Meeting smells

Or: How to tell if a meeting could be an email

No objective or agenda

You'd think it obvious, but several times in my career I've joined meetings where the organizer opened with something like, "Well, I'm not sure what we're gonna talk about." This seems to happen when people get overwhelmed, and scheduling a meeting gives the illusion of progress or control. These kinds of meetings often have too many attendees (see the next two smells), because the organizer shotgunned invites to anyone remotely related to the topic. Ironically, sitting down to figure out exactly what the organizer wanted to get out of the meeting would have probably revealed more effective and immediate next steps. Also, for the record, "Talk about XYZ," is not an agenda.

More than a dozen or so attendees

A handful of people can have a meaningful discussion, but the larger the group grows, the less likely everyone will be able to participate (see the next smell). Just think: if 30 people take turns speaking for just 2 minutes each, they'll be in a meeting for a full hour, but probably accomplish very little. As a natural consequence, most meetings I've attended with too many people end up with a subset of attendees actually having a real discussion--they were the only people who should've attended in the first place--while the rest quietly wait for it to end.

Lack of participation from majority of attendees

Simply put, attendees who don't participate in a meeting don't need to be there. Their time is better spent actually contributing to something. If the goal of a meeting is to broadcast information, live discussion is probably the least efficient medium. In my experience, the organizers of these kinds of meetings already write out the content of the discussion, which begs the question: why not just send that out instead?

Majority of discussion is irrelevant for majority of attendees

This is difficult to catch because the entire discussion may be relevant to the organizer. In my experience, these kinds of meetings are scheduled by people in charge of multiple independent teams. To them, it makes sense to have a single meeting where they're informed of everything going on (though even this is questionable; see the next smell). However, this means most of the attendees spend most of the time listening to people discuss work they have no impact or influence on.

Status updates

In software engineering, this is the "daily standup" meeting. These kinds of meetings are redundant because of the task management tools we're already using. Every team I've been part of used a task list which tracked:

This is pretty much all the information anyone needs to understand the status of a task. If there's actually more to discuss, you can always have an ad-hoc discussion, but it's probably not necessary more often than not.

Additionally, these meetings often include most attendees recieving updates about work they're not involved in (see the previous smell).

Recurring schedule

This is probably the weakest smell on the list, but I feel recurring meetings deserve some scrutiny. Regularly scheduled meetings often lack a sufficient objective or agenda (see the first smell) almost by definition. Unless there's truly some specific objective which must be met on a regular schedule, recurring meetings are often used for status updates (see the previous smell), or they have flexible agendas which don't actually call for meetings, but are transformed into meetings because the time was already scheduled.