Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
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Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
#2WTF? Venting might be arguably beneficial in some cases, but in many companies employees don't get to vent in a meeting.
Rather, they have to endure demands, complaints and display of status from management - which is the opposite of therapy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
One of the reasons of pointless meeting is to keep busy and appear busy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
#3There's some truth to this, but holy smokes, another meeting is not the cure.
There is value in "venting" at work. A few years ago I built a software tool that pings people at the end of the week asking how their week went. Some of the quietest people in the company had the most to say when they were behind a screen. In fact, some people literally called it therapeutic. It turns out that writing things down can serve as a form of "therapy" (source: https://positivepsychology.com/writing-therapy/)
If you lead a team, I'd strongly recommend you have a feedback mechanism like this in place, but a meeting is not the right medium. It's just a place for the extroverts to complain.
If you do hold a meeting for this stuff, a 1-1 is probably the best way to surface a similar level of information.
Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
#4WTF? Venting might be arguably beneficial in some cases, but in many companies employees don't get to vent in a meeting. Rather, they have to endure demands, complaints and display of status from management - which is the opposite of therapy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness One of the reasons of pointless meeting is to keep busy and appear busy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
The article is, in part, suggesting that it's exactly those kind of status-conscious people who benefit from 'meeting therapy':
"Academics from the University of Malmo in Sweden say meetings provide an outlet for people at work to show off their status or to express frustration."
But yep, that might not be ideal for a participant who would prefer to be making progress on something else. I've seen a bunch of tech companies start to suggest to employees that they can and should leave meetings if they don't feel like their presence is important.
Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
#5People should decline pointless meetings.
Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
#6The problem I experience with meetings is that often times the information presented is only tangentially related to you.
I hate it when I’m in a meeting and it ends up a conversation between two people. It’s stressful if you have an expectation to get something done but also an expectation to sit in a meeting you realize really doesn’t pertain to you.
Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
#7Sounds like a local maximum at the organisational scale.
Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
#8I've had times when a pointless meeting with too many participants was a welcome break. Of course, just reducing the work week and having more free time would be a lot better. But I'll take what I can get.
Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
#9One of my employers actively discouraged meetings and phone calls. They wanted everything done through Slack and email.
It felt great at first. Having a wide-open calendar and knowing that random managers can’t pull you into a waste of time meeting seems like a dream come true. However, we quickly learned that removing meetings doesn’t removed the need for communication.
Instead of scheduled meetings, our Slack channels turned into never ending pseudo-meetings. Instead of the well-defined start times of a meeting and the implicit expectation that meeting participants come prepared with an agenda and material to discuss, we had a spontaneous free-for-all in Slack. People could, and would, start important team discussions in Slack at random times all day long. “@here” started to feel no different than a meeting, except it was unpredictable, you couldn’t prepare for it, and it would certainly disrupt your concentration.
The other unintended side effect was that people were still scheduling secret meetings. They just had to be quiet about it because technically we weren’t supposed to do it. The teams with regularly scheduled meetings were more cohesive, less disrupted, and significantly less stressed than those who tried to handle everything in the asynchronous “always on, always connected” style.
So yes, excessive, unnecessary, or poorly-run meetings are bad. But I never thought I’d miss properly run meetings as much as I did when they were removed completely from our communication toolbox. Use the right tool for the right job and enforce good meeting discipline.
Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'
#10WTF? Venting might be arguably beneficial in some cases, but in many companies employees don't get to vent in a meeting. Rather, they have to endure demands, complaints and display of status from management - which is the opposite of therapy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness One of the reasons of pointless meeting is to keep busy and appear busy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Sounds like the management - who are also employees - are the ones who get to vent.