Over the last few years, Liza and I have had the pleasure of building an ever-expanding engineering team. We’ve managed to find great people from across the country and were 100% distributed & office-less until a few folks moved into the new Safari office in Boston two months ago. Because our team was remote by rule rather than by exception, we’ve been forced to develop a culture that exploits new tools whenever they can help us cooperate and collaborate. One particular habit we’re fond of is running meetings through Google Docs.
As is typical with developers, we are not generally fond of meetings, especially recurring meetings, so we have tried to distill them into their productive, fundamental essence1. While our meetings are still far from perfect, I think we’ve developed some conventions worth sharing with other distributed teams.
One minutes to rule them all—in real time
Google Docs sometimes makes it too easy to create and share new documents, so the first lesson is to fight against this: use the same Google Doc for the same meeting week after week and write it during the meeting. This practice is laughably simple, but it removes the biggest threats to useful minutes:
- the attendees (claim) to not know where the minutes were/are
- the minutes feel worthless because they’ll be ignored forever after
- the attendees (wrongly) feel that someone else will write the minutes
- the attendees claim the minutes did not accurately capture the discussion
To set this up, just use an extremely clear title for the document (“{Team} {Purpose} Rolling Minutes”) and then add the new minutes at the very top for each meeting. Make it clear from the very first meeting that everyone is expected to help write the minutes in real time (plant some willing collaborators beforehand, if necessary).
It’s worth rotating to a new document every 6–12 months or Google Docs will be crashy.
Collect agenda beforehand (the “Pending” bucket)
Once you’ve established that the same document will be used for each meeting in the series, it is time to start turning the rest-of-the-week time into a lever that makes the meeting itself shorter. We keep an (empty) bulleted list under a Pending heading at the top of every minutes document. The Pending list gets filled by folks as something occurs to them throughout the week. In more extreme cases, the Pending list must be filled beforehand or the meeting itself is summarily canceled (depends on the meeting). Developing the Pending list asynchronously can also make it easier for less outspoken people to make sure their topics get some space in the larger forum.
Establish a repeating structure
While it’s easy to screw up, a carefully crafted meeting structure can help everyone understand when they’ll be actively participating and when the thing is nearly done. The problem is that you have to frequently evaluate the structure to make sure it still actually helps the team communicate rather than being wasteful boilerplate.
Our “big” meeting looks like:
PREVIOUS ACTION ITEMS (social pressure to finish what you promised) CURRENT WORK (*extremely* short Before/Now/Next updates from each person don't skip this, as it gets every single human to actually say words at each meaning, forces people to write down what they did [more social pressure], and establishes a basic record of what the team was doing in any given month) DISCUSSION (a heading for every item that was on the Pending list, plus anything emergent) ACTION ITEMS (every time a meeting ends without meaningful tasks assigned to specific humans, a kitten loses its wings)
A repeating structure also helps answer questions about who promised what. You just go down far enough to find it in the expected place in the minutes of a previous meeting. While this is a simple act, doing it consistently makes it clear that the minutes serve a purpose and that the each member of the team is accountable.
Force collaboration and attention through humor
The biggest benefit of cloud-based minutes is the opportunity to use a meeting as a way to help the group gel a tiny bit more, week after week. For distributed teams, the chances for true collaboration and team-building are already extremely limited, so we take whatever we get. Specifically, I want to use the minutes as a tool to have the team:
- see each other actually (visibly) contributing to a shared project
- laugh with each other
- pay attention
To achieve these goals, we need only two things: silly cat pictures, collaborative authoring. When the team knows that their colleagues are humorously defacing/lolcatting their section of the minutes, ignoring the document is nearly impossible (we don’t actually use Comments in minutes as much as you would expect). Juxtaposing the boss’ description of a particularly rough moment in the release process with a sad panda provides a rare moment to let off steam for people who almost never see each other face to face. And watching a document being written and edited by 5–10 people at once is really quite enchanting.
1 Andrew, our CEO, bought a huge stack of these and forced us to read them, before, ahem the next meeting.
