Meeting Guidelines are institutional Theater
Back in 2007 when I started in IT, receiving a meeting invite was a highlight. Somebody took notice of me and, maybe, even considered me valuable in one way or another. Turns out, most invites we receive in the workplace are actually pretty much the contrary.
I) Your boss (or/and his boss) will never read nor care for your organization's meeting guidelines.
II) In most cases, that's no big deal.
Sooner or later, every organization scaling beyond the magic number of 150 will start a meeting improvement committee coming up with nearly identical meeting guidelines to reduce perceived waste and presumably improve meeting quality. Almost none of them are enforced. None of their effects are measured; it's institutional theater: we receive a signal (meetings are perceived as wasteful) and respond with wishful thinking wrapped in process instead of analyzing cause.
Recent data suggests that only a fraction of total time is spent in meetings with wider audiences, whereas meetings within the engineer's peer group are dominant. Institutional control doesn't survive contact with either. Externally, enforcement isn't even organized institutionally: no governing body exists to reward good, or punish bad, meeting habits — it's left solely to the individual. A colleague put it this way: "If I deny a higher-up manager's invitation because she did not send an agenda, the next invitation won't have an agenda either — and will eventually include HR." Internally, control was never in the room to begin with: team meetings are recurring, carry their own protocols and ad-hoc agendas, and were never run through a formalized scheduling process anyone could enforce in the first place. To actually "solve" meeting inefficiency, one would need to isolate problem spaces.
Borrowing from Steven Spear and Gene Kim's Wiring the Winning Organization: meetings exist to build cohesion — a shared understanding of the world — and cohesion is only required where coupling exists, i.e. hard dependencies between teams' work (like software interfaces, roadmap dependencies and blockers). External meetings are hardest to guardrail precisely because that coupling, and the cohesion it demands, sits outside any single team's control. Organize teams around loose coupling instead, and the need for cohesion — and the meetings that manufacture it — shrinks with it.
Internally, perceived measures such as meeting quality are qualitative proxy metrics for the Collaboration dimension of the SPACE framework, and will only go up once mutual respect and empathy are established and growing. This requires constant management attention (in one-to-one meetings, retrospectives and team building exercises) and, frankly, allows no shortcuts.
So don't write another guideline nobody enforces. Measure instead. Track where your time actually goes — external versus internal — and pair it with a periodic survey on perceived meeting quality. The data will tell you which problem you have. Too much time lost externally, and no guideline will save you: fix the coupling, not the calendar. Too little trust internally, and no framework will save you either: fix the team.
And if you still want something written down, make it earn its place on the wiki. Not a policy. Two sentences: Be a decent human. Be a sensible adult.