I've probably blogged about this subject before, so apologies for any overlap or duplication...
We've got lots of clients, especially those who've got "Confluence Support" Service Level Agreements with us, who are constantly in meetings whenever we try contacting them. One of our clients summarises meeting-overload as Meetings – Where minutes are taken and hours are lost.
Most companies see meetings as a way to communicate ideas and schedules to people, keep projects on track and generally deal with communications between team members.
Having worked at companies where there are lots of meetings, I tend to feel (as do all Adaptavist staff) that they simply cause further delays and confusion. In fact, most meetings are so chaotic that people actually come out of them more confused than they were before.
When Adaptavist was founded, we decided: No more meetings!
There were a number of reasons for this:
- We hate meetings
- Meetings prevent us from getting work done
- Time taken to organise
- Time taken to get to/from the meeting
- Time during the meeting
- Time after the meeting (eg. writing up minutes, emailing to-do lists, etc)
- Disruption time - the time it takes to stop what you are doing before a meeting and then try and start again after the meeting (eg. it breaks your chain of thought)
- A 1 hour meeting generally eats 2 to 3 hours for the majority of participants.
- Our environmental policy states that all unnecessary travel should be avoided - all our staff work from home so most of us would have to travel
- Meetings require all attendees to be available at the same time
I've just posted the draft agenda for a company meeting on our Intranet and was freaked out when I realised the last time we had a meeting was back in February (8 months ago). Other than some recent interviews and Go Karting events, our staff very rarely see each other face-to-face!
Without meetings you'd think that we'd have an internal communication nightmare, right? Wrong. It's been one of the most unexpected benefits of abolishing meetings - our internal communications are utterly amazing.
So, how do we survive without meetings?
Simple, we replaced meetings with a plethora of alternate communication methods.
Confluence (wiki)
Being able to collaborate online with a wiki wipes out the need for most "information broadcast" meetings.
The wiki (especially our intranet space) allows us to broadcast news to staff and work collaboratively on road-maps for projects, etc.
The wiki is so easy to use that all members of staff use it. Whether it's updating our employee handbook, planning the next phase of our ever-growing hosting services or simplifying conceptually-complex ideas for our plugins, the wiki is absolutely essential.
JIRA (issue tracker)
Without this tool, things at Adaptavist would grind to an immediate halt. We absolutely could not survive without JIRA.
We've tried countless tools for tracking bugs and tasks throughout our careers and none come even close to matching JIRA.
We've recently moved all customer communications to JIRA as our previous support system (Kayako eSupport) had literally crumbled under the strain of our ever-growing clientbase.
JIRA makes managing insane numbers of tasks (generally 250+ tasks per member of staff at any time) an absolute doddle. It helps keep things on our "radar" so we don't forget about them. It ensures that tacit information is stored in a searchable format, rather than someone's head.
VoIP Telephones
Any decent telephony system will help, but the biggest benefit of the VoIP service we use is that we can fully customise it through a simple web interface. We can easily set up conference rooms, hunt groups, aliases and all kinds of useful things at any time of day or night.
There are some downsides - VoIP is still a fairly new technology and occasionally goes through patches of being unreliable, however the range of features and cost savings are amazing and reliability is improving constantly.
It should be noted that internally we never have conference calls. The only conference calls we ever have are with clients and even then only one or two members of Adaptavist staff are involved.
Instant Messaging
Unlike most companies, all staff at Adaptavist are required to have at least two instant messaging accounts.
We have a secure internal server which is generally used purely for work-related chat. This is great because we can quickly and securely send confidential information to each other.
We also encourage all staff to use one or more public chat services like MSN and Google Talk - most companies actively prevent the use of such services.
But we go further - we expect all staff to have all their friends and family on public IM as well so they can chat while they work.
In old-school companies, where people still drive to visit their computer on a daily basis and work fixed hours, that would probably be a bad thing.
But at Adaptavist, our computer is usually just a few metres away from our bedroom and our hours of work are completely and utterly flexible. Having friends on IM (and email of course) means fewer disruptive phone calls.
I'd started writing about our flexible working arrangements here but that deserves a blog post in it's own right.
Now, where was I up to...?
Oh yes...
Facebook, Linkedin, etc.
Did I mention we encourage staff to keep in touch with friends and family online?
All Adaptavist staff can be found on Facebook and what's surprising is that most of our clients are on there too!
Facebook allows us to quickly do silly stuff like throwing sheep at friends in Australia or taking movie quizzes with relatives. It allows us to strengthen the bonds with our friends, families and even customers in the online world, while we're busy working.
We're also getting a growing presence on LinkedIn which is definitely more for business networking when compared to Facebook which is more for socialising.
Google Calendar
All staff are required to have at least two Google Calendars - one for work, one for personal stuff.
We then share both calendars with all other staff - it's up to each person whether they make their personal stuff available or just show "Busy".
This allows everyone to instantly see who's doing what and, more importantly, find out when people are not available for work-related tasks.
I'll discuss this more in my next blog post on flexible working hours.
Email
How could I forget email, heh. These days we usually just use email to send URL's to someone that's offline or ping people when there is a page in the wiki they need to look at.
Depending on what projects we're working on, we'll also get up to a few hundred JIRA and Confluence notification emails each day - basically an automated ping to go look at URLs. Because the notifications usually contain the information on what's happened (eg. comment added, status changed, etc) we can easily tell if the URL needs to be visited.
The notification emails are also a great way to keep track of what other people are doing. It's really important to use the threaded view in your email client to group related emails together. For example, it allows me to see if someone else is actively working on a JIRA ticket without even reading the emails because their name is shown as the "Sender".
Most staff are also on mailing lists - these are a great way to keep tabs on external communities, keeping us "in the loop" on remote projects.
Summary
You need lots of different kinds of communication methods to replace meetings.
For work related stuff, each task generally involves JIRA, email (notifications), IM (usually the internal secure IM) and sometimes VoIP phone calls.
Projects are similar but also use public IM (to chat with clients), mailing lists (to keep up-to-date with external projects, eg. JavaScript libraries) and Google Calendar.
Because most of our internal communications are text-based (IM, JIRA, Confluence, email) we never have to take minutes for meetings. All the information is recorded, verbosely, by default and it's all searchable.
We also extend our communications to friends and family - Facebook, public IM services and email keep us in constant contact with people and events outside of work.
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