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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'

#141

Post by jiofih »

Bartweiss wrote: post #89
papito wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nobody prints and binds 500 words of unfinished, unedited rambling

A lot of people do. They just don’t reach you (vs internet distribution).

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

#142

Post by dpeck »

Bartweiss wrote: post #29
bransonf wrote: post #6

The 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.

Once upon a time, this was the point of circulating 'minutes' or a summary after meetings. Outside of some special cases (e.g. the Federal Reserve), they're specifically meant to reflect conclusions , not the full course of discussion. Back-and-forth that reaches an answer isn't needed, and a debate that ends unresolved would just read as a summary of the positions. That way, you can invite the people who need to spe…

The number of people who have ever watched/listened to a business meeting after it occurred is vanishingly small.

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

#143

Post by jgust »

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…

You could summarize and say "edicts cause unintended consequences". Nature (and by extension, humanity) doesn't operate on booleans, and it's lazy to assume so. It takes work to identify positive behaviors and incentivize them, and identify negative behaviors and disincentive them. Treating the symptoms with an edict will almost always result in new and interesting things that you never knew you didn't want. Your example is great.

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

#144

Post by GordonS »

pc86 wrote: post #136
GordonS wrote: post #134

True story: A project I was on earlier in the year was full on Agile, with constant meetings - daily standups, weekly retrospectives, weekly scrum-of-scrums, weekly reviews/demos, bi-weekly product backlog refinements, weekly story refinements, weekly product backlog planning, weekly sprint planning, frequent meetings about git branching strategies and near daily "way of working" meetings. And of course there were so…

It's easy to poke fun but this seems like a 100% reasonable response when the alternative is changing the entire schedule of the entire team based on the feedback of a single person. And it doesn't seem like any one person should be attending all of these meetings (agreed it's definitely too many though).

> It's easy to poke fun but this seems like a 100% reasonable response when the alternative is changing the entire schedule of the entire team based on the feedback of a single person

So, it's meant to be an amusing anecdote on HN; I haven't told the entire story of the project :) The PM had heard this from several other team members alread, several times. The difference is I was tech lead, so he listened a bit more to me, and I was also quite adamant this time (I'd tried to tell him more politely numerous times).

> And it doesn't seem like any one person should be attending all of these meetings

Bingo, this was the biggest problem - the project manager in particular was bad for telling irrelevant people to join meetings.

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

#145

Post by blaser-waffle »

klenwell wrote: post #90
mipmap04 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I groaned too but it's a good quote. I'll use it too...

The one I heard was "If we don't know what the meeting is for, how will we know what we're getting out of it if we attend?"

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by labawi »

larrik wrote: post #115
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…

I see it as putting more of the cost of the meeting onto the caller, rather than spreading it amongst the participants via wasted time and energy (or the dreaded re-convene since no one was ready).

It's not just shifting costs. Maybe you trade say 1-3 units of time of caller for say 9x 1 units of time of attendees, for a 9/3 = 3x or more savings.

Callers tend to have higher salary, but usually way less than the people count multiplier.

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

#149

Post by zer00eyz »

potta_coffee wrote: post #113
crazypyro wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you are being overly dismissive of the "extroverts" needs in the situations you are describing... Some might just "complain", but others feel safer being vocal in a group of people. You mention understanding that some of the quietest people have the most to say behind a screen, well, I imagine there is a non-insignificant group of people who feel much safer talking it out within a group where there isn't a wr…

Most work places are heavily dominated by the extroverts. The sales and executive teams are all extroverts. So is the marketing team. IMO it's fair to consider the other side of the coin, there's virtually no way that extroverts aren't going to continue to rule the workplace.

There is an old joke about extroverted accountants looking at your shoes rather than their own.

Its that time of year again were everyone gets ready for holiday sales blitz. Marketing teams the world over keep talking about how they are going to drive revenue.

After you factor in overtime, technology support, shipping delays and the knock on effects of stress (look at deployments, LOC produced, and so on in Jan and Feb) you quickly see that the hit on the bottom line is bigger than anyone ever thought of (and more so this season).

You don't have to be an extrovert to build a chart and a graph of this (and the other phenomena) that points out reality, and its impact. It tends to temper people singing their own praises (what extroverts are really good at) without having the data to back it up.

The message from this, go find the other introverts, find out what they do, and how it matters to you. Corporations are a lot like spider webs, tug on one thread and the whole thing vibrates, it is just a question of how much and where. Your fellow introverts are the keys to figuring out where, and if they are meaningful.

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

#150

Post by djohnston »

We have a 1hr weekly with just the SWE's that is definitely therapeutic. We basically just poke fun at whatever stupid things happened during the week, while still keeping our teammates abreast of our progress on tasks. It's 1 hr once per week and I definitely want to take it to my next workplace
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