It will be unfair to say that I dislike team standup and company weekly update or all hands, but I rarely participate to them.

First let’s set the tone here, I am a remote worker since 2017 and since then I worked with colleagues across many timezones and usually for startups in San Francisco or US. So timezone is something to take under consideration when it comes to asynchronous meetings and the culture of the employer is key.

For me, it means that whoever organizes those meetings, if they want to be inclusive needs to put a bit more effort.

When I worked in Dublin, Ireland in office standup was time well spent. Each team had its own space, and it was hanging together for 10 minutes with their coffee to kick off the day.

I do not get the same feeling if I do standup at 6pm because you want to keep me at my desk when the US team kicks off their day and seeing a few people in the morning hanging in a Meet or Zoom does not bring the same energy.

The company meeting can be even worst because “C” level are looking to make themselves and their team look successful, because it is good to do useful work, but it can quickly turn to look boring, not that interesting and alienating.

I have only one exception! The company all hands organized at Packet Host, a company now known as Equinix Metal. The name was not all hands but “Weekly Kickoff”.

I reached out to Jacob Smith, my boss at PacketHost to refresh my mind about why I liked such format, here a few quotes from our quick chat that I think are on point!

Start on time, end on time.  No more than 30 minutes

It was our job to make the meeting valuable and interesting and fun, so people would want to show up.

a review of our scorecard (predictive metrics reviewed weekly to keep us on track)

It was fun because you felt that somebody put effort and care on those 30 minutes, and it never felt like a recurring meeting that you need to attend because somebody else thinks it is important.

Sometimes we had people doing quick presentation about their passion, singing or playing a song. The marketing team was always up with some sketch or drawings about new features or fun things happened the previous week. Entertaining or “not to miss” Slack messages and more but what I appreciated the most was:

a review of our scorecard (predictive metrics reviewed weekly to keep us on track) 

A simple table in Jira with a list of metrics from the various departments, I don’t remember them precisely but something like:

1. (sales team): number of new leads
2. (sales team): closed contracts
3. (marketing team): new signups
4. (marketing team): retweets
5. (ops): network outages
6. (ops): issue close
7. …

Those were consistent across the year and week by week a new column showed up with the new numbers. Informative, consistent and async friendly. Everything I need!

Long story short, if your employees are like me, and they do not participate to recurring meetings, or they use OBS to replace their video with an old recording of themselves it means that you can pause those meetings, replace them with an email and get back when you are more care to donate.