In this episode, Todd, Jamon, Justin, and Gant discuss the fine art of handling meetings.
• How Infinite Red Improved Remote Video Meetings With a Few Hand Gestures
• Virtual Meetings Have Types
• Link to tweet about Invision using the hand queue system developed at Infinite Red
Todd Werth: Welcome back to Building Infinite Red. My name is Todd Werth, I'm the Founder and CEO of Infinite Red. Today I'm joined by three people, the other two owners of the company. Jamon Holmgren.
Jamon Holmgren: Hey everybody.
Todd Werth: And Gant Laborde.
Gant Laborde: Welcome friends.
Todd Werth: You might know him as Gant Laborde if you're a listener to this podcast. And then returning with us is the Head of Design here at Infinite Red, Justin Huskey.
Justin Huskey: Hey, thanks for having me back.
Todd Werth: Very cool. Today I think this is going to be a fun one. It's something we all love to hate. We're going to discuss meetings. Yes. Meetings where productivity goes to die. First off, we have a variety of things we want to talk about. The first thing we're going to talk about is we are leadership here at Infinite Red we force people into more meetings than most as is leaders, jobs to torment the team. But first thing I want to start off real quick is everyone hates meetings. We know it. We hate meetings. I want to hear from each of you. Why do you personally dislike or hate meetings?
Gant Laborde: I'll go throw this back to my cubicle days for a minute here. Your head's down, you're getting something fantastic done. And then the next thing you know, someone's standing over you saying, "Hey, it's time. It's time to go to that meeting," and like, okay, who's running it and what is it about as, of course, it's has nothing to do with your currently thinking about. It has nothing to do with anything else. And you know that the person running that meeting is basically going to be finding their way as they go through it. And then you're just sitting there for an hour and I had a badge. When I used to work at a cubicle, it says, "Congratulations, you survived another meeting that could have been an email."
Jamon Holmgren: I think I have a mug that says that. Yeah. It's a common sentiment and I share it of course as well. In fact back when I ran my own consultancy, I actually often would just kind of say, "Okay, we're not going to have any meetings at all this week." We just kind of forgo it entirely. Justin's looking at me kind of funny because he used to work for me back then. But this was probably predating Justin. As we got bigger, it became harder and harder to do because meetings are about communication. But yeah, I didn't like them. It always felt like very little was accomplished for the amount of time spent. And the disruption was definitely a big piece of it.
Justin Huskey: Definitely. And for me it's like, since I'm working on projects, we talk a lot about doing work in meetings and as it turns out over a couple of weeks of meetings, you realize you haven't done any work. That's the main reason for me.
Todd Werth: Well, you know what they say, if you're running out of time, have a meeting and that will definitely improve the situation.
Jamon Holmgren: Who says that?
Todd Werth: No one says that. When I used to work in the enterprise typically for clients and stuff. I have so many funny stories but this highlights why meetings... We had a 45-minute meeting about some problem that happened and we spent 45 minutes determining whose fault it was. And zero time working on fixing the problem. Similarly, another meeting was every time we are brainstorming new ideas, every time someone said something and I think probably three ideas during the entire hour meeting were ever brought up.
Todd Werth: We would have long discussions whether that idea is inside or outside the box. It was very important that we identify that, whether this is inside or outside the box. That seemed like the most important thing. I would say I hate meetings where they don't actually move what you're trying to accomplish forward at all. Anyone else have any reasons they hate meetings? Don't hold back. Come on. Tell me what you say when you leave my meeting. I know you say stuff.
Jamon Holmgren: Often, meetings seem to be kind of proxies for actually having a good decision making process and showing leadership and communicating in more efficient ways. Meetings solve things extremely inefficiently, but they solve things. And so if you're kind of a lazy leader, you can just solve it by saying, Hey, everybody get together and let's figure it out all together. Nevermind doing the hard work of coming up with a better path and coming up with a better way to make those decisions. Better ways to communicate the decisions once they're made, better ways to get their feedback for example, that's a big one. Like you want to get feedback, you can do it in a meeting. It definitely works. That's why people kind of hate it because it does feel like lazy leadership in a lot of cases.
Justin Huskey: Yeah, it's like a conference room, five minutes. And I think that that's what we really dislike. Is we don't dislike meetings, everyone dislikes a poor meeting, a meeting that actually doesn't successfully accomplish anything, where people are not listening and they're all on their phones, but you still feel like you have to be there? That's what we really hate.
Todd Werth: We're the leaders at Infinite Red. We hate meetings. We actually have lots of meetings. Why the heck? Next thing I want to talk about is if we hate meetings so much, why do we have so many meetings? Jamon you had mentioned that meetings accomplish tasks poorly, but at least they accomplish tasks. Could you elaborate a little on that?
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I think that humans are actually kind of hardwired to communicate more face to face. And in our case, of course, we're a remote company, so we do it in Zoom. But that doesn't really change the fact that we are hardwired to do that, people standing in a circle talking about something that's kind of like, you could have done that in the caveman days. This is pretty, pretty far back in our history. And because we're hardwired to do that, we do have ways kind of built into us to handle those situations and to make decisions to gather feedback. And this is a big part of cooperating as humans. A business is a cooperation of many humans and you need to be able to coordinate activities.
Jamon Holmgren: You need to be able to get on the same page in terms of priorities. You need to make sure that you understand why decisions are made and what decisions were made. That when you are doing things, you're not pulling in opposite directions and well-run companies have good communication. This is actually something that is born out over and over and over. That communication is super key to having clear objectives and being able to attain them. And sometimes, I would almost say often meetings are kind of the most general purpose tool you can use to accomplish that. And if you use a more specialized tool, which we may talk about in some cases you're going to miss out on some of the things that meetings will more or less accomplish.
