91–100 of 222 posts
Literally the last paragraph hits the nail on the head for, I'd wager, the vast majority of people.
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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.
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…
>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. Sometimes friction creates abrasion and waste. Sometimes it creates the traction necessary to actually move forward without sliding all over the place like a hot mess.
I'm working on some of our internal screens at work and part of this is me really trying to get things right and easy for everyone. However, yeah, there _are_ things that should be hard to impossible to do because they shouldn't be doing them and we've entered the realm of needing to coordinate with people and raise flags that something errored along the way.
At first people thought of it in terms of the needless waist friction that had become so prevelant, but soon came to realize that it was a good friction telling them they were off the beaten path, allowing them to hand stuff over to their managers and get problems taken care of before causing problems for customers, wasting customer services time as well as causing us to expend more resources to correct the mistake.
Like you said, friction in just the right places allows good things to happen.
This sounds accurate to my now recently-ex company. The number of meetings have soared, to the point where they probably spend 2-3 days per two week "sprint" (it's really more of a hobbled walk) in project meetings. Not just the absurd number of project managers (currently 1 PM to every 2 programmers, I believe), but the whole team. And what's weird is that when you're in the office, it doesn't feel out of place, but…
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.
They did a company wide training on effective meetings.
Set agendas, notes, and etc were all part of their training. It was great.
I never saw a single person do those things... not the VPs, not the CEO, nobody. I did it for my meetings as a sort of invisible act of defiance, but nobody ever read them before the meeting and most didn't know meeting invites came with anything other than the time, date, location info :(
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…
The fact that my coworkers don't seem to understand the value of keeping a distinction between async and sync communication caused me to recently turn off my Slack notifications, and it's been incredible. I'm much, much more productive than I was before, and the amount of people who actually needed a synchronous response from me was a small fraction of the pings I get (I use DnD so people can click an option to notify me if necessary).
I've started turning down meetings too, or at least gating them with a request for a specific agenda: it turns out half the time, I can point them to some docs or answer them directly without needing to interrupt my routine for half an hour+.
The difference in my productivity is truly insane, and it's come at an extremely minor cost of the teams and teammates that work with me having to be more thoughtful about what they need. (and of course, I still take plenty of meetings, since sometimes conversations need to be open-ended)
Without efficient ways of doing things managers want more people doing things like them. Like the traffic problem doesn't get better with more lanes.
There'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…
In particular, for the get-the-feelings activities, the Retromat has a number of good items in the "set the stage" and "gather data" categories. E.g., Weather Report is good for a quick feeling survey: https://retromat.org/en/?id=2
Or you can do Satisfaction Histogram or Amazon Review to collect reactions to specific topics: https://retromat.org/en/?id=87 and https://retromat.org/en/?id=18