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On making remote work more human: Meetings

New rules (and experiments) for remote work

Brittany Jezouit
🏡 wfh
6 min readDec 19, 2024

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A humble remote work desk setup. Photo by author.

Last week I read a story from tech writer JA Westenberg called Modern Work Fucking Sucks. It describes a nightmarish state of remote work: waking up to Slack notifications, jumping back and forth between twenty different systems, an inexhaustible onslaught of Zoom meetings.

As someone who thinks a lot about work culture, the story felt like a rallying cry, a tidy articulation of what not to do: how do we create something that feels like the opposite of this?

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that remote work sucks. I think remote work is great. I am a fan. Please, never make me go back to an office. But yeah, Westenberg has a point — the way we design for remote work often forgets that we are human people with bodies and brains and not just work-input-cogs. We work on machines; we are not the machines.

In my role as Chief of Staff, I think a lot about how to make work more human. “Humans first” is our Medium’s first operating principle, after all.

And even though there are so many remote workplaces in the world, there’s no single playbook to follow on how to “do” remote work. What works for one company won’t work for every company. So we experiment, we try new things, we gather feedback, we see what works best for our unique group of ~70 human people who are trying their best to figure out how to build something good together.

Lately I’ve been thinking about meetings, i.e., the part of your workday where you interact with other humans. I’ve been experimenting with how to make the meetings part of my work-world more human. Here are a few things I’ve tried and liked lately.

Implementing a “no chat” rule

You know this feeling: you’re in a Zoom meeting, trying to pay attention, but there’s side-chatter in the chat. I find this so distracting. As soon as there’s comments in the chat (or worse, full conversations), my attention is split. I’ve also heard this come up as a conversation in our Abilities ERG as a particular struggle for folks with attention differences, so it’s worth thinking about from an inclusivity lens, too.

New rule: For small team meetings, I’ve been trying out a no chat rule. No one is allowed to post in the chat (save for sharing a link to a doc, perhaps). Instead, if you have something to say, say it in the meeting. This doesn’t need to be a rule for all meetings — for example, in our all-company meeting, the side-chat is a fun way that people stay engaged. But for the right meeting size and purpose, I am a huge fan of this change.

Literally just close your Slack in meetings

I recently read (and loved!) Four Thousand Weeks, a time management book that’s kind of anti-productivity-culture while also still being very much, well, a productivity book. In the book, Burkeman explains that the reason we drift into distraction (say, checking your Slack DMs while you’re in a Zoom meeting) is not because you’re bored, but because paying attention is hard and distraction is easy. The cognitive work of actually thinking deeply — or even better, actively listening — is harder than scanning your email or replying to a Slack thread. Your impulse to keep tabs on Slack isn’t productivity or boredom-driven; it’s your brain’s way of saying please don’t make me work this hard.

New rule: In a recent team retro, I asked everyone to close Slack. All the way. (And then also, to take off your Apple Watch or turn your phone upside down or whatever other ways those notifications might sneak into your space.) And then we had an hour-long meeting where we talked to each other.

Even as the facilitator of the meeting and the person making the rule, I found this, to be honest, sort of excruciating. At several points in the meeting I found myself drifting to the Slack icon or to open a new tab. But I didn’t!! And I think the meeting was better for it.

No-meeting mornings

We don’t have a shared company-wide, heads-down get-things-done time (yet! maybe one day), but lots of people have their own versions. I’ve mostly seen this in the form of a no-meeting day. I had a no-meeting Thursday for a while, but I was finding that a whole day wasn’t as ideal because a) it’s really hard to sustain 8 hours of deep work and b) by lunchtime, I was craving some human connection.

New rule: I’ve switched to no-meeting mornings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m writing this from my Thursday no-meeting block! Lately, I’ve felt like this is my best chance to get work done. These little windows on my calendar feel like sanctuaries, the place where I can take shelter from the work frenzy and use a deeper part of my brain for an uninterrupted space of time. Maybe I’ll adapt this to something different in the future, but for now I will protect this fiercely, no I cannot meet Tuesdays and Thursday AMs, please find another time!!

Differentiate between working meetings and planning meetings

Sometimes, a next step for a project is to “schedule a meeting”. But it’s helpful to clearly set set the expectation as to what type of meeting it is. When people have different expecations on whether a meeting is to get work done or to plan to get work done, frustration abounds.

New rule: State explicitly whether a meeting is to get work done or to plan to get work done. A team sync or check-in is a good example of a plan to get things done meeting. These should be efficient and focused on information-sharing but essentially, at the end of it, you break to go do the work. A get work done meeting is where you build something together.

As an example of this that worked well: A few weeks ago, I needed to meet with my coworker Carly to build a new CRM. We could have either met to make a plan about how to do it (short meeting), or met to actually do it (probably longer). Because it’s a collaborative project, we decided to go with a get work done meeting. I even titled the meeting “Brittany and Carly build a CRM”. And we built what we needed in an hour. It was great.

Put the talking order in the chat

This is a small one, but I hate the experience of being in a Zoom meeting, saying “who wants to go first?” or “who wants to go next?” and waiting for people to respond. It feels unnecessarily awkward.

New rule: where it makes sense, I’ve been putting the order in the Zoom chat. For example, we recently had a team meeting where we introduced a new contractor, and we needed to do a round of intros for everyone on the team. I just typed up everyone’s names quickly, in the order they appeared on my screen, and put it in the chat, and we went in that order. It was easy and also hopefully had the side effect of lessening the anxiety of everyone involved, because everyone knew when it would be their turn to talk.

What’s the remote version of sitting next to each other, but mostly doing your own thing, but chatting sometimes?

I haven’t tried this one yet, but I have a plan in the new year to schedule a regular working hour with one of my teams. It’s for a team that mostly meets for plan to get things done meetings, and I’m craving more side-by-side collaborative time. I miss sitting next to someone who I know is working on something similar to me and chatting with them a bit while I work or looking up to ask a quick question or get feedback, without having to schedule a whole meeting about it. What’s the remote version of that?

I’m not sure, but in this meeting, we’re going to try to recreate some version of that vibe. We’re planning to use Around.co as a virtual room to hang out while we work on a variety of individual projects: writing blog posts, event planning, copywriting/editing, writer outreach. Maybe it’ll be annoying and we won’t like it, but maybe it’ll be nice to have some co-presence that’s in between a Zoom meeting and working alone.

Those are some of the meeting experiments I’ve tried lately to make meetings more human. If you have ideas you’ve tried or ways you run meetings that get closer to the more human goal, please share in the comments — I’d love to hear about it.

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🏡 wfh
🏡 wfh

Published in 🏡 wfh

Tips, wisdom, ideas, and provocations about remote work.

Brittany Jezouit
Brittany Jezouit

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