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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'

#171

Post by eitland »

Timberwolf wrote: post #122
duxup wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a company that employed thousands of people. 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 wi…

> not the VPs, not the CEO This is the biggest problem where I've seen companies try to do this. The C-level and senior management team make a big fuss about how the company is having too many pointless meetings, they need to be effective, short and have agendas... and usually you can count in hours the time before the one of the exact same senior managers has sent a 2 hour, 20-person invite titled "project catch up"…

It feels like in almost every office kitchen I've been in in Norway there is some sort of label that say something that is supposed to be witty like: your mother does not work here, tidy up after yourself.

It mostly doesn't work.

Three places I worked had tidy kitchens. None of them had these labels, but more importantly: in all three of them management would fix it if others didn't. I guess most people only see their bosses boss tidy up a couple of times before they realize everyone is supposed to do that.

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

#172

Post by petra »

Nokinside wrote: post #36

Since this is Swedish study, I just want to point out that Swedish organizational culture is very meeting and consensus oriented. Nordic cultures may seem very similar, but their organizational cultures are different even within the same company. Others are often frustrated about Swedes and their endless meetings. Finns in the meeting are 'OK. lets do this.' and Swedes reply 'But Jan-Erik has not shared his point of…

>> Swedish organizational culture is very meeting and consensus oriented.

How does that work ? do people get a say regardless of their status ? do good ideas really rise up ?

Or does it just become a different type of political game ?

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

#173

Post by josephg »

bryanmgreen wrote: post #170
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…

Slack is a useful product that is so frequently and heavily abused that an argument could potentially be made it shouldn't exist at all. A friend of mine showed me her work slack for a company of ~100 people and no joke, they have over 20 channels for non-work purposes that are entirely random (#cupcakeparty) and are frequently contributed to with nothing valuable. Based on personal experience, I suspect that's not t…

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that - it’s a form of community building. The problem in my experience is slack’s over enthusiastic notification defaults. If Sue and Joe are chatting about an upcoming office party in a general channel, that’s great - just so long as my devices don’t tell me about it until I explicitly open that chat channel.

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

#174

Post by asjw »

srazzaque wrote: post #42
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…

Agree that enforcing meeting discipline is key. Banning meetings altogether seems like a crazy idea. We are social creatures after all, and often a 5 minute conversation can save 10 or more emails or 30 "chat minutes". Amazon has a very interesting approach to meetings that I'm curious if anyone has first hand experience with, or other thoughts. For those that aren't aware - Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint, and…

We're not social, we are tribal, we need to show dominance on our peers and in person it works best.

Being the king of slack serves no purpose.

What Bezos does (if it's true) is just apply common sense (let's solve this real issue and only this one quickly by talking about it an only about it because we are the ones who can solve it and no one else) to a workplace where people are payed so much that it shouldn't even be possible to have non meaningful meetings.

But this is the kind of world we live in nowadays...

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

#175

Post by throwaway713 »

This is probably controversial, but I generally disagree with the popular HN sentiment that great progress is accomplished by groups of people working together in teams. My view is that the greatest work is done in isolation by individuals, with the occasional conference to stay up-to-date on new ideas. This isn’t to say that individuals accomplish great feats entirely on their own (which undoubtedly is almost never the case), but merely that almost all productive work is done independently.

If I ran my own company, I would ban almost all meetings and limit the most crucial ones to 15 minutes tops. And while my company might fail due to a misplaced sense of schadenfreude, it’s a risk I’m willing to take to get experimental verification of whether meetings are actually as valuable as everyone claims they are.

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

#177

Post by patcon »

altacc wrote: post #51
Nokinside wrote: post #36

Since this is Swedish study, I just want to point out that Swedish organizational culture is very meeting and consensus oriented. Nordic cultures may seem very similar, but their organizational cultures are different even within the same company. Others are often frustrated about Swedes and their endless meetings. Finns in the meeting are 'OK. lets do this.' and Swedes reply 'But Jan-Erik has not shared his point of…

So true! I work across Scandinavia and there are definitely more consensus forming meetings in Sweden than elsewhere, even. Having previously worked in US & UK companies I'm still not used to it and I often feel like banging my head against the table and crying out "Will somebody please make a decision!". But of course this is Sweden, no single person will make a decision. I'm sure they think I'm terribly rude.

Heh sounds like you've maybe run across something quantified in the Hofstede leadership studies, commissioned by IBM when they first wanted to become an international globocorp.

What you're feeling is the difference between a collectivist leadership culture and an individualist leadership culture. Collectivist cultures value leaders who generate power through _maintaining relationships_, whereas individualist leaders prioritise leadership via _authority_. Think of it as accruing power in the edges vs the nodes of the social graph.

Fun fact: countries whose leader cultures are more individualist (e.g. America) are MUCH more likely to have whole populations who agree highly with "economic growth is important above all else", whereas collectivist leader nations (e.g., Taiwan, Finland) have a general populace who agree less highly with that phrase, but MORE highly with "ecological sustainability and environmental stewardship are important".

So while correlation doesn't prove causation, it may be the case that American-style individualist leadership culture is in opposition to our shared goals of non extinction :) but that's maybe a leap.

The whole study is really rad. Oh, and more bonus: collectivist leadership style correlates highly with feminine leadership style (another axes of Hofstede study)

EDIT: a-ha! Found the source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40836056?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

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

#178

Post by memling »

eitland wrote: post #167
triceratops wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how many people would want to pay to do their own jobs.

I'm not certain it is a good idea to to that but let me try to come up with a more constructive way to do it: Of course people shouldn't pay to do their work, so this must be taken from their allocated budget. If they don't have a budget they cannot invite anyone without the permission of someone who has a budget and think the meeting is a good idea.

in contracting this is not uncommon. one employer I worked for bid on a contract that was later revised down by 75 percent. meetings were curtailed to save money precisely because of the cost to the customer. budget sensitivity is a valuable tool to fight time wastagement.

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

#179

Post by dredmorbius »

triceratops wrote: post #126
caro_douglos wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

might charging a ‘call to meeting’ fee based on the attendees salary/hourly rate be an alternative?

Not sure how many people would want to pay to do their own jobs.

Allocating and drawing down a meeting budget pool might assist with this.

As a positive incentive, a countering "attending" pool, also budgetable. Meetings with strong appeal would be compensated from that.

Not sure what to do with the Imaginary Meeting Points at the end of the year, though possibly use it as the basis of some sort of merit award or bonus.

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

#180

Post by dredmorbius »

eris_agx wrote: post #99

This articles reminds me of Parkinson's Law: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law 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.

Exactly and the point I was going to make, and pointed at in the article (toward the end).

Uncosted inputs will be used to the limits of tolerance of costed inputs.

Time is a near-universal uncosted input, at least in internal allocation.

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