Harmonized Meeting Schedule

Since remote and zoom times, it’s easy to schedule meetings back-to-back without a break in between. To enforce breaks, VSHNeers have started to set different rules for meeting durations, start and end times or similar. This made it almost impossible to schedule a meeting with different people, and some start times are hard to see on the calendar and don’t seem natural.

We need a standard for when VSHN meetings should start and end so that there is time for useful breaks by default. This will help people find slots for internal and external meetings, arrive at the next meeting on time and well prepared, and reduce stress factors.

Meeting Times

When VSHNeers organize a meeting, we stick to the following rules:

  • Meetings start at :00.

  • A Meeting is either:

    • 30min long and ends at :30.

    • or 45min long and ends at :45.

This gives VSHNeers a minimum 15min break between every meeting.

Exceptions

Longer meeting formats

Workshops, retros, education sessions or similar have to be planned carefully and can take longer, but still have the same start and end times. Planning carefully means for example:

  • Include at least one break in the middle.

  • A prepared agenda sent in advance, so that participants can decide whether it really makes sense to join and can prepare themselves.

Read more on attending and planning meetings here. We’ll also come up with internal educations on how to plan an prepare meetings.

If you need more meetings

We really think you should avoid this, but if you really need two meetings within an hour, you can still start a meeting at :30 as long as it does not impact other VSHNeers:

  • Don’t schedule meetings with VSHNeers at :30 if they have another meeting until :30.

  • Try to end your meeting at :50 or :55, because participant’s other meeting might start at :00.

  • Tell in the previous meeting that you need to leave a bit early, so you actually have a break yourself.

Dailies

In the sense of "safe enough to try" we think that 15-30min daily stand-up meetings can still happen right before lunch time, even if they start at :45 or :30.

Weekly Company Meeting

The Weekly Company Meeting starts at 11:15. As it ends before lunchtime and is kind of a historical thing to have it at 11:15, we think it’s safe enough to keep it like this.

These rules are tracked and reviewed as VIP-176