Todd Werth: I feel like you have meetings when you don't know what else to do. It's like we understand it's the worst option, but it's the only option. Justin, why do we still have meetings? You run the Design Team.
Justin Huskey: Yeah.
Todd Werth: You don't like meetings. Why do you have meetings?
Justin Huskey: Because that's just what you do, you have meetings when you get into leadership.
Todd Werth: You saw a cartoon once of a leader and that's why you do that?
Justin Huskey: No. I think Jamon actually said it really well that humans by nature are very collaborative, especially in design. We're very collaborative and are very interested in seeing each other and talking to each other when we're trying to solve a problem. But outside of that, I also think it's just a way to hear from your team in a way that I don't think text will communicate sometimes. I think part of communication is just being able to read visual cues and body language. And I think meetings are actually good for that. It's kind of the first step in problem solving is to agree to it together.
Todd Werth: That's interesting. What do you think Gant?
Gant Laborde: Yeah. Well…go ahead.
Todd Werth: I was just going to interrupt you proving why meetings suck.
Gant Laborde: Well done Todd. Well done. I'll toss on just a little bit extra. That's kind of Building Infinite Red here is that we're remote. If you don't know that, listen to season one, why we're remote. Also, our remote tools. But what's really important here is we're staring at text and we are typing to one another. And I'll say one thing that's kind of key at Infinite Red is that a meeting is a high-bandwidth connection between people and there's just some things that you could type a book and you can't communicate it nearly as well as actually sitting in a room and staring at someone and having them tell you their side of the story. The high bandwidth aspect of a meeting does what paperwork and metrics and the dehumanization and your employee number never could.
Todd Werth: It's funny the don't have meetings that could have been emails. I mean I laugh at that. Everyone laughs at that. But here's from a boss's standpoint, here's the honest truth, how do I get you to read the email? I mean that's the truth. I don't know how many times I've brought up something and be like, what? I'm like, we have an announcement channel on Slack where you're supposed to read…
Jamon Holmgren: Did you get the memo?
Todd Werth: Yeah, exactly.
Gant Laborde: I went to a conference last week and they sent out an email, the parking directions and the person went to the front. I saw the entire exchange said, "You need to tell me the parking directions. This is something that's not okay." And it basically turned into why didn't you just read the email conversation? And it got pretty heated pretty quickly. And it's just funny how much we turn off when we're not actually talking to another person.
Todd Werth: Yeah. That's the main reason. But the other thing is meetings don't have to be a lecture and listening. We'll talk about some of the ways we're approaching making meetings better, but I do want to point out there are what I consider a work session where you get a group of people, it could be two people, it could be four people, and we're here working on an actual task, which means we're showing someone's screen is very different than a meeting where I'm just giving out information that you may not have read an email.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. That's a great point Todd. And I think one of the things that I look at is when you're having a meeting and even if you are sort of doing more of a presentational style meeting, you can read people's body language. If you can kind of feel like they're not really getting it, they're not really enthusiastic about this. You have a chance to kind of reset where if you send it out as an email, it feels more like a declaration. It's written down as law. And then what happens is the person who kind of disagrees with the direction now has to make a choice. They have to do something a little more proactive, a little more kind of active where they come out and they say, I don't agree with this. And it feels more confrontational. Whereas if you're just sort of like looking at them with a puzzled look a little bit, you get this chance maybe to have them sit back and say, "Okay, you're not getting something, let's talk this through."
Justin Huskey: Definitely. That's a good point Jamon. And I also think too In Design a lot of what we do, and one of the things I've actually learned from years of being in your meetings is that it's a good opportunity to not just offload information but to kind of sit back and there's that kind of leadership principle of sitting back, listening to everybody, taking in all of the information and then making a decision afterwards. And that's one of the best ways, in my opinion, to run a meeting.
Todd Werth: I do want to mention that if any of our team members are listening right now and they're throwing something at their monitor and screaming how bad our meetings are, we are far from perfect. And we have some pretty bad meetings. But we're going to a little about what we've tried to do to fix it. It's an ongoing thing. I'm certainly guilty of bad meetings for sure. That being said I'd like to just go over describe what type of meetings we have. Now I do want to reiterate, we're a remote company, but we use ridiculous amounts of Zoom on a daily basis. I'm kind of like to go over the kind of meetings that we have that other people have, what the differences are, that kind of stuff.
Jamon Holmgren: One that kind of stands out to everybody is our All Team meeting. It's the meeting where we bring everybody in to zoom. And we all group up and in the past we've traditionally done kind of announcements then. We have different segments. It's an hour, we do it every two weeks and we have different segments. Gant runs a really cool segment called The Bulletin Board. Gant you want to talk about what the bulletin board is?
Gant Laborde: Yeah. It's a great breakout session to sort of reinvigorate the meeting with anything that's interesting that's not work. It helps us personalize one another, helps us kind of get that energy back into what's going on and it helps us celebrate, that we're actually human beings. I used to be the person who'd laugh when you'd put other interests on a resume, but I think that's really more important. The older and the more I get into a leadership and communicating, I think there's a key.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah, it really helps kind of humanize Infinite Red when we're not standing around talking to each other all the time. It allows a peak in everybody's life. For example, I did a bulletin board showing the pool that I built in my backyard. Has a pool deck around it and stuff. It was kind of an interesting thing and I showed people what that looked like.
Jamon Holmgren: The all team meeting exists primarily and we do feel that this is important. We've tried to make it as least onerous as possible by only having it every two weeks. But it is required for meeting for everybody to be there. And the reason that we as owners feel that it's very important is primarily because we're remote. We feel like we don't get a chance to sit there and kind of hang out with each other on a day to day basis. Getting everybody together for an hour and just spending an hour together really makes a difference. And maybe Todd can talk a little bit more about what makes the all team meeting important to us.
