shifting everything from :00 to :05 is theatre at best, and a slippery slope more often.
teeray|1 month ago
MeetingsBrowser|1 month ago
This will surely solve the problem.
Doctor_Fegg|1 month ago
A_Duck|1 month ago
rkomorn|1 month ago
At one place where we were remote, we had a morning daily (I don't care to argue the usefulness of dailies, though).
When I joined as an IC, I added an emphatically-optional 15 minute "coffee chat" meeting preceding it on the same video chat link. Most people pretty consistently joined at some point before the start of the daily. Sometimes chat was about work, most often, it was just social.
IMO, it was worth it. It was low friction because it was next to a scheduled meeting at a time where a morning beverage was reasonable, and people felt no pressure to join.
sys_64738|1 month ago
motbus3|1 month ago
Zero BS If there are conflicts, the technical points, pros and cons should be on the table, or at least raise that it seems likely that people will receive those soon.
If the meeting detects a failure, we find a way, if we already completely failed we raise to the upper levels and we refresh the plans. We trust people to be professionals though we understand personal matters can always be on the way.
The counterpart is no one has a career ladder, there is little to no feedback. People can't raise so they leave the company if they are not happy. The only way to take the lead is when someone leaves
Sleaker|1 month ago
antonymoose|1 month ago
Why not set the alarm for 5 minutes prior and everyone shows up on time?
thiagowfx|1 month ago
Setting meetings to start at :05 or :20 or :35 or :50 adds friction.
Defaults matter for habit formation.
There is your golden opportunity to point out internal Gemini to the Calendar codebase and make it become reality.
randallsquared|1 month ago
But if you're in a meeting already, people are expecting that they have time until the hour or half hour point, so in spite of the meeting officially ending at H:25, it really almost always lasts until H:30 unless you have someone who wants to leave early and can enforce it by actually leaving.
It surprises me a bit that even engineering managers at Google agree with this policy and yet it's not an option in the Google Calendar settings.
mystifyingpoi|1 month ago
yard2010|1 month ago
My question is if people can't adapt to it, would it be a helpful technique?
vjvjvjvjghv|1 month ago
matula|1 month ago
No need for hacks, just better managers
dionian|1 month ago
booleandilemma|1 month ago
Jtsummers|1 month ago
kibwen|1 month ago
_ea1k|1 month ago
Instead, I must invite 10 people to do other things while I talk on a zoom call! "Sorry, I was multitasking"
gpm|1 month ago
Except for the weekly release meetings, those can be 48.
jayde2767|1 month ago
seshagiric|1 month ago
[deleted]
whitexn--g28h|1 month ago
antisthenes|1 month ago
As soon as a few teams start booking meetings on the hour or half-hour, this whole idea goes out the window and downsides begin to outweigh the positives.
The other downside, as others have mentioned, is that eventually meetings begin to run late.
The best advice about meeting is, in my opinion:
1. Don't have back to back meetings
2. Try to have at least 1 clear point for the agenda
3. Give at least some heads up. Don't pull people into meetings suddenly.
radley|1 month ago
mirawelner|1 month ago
Also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time? What is even going on? How are you getting work done?
ghaff|1 month ago
>also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time?
Depends on company, culture, and individuals. If you get through the purpose of the meeting, the meeting organizer may well say "Let's give everyone 20 minutes (or whatever) back." I do think that it's a worthwhile goal to default to <1 hour meetings.
In any case, agendas and thinking about how the meeting time should actually be spent is worthwhile.
DerArzt|1 month ago
Timwi|1 month ago
You can tell this is written by a manager who has never written a line of code in their life. For me as an actual programmer, meetings were always the time where I had to stop working. It's staggering to me that managers still think real work happens in meetings.
anticristi|1 month ago
mazone|1 month ago
emeril|1 month ago
skizm|1 month ago
We do the :05 thing and this is exactly what happens every meeting: all of them end up starting between :07 and :10 since people leave their desk to find the room at :05.
fogzen|1 month ago
Waiting for attendance is simply scheduled into the agenda. The first 5 minutes of the agenda is reserved for quorum. There is absolutely no need for making it any more complicated, or playing games with the scheduled time like the post suggests. Childish nonsense.
kyleee|1 month ago
;)
wiseowise|1 month ago
> Starts meeting after 5 minutes
"Uhm, shall we wait for Jeff?"
1970-01-01|1 month ago
aidenn0|1 month ago
JoshTriplett|1 month ago
ipince|1 month ago
We did this at Google too while I was there (only the started 5-mins past part). It works really well.
No need to change the Calendar events though. It's just implicit that we'll start 5-mins past. (Or, well, explicit in MIT's case).
kalleboo|1 month ago
HardwareLust|1 month ago
jeffrallen|1 month ago
sghiassy|1 month ago
kayson|1 month ago
In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.
yegle|1 month ago
nottorp|1 month ago
hartator|1 month ago
If you can’t tell people to stop being late, you are not doing your job as a manager.
gneray|1 month ago
1over137|1 month ago
throwaway150|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
nephihaha|1 month ago
cynicalsecurity|1 month ago
prmoustache|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
StellarScience|1 month ago
jtc331|1 month ago
False.
This doesn’t work.
Source: a company doing this. Meetings just continue on to the 5 after mark.
lifetimerubyist|1 month ago
Any meeting that goes over an hour has a mandatory 10 minute break at the 50 minute mark every hour.
If you're not on time..tough sh*t we're starting without you. Use the AI minutes or something to catch up.
rectang|1 month ago
If leadership blesses this cutesy little five-minutes-late maneuver, implicitly accepting that meetings don't end on time, then meetings won't end on time at 5 after the hour either.
whatever1|1 month ago
Everyone wants to think their time is valuable, but this is relative.
sys_64738|1 month ago
gpvos|1 month ago
Words to live by.
findthebug|1 month ago
syngrog66|1 month ago
honor end times so everyone has a few minutes to take a bathroom break or move to a diffrrent room, or prep mentally, etc
retretret|1 month ago
kokoe|1 month ago
cantSpellSober|1 month ago
hirsin|1 month ago
At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc.
Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality? I just don't see that working with human nature of "one last thing" and the urge to spend an extra few minutes to hammer something out.
It's just laughable to me to bother with a "ends five minutes early" option. It just doesn't work - you know you're not cutting into anyone's next meeting by consuming those last five minutes. But you can't know that if you push into the next half hour block - maybe they have a customer call up next that starts on time, so you have to wrap up.
AnonC|1 month ago
This contrast is an incorrect assumption. Outlook does allow starting meetings late as well as ending meetings early, with somewhat arbitrary durations. [1] I have definitely seen these options in Outlook settings (on web, since I hate Outlook).
However, I haven’t used it because the teams one works with need to be alerted and reminded of it before it sticks in their minds (if nobody else is using such settings).
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/end-meetings-earl...
JoshTriplett|1 month ago
Whenever I'm having remote meetings with people using a Google meeting room, right at the hour they'll say "I'm getting kicked out", because the next person is waiting to use the booked meeting room.
rectang|1 month ago
nizbit|1 month ago
AndrewKemendo|1 month ago
keybored|1 month ago
antonvs|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
coolgoose|1 month ago
Fixed time makes it so much easier to reason than random stuff.
wildredkraut|1 month ago
But yeah, this guy work for google, says it all.
huflungdung|1 month ago
[deleted]