Engineering Teams Unite: Making Synchronous Meetings Suck a Little Less

Remember when the entire world vacated their offices overnight? Over a handful of days, thousands of hours were spent taking those offices online. Our habits are powerful. To be fair, the time to find a better alternative didn’t exist. We were blindsided.

Live video conferencing formed the backbone of this transition. Zoom’s market capitalization surged from approximately $20 billion in January of 2020 to over $160 billion by October. Companies with promising new live video solutions received billions in venture capital funding throughout the pandemic.

Our use of video technology shifted from being supplementary to becoming a debilitating addiction, taking us further away from our goals. We were so used to seeing our colleagues’ pearly whites in person that we just had to find a way to see them over the internet.

How could we have made sure that our use of video as a collaboration tool aligned with our goals and didn’t impede us? Did we even bother asking ourselves that question amidst the mayhem?

We all made mistakes when adopting video, but perhaps the most serious problem is with meeting size and length. It is still common to see video calls with 20 participants that reach or exceed the one hour mark. And you thought there was no possible way that meetings could be made more miserable…

In fact video has made meetings so much more miserable than before, that there’s a new medical condition coined in their name: zoom fatigue.

Zoom fatigue: the feeling of existential dread that sets in when you realize you’ve wasted the last hour of your life staring at the same grid of faces, listening to people talk in circles about things that could have been handled asynchronously. Symptoms may include glazed-over eyes, a tendency to stare blankly into space, and an uncontrollable urge to scream into the void.

Remote-first teams are still relatively new, so it doesn’t make sense to simply copy and paste the traditional office environment onto the internet. When my MacBook starts dispensing cool, refreshing virtual water from a blue jug, I’ll eat my words. You’re allowed to enjoy water-cooler talk, but you shouldn’t hold 20 of your coworkers hostage and force them to listen to your weekend glamping story.

How ‘bout THIS glamping story?

The meetings

I’ve been part of distributed teams for years now, but there were a few recurring meetings during the pandemic that really stood out as a waste of time and money. Despite everyone’s good intentions, we just didn’t get the results we were hoping for.

We were a company building an integrated platform for video conferencing, specializing in large events. Several times a month we would have video calls to talk about initiatives happening in different areas of engineering. There were meetings for backend, frontend, scalability, and more. They were completely voluntary, and there were always lots of passionate engineers in attendance.

I was in a group of a hundred engineers on one of these calls, which took place at the ungodly hour of 3am for me. Of course, it wasn’t 3am for everyone since the meetings were biased towards GMT, which meant most people in the Americas skipped them. The discussion leader went through a backlog of important issues for an hour, but only a handful of the same five people spoke up. It was like the speakers were hooked up to a load balancer — the same five people spoke up in round-robin ordering.

Meanwhile, there were hundreds of other engineers catching some much-needed shut-eye while these meetings were happening. Despite fancying ourselves as a modern distributed team, we were failing to engage even half of the stakeholders in the critical engineering decisions being made. We knew it was a problem, and it was only magnified by the fact that we were spending a significant amount of money on meetings that weren’t delivering the desired results.

And let’s not forget, engineers don’t come cheap. Assuming an average cost of $100 per hour per person for 100 engineers, that’s $10,000 for a meeting with just five contributors (excluding the moderator). Even if we only had four of these meetings a month, that’s still a cost of $40,000 — not exactly pocket change.

What went wrong?

Our meetings were designed to achieve consensus, decide on critical tech concerns, and nudge ourselves in the right direction as an engineering organization. Why then, were we unable to accomplish even one of those things?

1. Synchronous communication kills meaningful collaboration: Productivity comes in waveforms, not in 8-hour blocks. My alertness at 3 in in the morning was different from participants that were already on their second cup of coffee or who had just gotten back from an intense bike ride. When everyone is forced to enter deep thought at the same time, you rarely catch them all in a period of alertness and cognitive effectiveness. You end up sitting silently in a virtual room together.
2. Not all decisions can be made in 10 minutes: When meetings are allotted a specific amount of time to discuss a backlog of issues, people may feel pressured to rush through them, resulting in important issues being overlooked and unimportant ones taking up too much time. Not all decisions can be made quickly, so it’s important to break up discussions into smaller, focused blocks to ensure that each issue gets the attention it deserves and is resolved in an appropriate amount of time.
3. Centralized discussions often don’t reflect reality: Our decision-making process was not as simple as one meeting. We didn’t have a clear record of where the team had reached consensus on important matters. While we were discussing and making decisions across different channels, there was no single source of truth where we could track the progress and alignment of our initiatives. This made it difficult to know if everyone was on the same page and if we were making progress towards our goals.
4. Silencing input from some team members: Some team members felt anxious about sharing their thoughts in group meetings, which created a barrier to their contribution. To ensure that all team members are able to share their ideas and input, it is important to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable. Introducing a voting system could simplify the contribution process and encourage team members to share their ideas even if they feel anxious about speaking in meetings.

In conclusion, our team realized that we were facing challenges in achieving alignment to drive technological growth within the organization. We frequently discovered that we were working on issues that others in the company were also tackling simultaneously, resulting in duplicated efforts and wasted resources after weeks of work.

This one seems nice as well.

How can we get more?

There are some specific ways we can resolve the problems. Although async collaboration is preferred, there aren’t many tools available that solve these specific issues in a collected way.

1. Break up larger groups: When dealing with a large group of stakeholders, it can be helpful to break them down into smaller groups to allow for more focused and productive discussions. This also makes it easier to combine findings and discussion results into a final decision. Smaller groups also allow for easier scheduling and alignment of goals.
2. Align yourselves with the problem: Spend time ensuring that everyone understands the problem statement to collaboratively design an effective solution. Restate the problem statement periodically throughout the meeting to maintain alignment and prevent divergence from the overall idea and aim.
3. Always record results: Having a clear record of the reasoning behind decisions makes it easier for team members to search and understand past decisions. If possible, assign one person to record group sentiment and decisions.
4. Leverage interactive collaboration tools: It can be helpful to have a break from audio and video and use an interactive collaboration tool such as Miro. When you move the focus away from communicating face to face, it allows people to focus on thinking things through instead of keeping a discussion going.
5. Use a tool like Hydroplane: Hydroplane is a tool that helps engineers collaborate by providing a robust proposal-voting feedback loop, increasing awareness of important technical initiatives, and offering decision-making history. This allows teams to reach consensus asynchronously, save time and money, and avoid repeating costly mistakes.

Going async is like going to the gym — it’s tough at first, but you’ll eventually see the gains in productivity and happiness. Until then, use these tips to make your meetings less painful and more effective.

Conclusion

The are many drawbacks to synchronous communication, especially in remote teams. You should always prefer async collaboration, and reach for video when there really is no alternative. The short feedback loop that video meetings provide can sometimes be useful for aligning ourselves and our ideas, but keep them small, brief, and infrequent. Unless you have a very good reason for inviting more participants, keep video calls to 5 people or less. If your meetings start to look more like a football stadium on Super Bowl Sunday, then video is not the right format for the discussion.

At Hydroplane, we are working on a solution to help engineering teams with complex decision-making. Our tool can benefit both distributed and non-distributed teams by organizing decision-making into proposal-voting feedback loops. With Hydroplane, you can easily share important context with your team and reach consensus on complex issues without having to schedule synchronous meetings. Subscribe to be in the loop and receive an exclusive discount when we launch.