Todd Werth: The truth is when the all team meeting comes up at 1:00 PM on Tuesday, people are working on stuff and everyone's like, Ugh, I've got to go the all team. I get that. I'm working on something also. But we've had the situations past where people did express the issue that they feel disconnected from people they don't work with a lot. A lot of people will work in the same groups often and not work with other people and stuff and they don't even know what someone's voice sounds like. Even though I'm sure plenty of people would rather be back doing what they're working on. I think the most important part is just to interact with each other. I'll talk a little more about things we've done wrong. I think I've done the all team meeting wrong for a long time and actually right in the process of changing it. But that's why. Other types of meetings.
Justin Huskey: In design, one-on-one meetings have actually become really core to who we are as a team. I do a one on one meeting with everybody in the design department every two weeks and that's an opportunity for them to tell me kind of where they're at, the kind of challenges they're facing and asking for advice, help, things like that. It's not so much a meeting where I'm talking with them. It's much more of a meeting where I'm listening to them and they're talking to me about what's going on. And I've noticed a lot of ideas that we've implemented in our design process have come from those one-on-one meetings and they've become invaluable.
Todd Werth: Yeah. That's interesting. You do more one on ones than anyone else in the company? I think designers are a little more up for that. I think the engineers would hate it, doing one on ones that often, to be honest. What other type of meetings would people like to talk about? I mentioned a bunch of different types we can go in later about how we're improving and how we're failing at meetings and that stuff, but I just want to kind of get the kind of meetings that we do so people understand the whole thing.
Gant Laborde: Well, I think you kind of pointed it out right there our meetings actually have types? When I worked in an office, we didn't think about different meeting types at all. You got called into a conference room and you behaved like you were in a conference room. If you get called into someone's office, you kind of behaved like you're in someone's office. Since we work in remote, I think that the most advantageous thing that we've done is we've started to catalog and create how do a bunch of people who are constantly in the same place, which is a meeting where we're all just a picture talking to each other. We actually treat them differently. That's why we have one on ones. That's why we actually, if you read our blog posts, we have gigs and jams, we have all kinds of different strategies. I'm sure we could talk endlessly. I'm probably talking about a bunch of ways that we've done that and improved our meetings. But you have to understand what's really key here is our creative process is going to require a certain type and actually are an all team meeting requires another.
Jamon Holmgren: I'd like to talk about the small group meetings. This came out of a conversation that Justin and I had actually at another type of meeting that we do, which is our lunch meetings. But I was taking over as CTO. I was taking over our technical team and I was looking at the prospect of having to do one on ones with every engineer and just thinking, this is not going to happen because there were 16 or 18 engineers and this is looking at the amount of time I had available. It's just not going to happen. I can't spend that much time doing one-on-ones. As we were talking at lunch I asked Justin if he had any ideas on how I might approach this problem of having, 18 engineers and generally speaking, I need to spend some time face to face with them to kind of get an idea of what they're facing and issues that are kind of coming along.
Jamon Holmgren: Very different than maybe a one-on-one from an employee perspective. There's kind of two different things there. And so Justin suggested that I do like break the team up into groups of four or so and have them. I actually created four groups. And then I did a one on team, I call it. Where I get a chance to talk with them and kind of ask each of them in turn, how their projects are going, what concerns they might have, talk about various things in a very, in a small group setting. It was really great. Now these don't take the place of actual one-on-ones. Went back to Todd and Gant and we talked about the actual one-on-ones and Todd and Gant since I was kind of taking on those one on fours and Justin was doing the one on ones with the design team, which kind of takes the bulk of the team in terms of doing more of the technical or design focused meetings face to face meetings.
Jamon Holmgren: But we still need to do the employee meetings. Gant and Todd decided and agreed to take those on. And so they periodically will go through the team and do one on ones with everybody. It doesn't matter if you're a designer, project manager whatever they go through and do one-on-one meetings and they share that load. It's still a big job, still a lot of people to go through and it probably won't scale forever. But that's kind of where we're at with that. But the small group meetings have been very helpful for us. Once a month I get together with each small group. I do four of those a month and we talk about whatever's come up and I kind of keep a finger on the pulse of the design or the engineering team.
Todd Werth: Cool. Before we move on any other descriptions people want to talk about the type of meetings we have?
Jamon Holmgren: Well, I'd like you to maybe talk, about the owners meetings that we do. This was something we did very early on. And I guess-
Todd Werth: Yeah. If you haven't listened to our podcast, we don't have a king or a more traditional CEO, even though that's my title. We make decisions as a quorum of the three owners, which is a more complicated, messy process. But we feel that it works well for us. Anywho, we decided that we would like to get together the three of us in person once a quarter and we typically all fly to one location. We used to do it at different locations based on the geography, but we tend to do it now at my house in Las Vegas mainly because it's the same distance from Portland, Oregon, where Jamon comes from and New Orleans where Gant comes from. It's just convenient. Plus I have guest bedrooms and that kind of thing. That's really nice because we tend to talk about bigger things.
Todd Werth: Frankly, if we're talking about an actual getting something accomplished, we need to have a holiday schedule or we need to figure out benefits, that's actually easier to do in zoom. We're all on our computers and we can work on the document together. We use the owners meetings in person really to talk about bigger issues, to have a two hour conversation about something that we never had time to talk about. That kind of stuff, philosophical directions to go and that kind of stuff. And ultimately just to let us hang out and build that kind of trust because this kind of partnerships very much like a marriage and we do argue with each other and we need to be able to learn how to fight with each other and get over it and stuff. And that's one of the places we can expand on that.
