Sonar's Meeting Culture

Sonar’s Meeting Culture

Intro: we should always keep time efficiency top of mind. Time is our most precious resource, both as a company and as humans. We all have the same 24 hour day, we made a conscious decision to prioritize work/life balance at Sonar. To accomplish work life balance AND make market-changing products, we have to be hyper efficient with our time. Saying no to things is one of the best things you can do. 

Meetings are a high-resource-cost activity
Meetings are one of the most expensive uses of time for a company
Meetings have lasting effects on morale well after the meeting. Good meetings energize teams, bad meetings drain people. 
Parkinson’s Law - work will always expand to fit the time allocated for a specific task. Always opt for the shortest meeting time necessary, it forces you to be efficient and you will find you’ll actually be more productive in meetings that are shorter
Recurring meetings (weekly, monthly, etc) are the most expensive type of meeting and should be avoided when possible. 
As soon as a recurring meeting is no longer needed, cancel it. 	
Questions to ask yourself before scheduling a meeting: 
Can we accomplish this task asynchronously* over Email or Teams?
If not, can we accomplish some of this task over Email or Teams to reduce the duration of the meeting or required attendees
Does everyone I want to invite to the meeting need to attend? Will they contribute to the meeting?
Live out of your calendar. Make sure it is accurate and up to date at all times. 
Attendees
Only invite people to a meeting if they absolutely need to be there. 
Avoid using the “optional” tag for attendees who you are just trying to give visibility to - just let them know you’re having that meeting. Optional invitees may feel pressured into joining meetings they would have otherwise not joined.
Removing a person or not inviting someone to/from a meeting is a GIFT to the removed person.
If you don’t feel like you’re adding value to a meeting, excuse yourself from the meeting. That is a GIFT to yourself and others.
Ask “what question are we trying to answer with this meeting?” and that will help inform who needs to be in the meeting
Avoid meetings (both internal and external) with more than 5 people whenever possible. The exceptions to this are listed below. 
Meeting Outcomes
Every meeting should have a clearly defined objective. 
Example of a clear objective: “Let’s discuss GM’s feature request for giving a native app to their sales people. The objective is to decide if we have the engineering resources to complete their request by Q3”
Example of an unclear objective: “Discuss feature request from client”
During the meeting, push the conversation towards the objective (community moderation, or meeting organizer moderation).
Reflect on whether the objective has been achieved before ending the meeting.
Avoid trying to wedge in other agenda items other than what was planned for a given meeting.
Meeting Etiquette
Use the description field in an invite to provide as much context as possible. Also, include an agency and objective for each meeting.
Always opt for using video. Even if the other attendees cannot use video, you should still opt for video. Most communication is non verbal, so seeing someone’s face helps with communication. This is especially important during remote work to build personal relationships. Also, it is easy to hide being distracted when not on video.
Show up to meetings on time and prepared.
Always provide full context about a meeting before sending out a meeting invite (no one should receive a meeting invite without first knowing it is coming and why).
Meetings are generally not a good way to disseminate information for the first time, with exceptions of training or team-wide meetings to share statuses. Information should be disseminated before a meeting with ample time for the attendees to digest the info. Then, during the meeting, the objective can be achieved quickly.
Try to avoid scheduling meetings the day of. This is especially important for engineers who need long periods of uninterrupted time. 
If you must be late to a meeting, come to the meeting in a “passive” mode. Listen and jump in only when you are certain you have the full context of what happened before you joined the meeting.
Rescheduling meetings: If you need to reschedule a meeting, please give extra consideration to others’ calendars and provide as much notice as possible. Make sure to request the availability of attendees and avoid simply rescheduling the meeting without notice.
Avoid rescheduling meetings for the “same day.” If you need to cancel a meeting, it will have to be moved to a future date -- this helps people plan out their workday.



Notes:
* In synchronous communication, multiple parties are participating at the same time and they wait for replies from each other. For example, I would call someone on the phone and wait for them to pick up. Then, I’d give them information and they’d receive the information at that exact moment.

Asynchronous communication is different. For example, you write an email to your team letting them know what you accomplished during the day. Then, a teammate in another time zone reads your email 6 hours later when their day starts. The recipient is neither expecting nor waiting for an incoming message, so they may not get to it right away. But they also aren’t spending any time waiting for communication.