Starting to think through a plan for restructuring how I run my lab meetings. We're in an AMC and a small-ish lab (5-10 people), but with pretty diverse educational backgrounds. Most are BA/MA-level staff, but I also have post-docs and the occasional undergrad, grad student or med student in attendance. Interested to hear from anyone who wants to respond (students, faculty, folks who haven't attended a lab meeting since grad school a decade ago) about how other lab meetings are structured and what they did or didn't like about them.
I have labs in two cities about 90 minutes apart with staff in both locations so unfortunately I think we're stuck meeting via zoom, at least on a regular basis (though I try to get us together in-person sporadically). I may try to go back and forth to host from either location on alternating meetings as unfortunately my "remote" team (who actually does the majority of the heavy lifting on my federal grants right now) has not been getting the attention they deserve as some personal things going on has me making that trip less frequently myself.
I do try to minimize generic "project update" style lab meetings where we just go around the room and do 5 minute individual meetings with everyone, but especially with a distributed group in a post-COVID era with people working from home more, I am actually wondering if there may be more value to this than I thought as it seems like many lab members genuinely don't know what other projects are going on. I also like to keep at least some educational component to it. In the past this was someone from the lab presenting an article. I'm thinking we will continue that, but I'm going to narrow the pool of articles some (I've selected about 200 current and historical articles relevant to our work as a lab for folks to pick from). Otherwise, it seemed like some folks (the junior ones in particular) could select some obscure things that didn't have much relevance or value. I'm still open to folks selecting outside the 200, particularly for hot-off-the-presses things but I wanted to offer some additional structure for people.
So what do/did your labs do? What cadence was most helpful without being overkill (weekly/biweekly/monthly)? What did/didn't you like? What specific activities?
I have labs in two cities about 90 minutes apart with staff in both locations so unfortunately I think we're stuck meeting via zoom, at least on a regular basis (though I try to get us together in-person sporadically). I may try to go back and forth to host from either location on alternating meetings as unfortunately my "remote" team (who actually does the majority of the heavy lifting on my federal grants right now) has not been getting the attention they deserve as some personal things going on has me making that trip less frequently myself.
I do try to minimize generic "project update" style lab meetings where we just go around the room and do 5 minute individual meetings with everyone, but especially with a distributed group in a post-COVID era with people working from home more, I am actually wondering if there may be more value to this than I thought as it seems like many lab members genuinely don't know what other projects are going on. I also like to keep at least some educational component to it. In the past this was someone from the lab presenting an article. I'm thinking we will continue that, but I'm going to narrow the pool of articles some (I've selected about 200 current and historical articles relevant to our work as a lab for folks to pick from). Otherwise, it seemed like some folks (the junior ones in particular) could select some obscure things that didn't have much relevance or value. I'm still open to folks selecting outside the 200, particularly for hot-off-the-presses things but I wanted to offer some additional structure for people.
So what do/did your labs do? What cadence was most helpful without being overkill (weekly/biweekly/monthly)? What did/didn't you like? What specific activities?