Jamon Holmgren: In addition to that, two to three times a week, we do owners meetings in zoom. And we did this really early on, even when it was me, Todd and Ken as owners. We decided that three meetings a week, an hour each seems kind of ridiculous when you think about it. Like that's way too much time. What would you have to talk about for that amount of time? And I think Gant was probably a little shocked how often and how long we were meeting-
Todd Werth: More than an hour often.
Jamon Holmgren: ... Yeah, often more than an hour. But we identified very early on, and I think I've talked about this in the first season, that the biggest existential threat to Infinite Red was that we would have a falling out as owners. We identify that as the biggest issue. And it was why we had built the trust in that we were able to kind of go through the big changes that we talked about in the first episode of the season where Ken left the company without having it be a company ending event because of the amount of time and investment in our relationship and talking and making sure that we are all on the same page.
Jamon Holmgren: Those meetings right there, there wasn't really another way to do it. There wasn't really an asynchronous way to build that trust. And that was I think something that to me was even more key than the in person ones. I think doing that every week consistently week in, week out it was what really built that trust.
Todd Werth: I'd like to move on to what hasn't worked for us. And after we discuss that, we're going to talk about how we are trying to improve that, techniques we've used and that kind of stuff. But first let's have a little bit of vulnerability here and discuss either what you think I'm doing wrong in meetings, someone else's doing wrong or what you personally have done wrong in meetings. And let's let's disrobe, and get vulnerable.
Jamon Holmgren: That's true.
Todd Werth: Justin, could you start us off. Tell us all about what you've done wrong please.
Justin Huskey: Once is I rolled out a big giant banner and asked my team to remember every time they're doing something to look at it and say, is this good for the company,
Jamon Holmgren: Office Space reference there, for those who don't get it.
Justin Huskey: For me, one of the things that looking back it was just being prepared to be honest. A lot of times I would go into meetings and think that it would just kind of naturally flow together and sometimes it does and sometimes you can get away with it, but more often than not, for me at least it would just kind of crash and burn. And so it would start out really well. And then the longer it went on, people would realize they just kind of felt like they were wasting their time in them.
Justin Huskey: And so, especially talking the clients where you've got to kind of put on a little bit more of a show. We spend a lot more time now preparing for it, spend a lot more time coming up with agendas and stuff like that. But it's still, it's a work in progress to be honest, because the easiest way is to just kind of jump into a meeting and think you'll work it all out as it goes along.
Todd Werth: Thank you Justin. Uh, Gant, what do you do wrong?
Gant Laborde: Absolutely nothing. Todd.
Todd Werth: You're a perfectionist. You work too hard. That's right, too committed, this isn't an interview again.
Gant Laborde: All right, well I'm taking this tuxedo off if you all don't mind. One second. All right.
Gant Laborde: I'll have to say that when I'm in a meeting with people, I generally have little patience actually, that's probably the worst part for me is that sometimes we'll communicate something and it'll be clear to, I don't know, two thirds of what's going on for most people. And then I honestly will think maybe a person isn't paying attention and that bothers me to no end. I think that, I think it's because I'm a stickler and I like to prepare. Those kinds of things end up bothering me which has led me to try to lead more interesting meetings. We all know how that's going.
Todd Werth: I'm sorry Gant. I missed that. Could you repeat?
Gant Laborde: Yeah no problem Todd you jerk. There you go. That was a real meeting.
Jamon Holmgren: I think it is harder to pay strict attention during remote meeting and sometimes because there are things on your desktop blinking and beeping at you, they want your attention. You can look at Twitter while appearing to look at your camera. Todd is famous for his working while paying very close attention to the camera.
Gant Laborde: What's really great about that is that on Todd's microphone it actually has a small mirror. For a while now we were watching what Todd was watching in his small mirror and now he purposefully sets that up in meetings. He puts weird blinky things in that spot.
Jamon Holmgren: Yes. It's a-
Todd Werth: It's not an actual mirror. It's a little Chrome knob on my mic stand.
Gant Laborde: Yes, a Chrome knob. It's our mirror.
Jamon Holmgren: I think one of the things I did wrong and still struggle with to some extent is just straight up dominating the conversation as a leader, as kind of a type A personality. I tend to kind of put myself in the kind of the lead of the conversation. But often as we've talked about before, the meetings are, really more about gathering information and then eventually making a decision rather than leading everybody to the conclusion that I already wanted. There we'll be talking after a little bit about things we did to improve. But that was definitely something I did wrong.
Todd Werth: Well, I'll finish up. I do lots of things wrong. If I'm in a particularly good mood, I get particularly jokey and I do treat the meeting, perhaps possibly like the audience of my standup routine. Which I find hilarious. To defend myself, I actually never want to do something that's fun for me and unfun. Unfun yes, that's a word. Unfun for others. I do and when I'm told about it later, I do regret doing that.
Todd Werth: It's not intentional. I hope I'm that self centered. I do that sometimes. Sometimes like Jamon, him and I both tend to dominate the conversations and we're both bad at that and we're both in a meeting and we're both in the mood. It could be a pretty useless meeting for everyone else attending and just listening to us drone on together or against each other or whatever-
Jamon Holmgren: To be clear it's usually really great content, but-
Todd Werth: ... It's why we started our podcast. Just so we could drone on to you poor people. But so there's that. I prided myself in to having good meetings and stuff, but to tell you what, at a certain point, and I don't know what point that is, but a certain number of people in our company, I crossed the threshold where I think that my skills weren't good enough and the biggest challenge I've had is to get interaction with 25 people in a meeting. With 10 people, it was pretty straight forward to get everyone interacting with 25 people. It's been very challenging and I felt like I failed at that and just recently been working on that problem quite a bit because I don't like lecture meetings. Personally. I don't like attending them. I don't like giving them. But sadly a lot of my meetings have turned into lecture meetings just because I can't figure out how to not do it. Although we are working on it. And I think we've discovered a few things. Yeah.
