Chapter 5: Meet and Greet

"A work meeting? On a Sunday? Who has a work meeting on a Sunday?"

We do. You, like many others I've discussed my work habits with, may think this crazy, sacrilegious or just a lie but give me just a couple minutes of your time; read the rest of this post and you'll understand.

I think it's fair to say at at the core of every organisation is... well, organisation. The backbone of any successful company (and its workforce) is being able to provide an efficient structure for all the important (and even lesser-important) things going on and following that structure - if everything has its place and each thing is in that place then the workflow should run smoothly. The most common way to achieve this, of course, is through regular project management meetings but for a remote company like ourselves it's not as simple as ringing a phone extension and saying "can you come in here please?" - as I mentioned in an earlier post we as a company are dotted around the world and this can make collaboration difficult or stressful at times.

So, just as normal companies regularly have normal meetings, our remote company regularly has remote meetings. Being that some of us work full time jobs we can't do these during the week and since Saturday forms part of the Shabbat for some of our team Sunday becomes the only viable day (none of us seem to follow the "Sunday is a day of rest" mantra either). So every Sunday evening for the last 2-3 years (depending on whom you ask) the team has been reviewing the week's progress and planning for the week ahead as well as longer-term goals. For those of you who do hold Sunday as a holy day of rest and would therefore call us sacrilegious, I would argue that it is in fact quite the opposite - the weekly meetings have become almost a religious level of practice for us. The only time any of the team will not attend is if they are physically unable through either being on a plane or unable to reach a computer with access to the appropriate platform.

Speaking of platforms, we have sampled a few. In the initial stages of our work we were holding meetings over Skype and Google Hangouts. The latter, however, seemed to struggle with holding a stable connection and we ended up giving up on it and using Skype - it's free and allows conference calls. However, after some time we noticed that the connection often dropped there too and that to enable screen sharing in the call we would have to pay for a premium subscription. At this stage we were still working from individual budgets and as such decided that if we were going to use a paid-for platform then we would get one dedicated to meetings. Enter GoToMeeting. For a long time (and the majority of our meetings) we have used GoToMeeting - this provided an excellent solution for everything we needed and we were always able to get through our meetings with minimal connection trouble. However, a free solution which provides everything useful that a paid solution does will always be preferable - we now use Google Hangouts; we have found that latest version of Google Hangouts (that platform we started on which wouldn't hold a connection) is much more stable and (still) free.

Who knows, this post may even help other startups decide on the best meeting platform for them.