ORIGINAL: CarnivalBizarre
I'm just amazed you guys seem to spend so much time in meetings. A meeting a month is just about right for a five people team.
If I did the work I did at my job alone in a basement my productivity would not be at the same level as in the team.
But I guess it depends on what you are doing. We are developing a roof construction/timber design software that has been going on for a few years now.
Depends on the project.
When I was jointly managing a team of 30 AI project managers/programmers, we met once a week for 1 hour. The rules for that meetiing were very exacting:
1 - all reports had to be submitted by the day before; no boring stuff in the reports, just the important news (e.g., decisions made, action items that needed approval).
2 - during the week, agenda items were posted on a common board by whoever wanted to discuss something - with an estimate of time needed.
3 - the final agenda was created by whoever was chairing the meeting about an hour before the meeting, based on the items on the board.
4 - the agenda had start and stop times for each item.
5 - the meeting started on time and ended on time with no exceptions.
6 - the first order of business was to agree on the agenda.
7 - the person who posted an agenda item was in charge of the discussion on his/her item.
8 - as the meeting progressed through the agenda items the clock was watched carefully; if an agenda item took too long, the meeting was stopped and a decision made about taking the time from some other item, or aborting the discussion on the current item.
9 - often a difficult item was assigned to a subgroup to deal with and report back to the full group. Note that those reports where emailed to everyone before the next meeting.
10 - the meetings always ended with a 5 minute go-around-the-room where everyone said what they liked/disliked about the meeting that just ended.
Because the time limits were so strictly enforced, people didn't blather about unimportant stuff, or go into their standard soapbox speeches. Focus on the crux of each topic was vital if you wanted the group to reach a decision about your item. The ending pluses/minuses segment made for continual improvement in the meetings. Indeed, the 10 points I listed above came about gradually based mainly on the feedback from numerous ending segments.
The result of handling meetings this way was that everyone arrived on time. The meetings were always informative and productive. We used email extensively for communications within the group but even so, the face-to-face meeting time was extremely useful - rarely did anyone miss the weekly meeting.