Gant Laborde: And I want to give you credit there Todd. I've been to some of your meetings where everybody's laughing, everybody's interacting and I think that those are the smaller meetings, that they're easier to control. And if you've got a lot of people and perhaps they feel uncomfortable laughing and talking and being interactive then maybe it doesn't work, like stand up does. The more people in the audience the worse it is because we're all sitting there and muted and it gets more and more difficult. You walk in there and it was like, is this a hostage negotiation? No, it's a Todd meeting. Oh, okay.
Todd Werth: I mean I have a pretty thick skin and shame isn't a big thing for me so I can handle being up and making jokes and having 24 people stare blankly back at you. But the truth is people see that to happen to me or whomever and they don't want to get up and say something because that can be excruciating. And so it creates this feedback loop of no one interacting. Which is not ideal.
Jamon Holmgren: I think one of my other big things that I've had to work on is really staying focused especially when maybe the current topic isn't super interesting to me or maybe a person's kind of droning on a little too long. This is sort of thing that has always been a little bit of an issue for me. Just paying attention in those contexts. I've worked on it and I've gotten better at it. But it has been one of those things where... I actually, have found that taking notes usually is the best way to fix that. And I do that during the sales meetings. Sales meetings are a good example of this where I'm meeting with a potential client, I'm taking notes because that really helps to keep me on topic and focused.
Todd Werth: I will say Jamon you're especially bad at that-
Jamon Holmgren: I appreciate that, buddy.
Todd Werth: ... If you're not interested in a subject, if you had a sign above your head that says, I completely don't care flashing, it would only be slightly worse than the look on your face.
Jamon Holmgren: Does my face right now count or?
Todd Werth: I get it. It's, some of the stuff is just and when I see you doing that, I do try to take that as a cue that I'm not keeping Jamon's attention here or whomever. But I would say that's probably one of your biggest things. My biggest things is if I'm in a particularly good mood, I treat it like a fun session for Todd.
Gant Laborde: Or if you're chatting with someone on Slack, then it's really hard to hold your attention. That's one of them
Todd Werth: Yeah. We especially the three owners and Justin included, we know each other so well now we can see we can see through the BS of pretend listening, but cool. Thanks for that. That being vulnerable. It's never easy being vulnerable on a podcast that will be on the internet, is less easy. Thank you. I appreciate that. Now that we've talked about how horrible we are, let's talk about how we've addressed some of these problems, techniques we've used that we know work, maybe things that didn't work. And also talk about a few of our kind of systematic cultural systems that we put in place. Actually, let's start with that one. Would someone tell us about our finger system?
Jamon Holmgren: Well, first off, can we not call it the finger system?
Todd Werth: What's it called?
Jamon Holmgren: Yes, we have a Queue System. We actually came up with it for this podcast because we were talking over each other and it makes it very difficult on the editor to pull everything together. Also, just hard to kind of keep a flow going. And we've been actually been using this system as we're doing this podcast because it's just so ingrained in us at this point. I wrote an article about it.
Jamon Holmgren: It's up on our blog. We'll probably link to it here in the show notes, but it's titled How Infinite Red Improved Remote Video Meetings With A Few Hand Gestures. And essentially we got feedback from people as well and in other meetings that was essentially I don't want to make it hard to have a natural conversation, but people should be allowed to express their opinion without someone starting their own opinion right in the middle of it.
Jamon Holmgren: That was one actual quote from the article. And then another one, I want to make sure people are able to share their opinions without having to fight and be aggressive. No problem for me to get a word in edgewise if I need to, I'll jump right in. I'm pretty forceful personality, I can do it. But that's not everybody at Infinite Red we don't want everybody on Infinite Red to have to be that way. We came up with a Queue System. Essentially the way that it works is if someone's talking and you want to go next, you first kind of survey the zoom room to see if anybody's done this yet, and you just up one finger, your index finger to say I'm next every one in the queue. And then if someone already has the first spot, then next person puts up two.
Jamon Holmgren: And so on three, four. If you have a quick interjection, you put a zero, just make an O with your hand. And that kind of indicates, "Hey, I just have a quick interjection that shouldn't be misused to be something that's just like you're going to drone on for 10 minutes." That's literally just be like, I didn't understand what you just said. Can you say it again? Or I just had a quick thing I needed to interject here. And then the original person continues on. If nobody's talking, if you just kind of have some silence, which is very hard for Todd and me to endure some silence, but it does happen once in a while, then you're free to just go ahead and start talking. But of course kind of look around the room. We also have added some kind of hacks to this.
Jamon Holmgren: For example, sometimes I have something to say, but you know what, it's kind of moving on to the next subject. I don't want to derail what's going on right now. Nobody else has their fingers up. I'll just put a three anyway. And that just shows everybody that, Hey, if someone wants to jump into position one or someone wants to jump in a position two, I'm low priority I'll go third. It's no problem. And this Hand Queue System is actually moved outside of Infinite Red because of this article. I believe InVision has adopted it now. They're starting to use this system. They said something about it on Twitter the other day and there's a few others that have also adopted it. It's kind of moving out across the nation. I've even heard people say that they've used it in person face to face meetings.
Jamon Holmgren: It's actually helped them there. I'm very proud of that system. It's something that we remind each other sometimes and before a meeting start and we say, "Hey reminder, we're using this queuing system." And yes, unfortunately it does become known as the finger system. You're using your fingers. I understand like queue up. But for probably obvious reasons, I'd rather not call that.
Jamon Holmgren: Yes. Gant. Gant has his finger up. This is a perfect example. You can't see this as an audience, but Gant had his finger up, he was like, "I need to go next, so go for it."
