We all have them. Some are great. Others, well, they could be better.

Signal vs. Noise has had a series of posts (well, if two makes a “series”) on meetings. The first one Meetings Considered Harmful mentioned a U of M study that basically said that organizations with lots of meetings tend to also have a lot of negative employee effects.

Makes complete sense to me. I find my worth within an organization by the amount of innovation and “cool stuff” I can put together for the company. Meetings, for the most part, get in the way of that goal…

37signals responded by saying that they basically don’t have meetings. Awesome.

Then there’s the followup. It’s got some suggestions on how to make your meetings not suck for the organization and those who’re attending. My favorite “guideline”:

Meet on site. Meet at the site of the problem instead of the conference room. Get in front of the code, in front of the UI, and talk about it together. Point to real things and suggest real changes.

Finally, in the comments for the second post, there’s a link to Christopher Hawkins’ blog where he talks about his guidelines for meetings. My favorite quote from this one:

The meeting should have a moderator to help participants to focus. If someone is continually driving the meeting off-topic, that person should be asked to leave. “But that’s rude and it singles out that person for humiliation and it’s not fair” and blah blah blah. My heart bleeds, pal. You’re in a meeting for a purpose - if a person can’t support and advance that purpose, they should go do something else that is productive.

Amen.