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Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

bbc.com

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Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#81

Post by PragmaticPulp »

jka wrote: post #46
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #9

One 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 chann…

That sounds like a super interesting learning experience. What were the justifications for no meetings at all, out of interest? Edit: Bleh, I misunderstood; just discouragement of meetings. It'd still be interesting to hear the reasoning (especially if it deterred people from holding meetings in favour of Slack) A low volume of meetings, ideally visible to all staff on company calendars, with well-documented titles &…

> That sounds like a super interesting learning experience. What were the justifications for no meetings at all, out of interest?

They thought it would increase speed of execution. Instead of finding the first available calendar slot that works for everyone 3 days from now, why not just have the conversation immediately in Slack? Get answers fast and then move on.

They also wanted to avoid gathering more people than necessary for longer than required. The idea was that engineers could quickly check the "@here" message, decide if it's relevant or not, and then get back to their work.

Good intentions, but it increased the volume of notifications immensely. Taking a single day off of work meant that I had to sift through well over 100 Slack notifications when I got back to my computer. A mix of @here, @channel, my name being tagged with 10 other people, or impromptu private message meetings. I uninstalled RescueTime because it was too depressing to see a minimum of 2-3 hours per day spent in Slack. I'd gladly trade those 2 hours of Slack time for 2 (or more) hours of efficient, well-run meetings.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#82

Post by corodra »

Wasn't it Microsoft Japan that realized meetings were naturally crunched down to strictly useful ones when they went to a 4 day work week? Then more time was spent doing real, actual work and then workers being able to ACTUALLY relax at home or doing something truly therapeutic... like not being at fucking work. Not this bullshit "you can relax at work" crap. Oh, and their employees felt ACTUALLY better and ACTUALLY less stressed. I feel like this "study" is more a focus-group bullshit attempt to fight off the results of a 4 day work week.

The world is getting silly. Not because of studies like this. But because people actually agree with obvious bullshit like this. I feel like I'm taking damn crazy pills.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#83

Post by throwaway5752 »

One of the things you realize quickly as you manage is that there is a more bimodal distribution of preferences for socializing among engineers. I don't want to fall into stereotypes, but there are some people that don't like meetings (aggressively) and are pretty outspoken about it.

There are a number of people that kind of enjoy it as a form of socializing. That obviously doesn't apply to overly long, poorly structured meetings that waste time. But a sizeable (mostly) silent group of people appreciate reasonably scheduled and structured meetings in the way described in this article. To each their own.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#84

Post by PragmaticPulp »

basch wrote: post #44
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #9

One 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 chann…

Wouldnt due dates solve some of this problem? Either "we arent going to talk about this again as a group for 48h", or "you have one week to prepare for us to revisit this." It still allows you to multitask and be in multiple meetings at once, without allowing people to start initiatives before people are prepared. Not perfect, but sounds like a step forward in a no-meeting culture.

> Wouldnt due dates solve some of this problem? Either "we arent going to talk about this again as a group for 48h", or "you have one week to prepare for us to revisit this."

Not really. Once you start adding specific dates around when people can discuss things, you've just reinvented meetings in a less efficient medium.

The key is proper mentoring, coaching, and expectation setting. If meetings are becoming a problem, work on coaching people how to run healthy meetings. If you just ban meetings, the same bad habits just spill over into less efficient mediums and create even more problems.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#85

Post by andrewfong »

buboard wrote: post #33
jt2190 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the asynchronous “always on, always connected” style Nit: I've always heard this called synchronous , since in this style work is performed immediately, rather than queued up to wait for execution at a scheduled time.

correct. Asynchronous is something like email

Technically, you can demand an immediate response via email (and in some industries, this is quite common). It's the expectations around the channel that matter.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#86

Post by wongarsu »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #50
cabraca wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call your BS call :) There is nothing better than a day with nicely spaced meetings My current Project on every second wednesday: 10:00-10:30 Daily Standup 11:00-12:00 Architect Jour Fix 12:00-12:30 Lunchbreak 13:00-14:00 Sprint Retro 15:00-16:00 Sprint Planning Most of the gaps have a reason (conflicting meetings, etc) We use those gaps to "transfer knowledge". That basically means we sit in the cafeteria chatting…

Wait, you're actually putting that forward as a good day? That boggles my mind...if you come in at 9, get settled, you have maybe 45 minutes to work. Then, until 14-15, you have NO one hour stretch, then you have just one more stretch from 16-17...when do you actually code?? Don't you need a couple hours of focused time?

I assume he's coding on the other days of the week.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#87

Post by andrewfong »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #9

One 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 chann…

Did your employer discourage all meetings or just recurring ones? I find ad-hoc meetings to be pretty useful. It's the recurring ones that drive me batty.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#88

Post by manmal »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #83

One of the things you realize quickly as you manage is that there is a more bimodal distribution of preferences for socializing among engineers. I don't want to fall into stereotypes, but there are some people that don't like meetings (aggressively) and are pretty outspoken about it. There are a number of people that kind of enjoy it as a form of socializing. That obviously doesn't apply to overly long, poorly struct…

I don’t like meetings because they are not „productive time“, but I do like them because they do, as you wrote, fulfill my socialization needs. Onsite meetings work way better for me in that regard.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#89

Post by Bartweiss »

papito wrote: post #35
Bartweiss wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only do those things make meetings more productive, they increase the overhead to calling a meeting. We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, but adding friction to something that's happening too often can help bring it back into balance. That's especially true for things with large "multipliers". An unscripted meeting might take one hour for the person calling it, but eat 10 hours of other people's t…

Adding a barrier of entry to something generally improves the quality of whatever it is.

At the cost of quantity, but agreed.

(There have been some really interesting displays of this, like Robot 9k avoiding chat spam, or Kingdom of Loathing's 3-question "test" for joining global chat.)

Print fiction stories are higher average quality than web-published or fan-fiction, because they costs money to produce. Nobody prints and binds 500 words of unfinished, unedited rambling, but they certainly put it on AO3. But it turns out there's a lot of stuff that's interesting and valuable, yet too niche or awkwardly sized to justify printing.

So I guess there are two questions. First, does the barrier to entry improve the overall quality of the thing, or just weed out the weakest examples? Charging anyone who calls a meeting $10 would avoid some stupid meetings, but requiring an agenda can also improve worthwhile meetings. Second, are the marginal examples worth having? For a short story in a database, sure. For a five person meeting? Definitely not.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#90

Post by klenwell »

mipmap04 wrote: post #13
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #9

One 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 chann…

I've found that, with the exception of daily stand-ups, all meetings must have a bullet point agenda and notes should be sent out for each meeting with risks, action items, issues and ownership of those items. If both of those things are lacking, I doubt how useful the meeting will be or was.

A great former boss of mine and I adopted a silly catchphrase that was introduced to him by an efficiency guru at some managerial conference:

"No agenda, no attend-ah."

We groaned every time we used it. I've used it ever since.

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