Gant Laborde: Yeah. And the tidbit that I wanted to add on to Jamon here is that it's actually going to be in a book that someone's publishing And they sent us an early copy of the book. That's really cool. As a little bit of a tip, if you have a bunch of people in a meeting, take your socks off if you want to be person 11.
Todd Werth: This is so widespread. The other day on the freeway a driver behind me use the system. He was telling me I was number one and he seemed very excited about it.
Gant Laborde: You want to talk next huh? Did you pull over and talk to him?
Jamon Holmgren: And Todd's like, not until I'm done dude.
Todd Werth: I hadn't finished my drive. It's cool. The next one I'll just take real quick. We've talked about this before. I'm pretty sure, maybe we haven't. Oh, we've talked about in the podcast, but it's our Clue System and it's the way we manage meetings and we've created a piece of software that's just internal, which is based in the clue board and represents all of our meeting rooms so everyone can see who's in what meeting. They can join meetings, they can schedule meetings, that kind of stuff. There's a lot of different systems out there for that. We just created one. That's the clue board. That's very helpful for starting meetings and knowing where people are meeting, but it doesn't really affect being in meetings at all.
Gant Laborde: It integrates with Zoom. It's very cool because you can see who's where. And one thing that's very interesting about is once we started using it, the awareness of what was happening across the company went way up as a remote company. You can't just look over and see oh, Justin is meeting with Gant in the conference room B. But now we can, we literally can go see that Justin is meeting with Gant in the study or the conservatory or wherever we are right now. This is the sort of thing that actually made a much bigger impact than you would have expected. A simple tool for clicking into a conference room to do.
Todd Werth: Yeah. When I see Jamon and Gant meeting alone, I literally, I'm not even joking, go in there. And the first thing I asked is, are you two plotting against me?
Jamon Holmgren: Yes.
Todd Werth: Which-
Jamon Holmgren: No. Literally the answer is yes.
Todd Werth: Justin, can you talk a little about what we've done to make meetings better? Techniques we've used things we'd maybe you tried that totally bombed and we didn't use.
Justin Huskey: Definitely. Actually, one of the things that comes to mind for me is that I'm kind of on the opposite side of the spectrum of possibly you and Jamon, Todd. I don't quite interject as much. I'm a little bit more of like I'll kind of sit back and then people want to hear the voice from me a little bit more. And so, one thing we've done is we have chat open at all times in Zoom. And so, if people have ideas but they don't necessarily want to interject right in the middle of the meeting, sometimes there's like 20 people in the zoom room. They can put it in chat and somebody will read it. And I've noticed a huge uptick in people who are able to put in ideas and still get heard at the same time without necessarily having to stand up and talk in front of everybody. And I think that's been huge.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah, that does work very well. And we encourage it and it's totally fine. We ask people, especially during the all team, not to Slack but to use chat. Not everyone likes to speak, especially in a big group and we totally understand that. And we don't want to make people hate coming to meetings by forcing to do some that makes them anxious but-
Jamon Holmgren: One thing I should mention is that this queuing system we came up with is pretty pervasive within Infinite Red. But it's not a replacement for human empathy. It's still really important that we all actually care about making sure that people are inclusive. It's just more of a way to remind us. For example, if I just start talking after someone just finished, any other attendee is perfectly welcome to say, "You know what, Justin had his finger up, he wanted to talk next." Totally okay. You can interrupt the CEO, you can interrupt the CTO, anybody. That system takes precedence over the others. I think this is a big one. Todd's been very good about reminding everybody. But we also state who the meeting organizer is or ask who the meeting organizer is at the beginning of the meeting. And Todd, do you want to maybe talk about why that's important?
Todd Werth: Yeah, just real quick. Especially with someone like Jamon and I are both in the meeting. We'll both naturally just try to run the meeting because that's not what we're leaders. That's our job. We lead. It's real simple, beginning of a meeting I say, whose meeting is this? Even if I know so that everyone knows and Jed, our Project Manager will say, I'm running it and now I know I'm a participant and I'm not expected or have responsibility to lead it. Which actually is nice for me because then I can just participant.
Jamon Holmgren: Totally.
Todd Werth: Gant you had your finger up using the finger system.
Gant Laborde: The transition to this is a little bit off, but sure. You know what? Another thing I'll say is that the finger systems not always implemented. We do have different types of meetings. For instance, finger system would be a terrible implementation in a creative meeting. If everybody's sitting there and you're saying yes and that other people are cutting each other off to come up with a new idea. That's when the finger system is actually holding back creativity. And so, for this, I like to say that we have gigs and we have jams. When we're all sitting there and we're excited and we're talking to each other, that's a jam meeting. Honestly, I'd say leaders rarely get to be involved in these kinds of meetings because we're kind of expected to sort of have a structure on what we're talking about. But
Gant Laborde: I really enjoy some of the meetings where it's a brainstorming session. Even if it is led by someone, we kind of are happy to have someone interrupt you, excited by your idea. We don't always have to use the finger queuing system, but it's a great way, especially as you scale with more and more people remotely and they're all plugged directly into each other's ears. You can't have a conversation off to the side. We have to be courteous.
Jamon Holmgren: I have noticed that sometimes we just slip to the hand queue system when it actually kind of feels like it's necessary. We might start off the meeting kind of just doing it more loose then it starts getting animated and people start raising their finger because it's like, "Hey, want a chance to talk here." And then we just kind of move into it. I think it's actually become a part of our culture.
Justin Huskey: I think if anybody kind of thinks of a video conference and they have skepticism around it, it's usually because one person starts going and then the next person starts talking at the same time. You get more of I want to, "Oh, nope, go for it." And then, and then it just keeps happening. And I think the Hand Queue System helps that a lot. And the more you hear people like tripping over each other, the more you probably should kind of start moving into the Hand Queue system.
Jamon Holmgren: Just like the meeting organizer. We also try to communicate what type of meeting it is before the meeting. We're not always great at this-
Todd Werth: We should get better at that.
Jamon Holmgren: ... We really should and Gant wrote a great article about it, Virtual Meetings Have Types. We'll link to that in the show notes. Please check that out as well. I think it's very helpful.
Todd Werth: Yeah, that's something I think I'm going to work on, is this a gig or a jam? Also, sometimes it's very rude to be part of a meeting where someone isn't paying attention. But we have situations where someone can't attend the meeting, but they'd like to put in the background to listen for important stuff. In that case, what we've been starting to do is say Jamon can't attend this meeting full attention, but he's listening for his name and stuff, so he's going to be working. Everyone knows that Jamon is kind of off in the corner and don't be insulted. That he is not listening and don't ping them for no important reason.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah, totally. That is helpful. Again, coming back to empathy for where people are and what they're doing. Gant, by the way, how did you come up with the names, gig and jam? And we have people maybe where English isn't their first language. What do those mean?
Gant Laborde: Yeah. What's really funny is trying to actually describe these two different types. And what was really funny is it just seemed like a cutesy term. I actually worked with quite a few people that, especially if you're a musician, this will kind of click you might get a bunch of people together to jam and there's no set list. There's no, this person has to play this part, we're going to play this song next. In a jam or a jam session, people are just sort of finding the rhythm together and they're building something together. Whereas when you're actually going to a concert and you play a gig, they have what songs' going to be played next almost always. Now, of course in smaller concerts they'd be like, "What song you all want to hear?"
Gant Laborde: But for the most part they have essentially what song's going to transition to the next one to the next one. The lights are all queued for this. The sound people know what's coming in. It can't be changed. And a gig is more of a rigorous table of contents style. It also lends itself to a finger system. It's just a little bit more structured as opposed to just getting together and jamming on something.
Todd Werth: One of the things, this is a problem that I pretty sure I created. And we just-
Gant Laborde: Oh, finally found it.
Todd Werth: But we just fixed it and the fix was significant. We're going to share this with you. Basically, when we have our all team meetings, we have 22 to 30 people, depends on the time in our company and that kind of stuff. And a lot of people, because we work remote doesn't mean you work at home. It means you work where best for you on that particular day. Some people were in noisy cafe or whatever. We made a rule during the all team to mute and only unmute when you're talking, which logistically makes sense.
Todd Werth: That was a huge mistake and we did this for years. The reason it was a huge mistake is because it produced what I described earlier. Even if people were like you said something amusing or you said something people agreed with and they might say something or they might laugh because they're all muted. You didn't hear any of it. And because you're talking and it's hard for you to look at 25 faces, you have no idea. You get no response from the people you're talking to and it's very disconcerting to the speaker and it really limits the feeling of interacting with each other.
Todd Werth: I cannot overstate to make people all un-mute and less they are in a cafe and it's just situation hopefully they're not. If the cat's Meowing fine, cat's Meow, the baby's crying. As long as it's not super loud, fine, babies cry. It's well worth it to deal with the noise it made last all team I asked everyone to un-mute, I think a couple of people didn’t just because of the situation they were in, but most people on muted and man did it make a difference. Would you agree with that? Justin? Do you think that made a big difference?
Justin Huskey: I think it made a big difference. It's nice to hear people's reaction. I think it's natural to pay attention to how people are reacting to what you're saying. Other than a few examples. Yeah, it went really well. A few people were in cafes and there were plates falling down in the background and people murmuring. There are some exceptions to it, but yeah, it's great.
Gant Laborde: Well, I would just want to say that the affirmation is really key for anybody speaking, especially if you're giving up. Jamon and I, and Todd, we've presented in front of large audiences before. And just as a person speaking, you find that person in the audience who nods. You find that person who you're connecting to. And that really gives a great sort of eye contact communication. And I really respect those people. And I think the same things really necessary in smaller conversations of 20 to 30 people. You can look and see all these small heads nodding, but there's a silence with it. It's a little creepy.
Todd Werth: When I'm giving a live presentation, I find that one person who's nodding, I lock eye contact with them and I do not disengage-
Gant Laborde: You do not break that eye contact.
Todd Werth: ... I do not blink, I do not disengage that eye contact. I feel like it makes them feel very special.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. That's how Todd and I met.
Todd Werth: Yeah. For an hour locked in, that's my biggest tip for you.
Justin Huskey: To go back to one of your original points, Todd. I think that's actually an example of out of the box thinking.
Todd Werth: That is out of the box. Yeah. Another thing that I would like to talk about and, we're starting to do more of this and Justin actually pioneered this and a couple of our engineers do it as well, but it came up recently with a meeting that Gant was going to do. Could you tell us a story about the meeting turning into a video?
Gant Laborde: Yeah. Do you want me to do that?
Todd Werth: You were the main character that stories. I just want to make sure you actually used my name because we're on a podcast.
Todd Werth: I can ask Jamon to pretend he was Gant and re-enact. But-
Jamon Holmgren: Welcome friends.
Gant Laborde: That's great. Actually.
Gant Laborde: What happened was I was trying to get everybody together and it was just one of those weeks. I could not get person X to actually meet at this time or that time. It was a one hour kickoff meeting where I was going to go over a slide deck and I was starting to stress about the inability to find a proper time to get everybody together. And fortunately, enough, Todd dropped in and said, "You know what, basically it's a lecture style meeting. You have some talking points but they can handle the talking points afterward. Async, just do a video." And when he suggested that it clicked, I could do a fantastic video, go over my slides, explain everything, even make sure that I had the energy amped up and people could always go back and re-listen to things-
Todd Werth: You did.
Gant Laborde: ... Actually, what I did was I recorded what was going on in the best mood possible and I really, really enjoyed it. And then everybody was able to consume essentially a one-hour meeting with a 10-minute video. I liked the video and if there's any questions there that needed to be answered, I think they were all in there, but I shared a 10-minute video with everybody. It saved them a lot of time and saved me a lot of energy and I enjoyed it.
Justin Huskey: Yeah. I've worked on doing videos for our team and clients as well, I've noticed it helps me refine my message to the team. Did you notice that doing your videos?
Gant Laborde: Yeah, absolutely. And the cool thing about it was I, I did have a moment where I was like, what the hell am I talking about? And I just got a chance to actually say it better. It didn't get a chance to needle into everybody's brains in the wrong sentence whatsoever. It was kind of nice. I was able to give a very clear message and we should do that a lot more.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah. I think we should, for sure. I think that Justin and some other designers especially back in the old Clearsight days they used to do this for clients. They would do a presentation for the client, they'd send over to the client. I remember why Mike Waszazak who was my Creative Director back then started doing that and it was just like an immediate success. Clients loved it. But we didn't really think about doing it between each other until between the internal to the company until much later at Infinite Red. And I think that that's been really cool. One tool that I've used to do this with my engineers is called Loom, loom.com. Now it's not like a full-fledged video editing software or anything like that, but it lowers the friction.
Jamon Holmgren: You can just jump in front of it, share your screen, share your video or just one or the other of it, and then just talk to them. And I've done that a few times now and I'm going to continue to do that because it's definitely been something where texts like you posted an announcement and people either don't read it or they read it and they get like the worst possible interpretation because there's no body language. But having that video has really made a difference. And I've actually been very pleasantly surprised when I've posted them about the reaction
Todd Werth: That brings up, not to digress, but it brings up a problem with texts communication. Text communication only communicates as well as the writer has skill. I think I probably mess up my communication more than most. Meaning the people hearing got the wrong, the wrong tone or the wrong information of what I intended. And a skilled writer will write in a way that that communicates what they intended and the tone of what they attended. But that's more rare than not.
Gant Laborde: And there's another problem with text communication. It's Async and order is not enforced. What I think someone has read maybe in some other channel in Slack or perhaps they saw something on Twitter or perhaps somewhere else, and then I start speaking in that context. The person then comes in and reads in a reverse context and your message is terrible. When you're actually are in a meeting, it is a shared context. It is a shared linear communication. But text on the other hand, we can't treat it that way.
Todd Werth: Well even video that’s async, you can get a lot more information crossed. One of the things, and we haven't tried this yet, but our plan with the new because we're just starting to do more of these videos internally is when you post the video, we have a channel called IR Announcements, which is you're supposed to read everything that's posted in there and we try not to post too much or anything extra. But the plan is to post a video and then tell people, list the people who have to watch the video and then everyone else is optional.
Todd Werth: It might be a marketing thing from Gant to people who are working on that marketing project. I'm not important to that because I'm not involved in that. He would list out maybe four people who have to watch it and then I may watch it anyways because I'm just interested or I may not. And then people in Slack would check that they watched it and Gant later can go look. Okay. Did the four people that I needed to watch it, watch it?
Jamon Holmgren: And you don't really get that chance with a meeting because people wouldn't know upfront whether they should join and they certainly may not have time at that time or it may not be worth it to attend at that time. But at 4:30 they are about to head home or quit for the day. It might be worth it then. Having the asynchronous of the video is actually a pretty big deal.
Todd Werth: Yeah. Another technique that we just started implementing and so we can report back later how well it's working. But so far it's been working great for the three owners, especially Jamon and I, we can dominate a conversation easily. For people like Justin to mentioned that he's not that way. It's not as personality. And Jamon mentioned we don't want a company and people like us because that'd be really annoying. To be honest. One of the rules I came up with where we just started piloting and so far it's worked out great in certain meetings.
Todd Werth: The owners wait 15 seconds before they respond. If something comes up someone says something and instead of us jumping in and sharing our opinion, because we always will, whether we know anything about it or not doesn't matter. We wait 15 seconds, which creates this awkward silence and allows other people who aren't as aggressive come in. And if they don't come in, after about 10 seconds, you'll get people who normally wouldn't come in at all just to fill in that silence. And so far, I don't know if you all agree, but I think it's actually been pretty amazing. Gant is now waiting his 15 seconds.
Gant Laborde: Yeah. I was waiting 15 seconds to say I liked it.
Todd Werth: Justin as not one of the people who bulldoze meetings, have you enjoyed that?
Gant Laborde: Wow! That's some real in the box thinking.
Todd Werth: The pause joke does not work in a podcast.
Gant Laborde: And you're just making the editor hate you.
Justin Huskey: It's time.
Justin Huskey: No, it's made a big difference. It's nice because I noticed right around between eight to 12 second mark is around where people start jumping in. It's just the right amount of uncomfortableness that it makes somebody who's not comfortable talking, wish they were talking rather than sitting in uncomfortable silence. They go for it.
Todd Werth: So funny. Well that was really interesting. I think a lot of people have passionate opinions about meetings, often negative. I think hopefully you all can relate to some of the things we said and hopefully some of those techniques can help you improve your meetings. It's an ongoing thing.
Todd Werth: Hopefully we suck less than we used to suck, but I'm sure we still suck because it's a tough problem. And we're going to continue trying things and seeing how they work and trying to improve and as leaders or someone who's building their own business, as long as you're trying to improve, you're doing better than a lot of leaders. Keep up on the trying. Anyways, thank you so much for listening to another episode of Building Infinite Red. And we'll see you next time.