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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'

#191

Post by kyshoc »

munchbunny wrote: post #127
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…

> 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. I completely agree. A meeting can be extremely valuable when you have clear goals, an agenda, and clear reasons why every participant is needed/needs to be there. One tendency I see and hate is when someone cal…

> calls a 1 hour meeting, [...] but now they feel the need to pad the remaining half hour with whatever

that's a wild way to run meetings — in my current organization, finishing a meeting ahead of schedule (when appropriate) is celebrated as "giving time back".

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

#192

Post by throwawayjava »

dredmorbius wrote: post #179
triceratops wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I thought a few extra vipers was bad! I can't even imagine the level of ensuing bullshit...

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

#193

Post by [deleted] »

WaylonKenning wrote: post #80
WhompingWindows wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As an Architect, I'd rather have six hours of meetings, and one hour of documentation, than eight hours straight of being at a computer. In some jobs - meetings are the work. Meetings are influencing, are negotiating, are discussing, are communicating. And all of that is best done face to face.

[deleted]

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

#194

Post by stevelini »

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…

Often I ask myself at the start of the meeting "what are we trying to achieve". Am wondering if I've been missing the point.

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

#195

Post by black_puppydog »

The text kind of reads to me like those meetings are therapeutic mostly for the people that cannot really justify having a job there to begin with... This really reminds me of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" and the solution to that would be a restructuring of society that doesn't require being in an employer/employee situation to be a valuable part of society.

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

#196

Post by username90 »

earthboundkid wrote: post #138
flatline wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half an hour or more is no longer a standup.

Doesn't mean that isn't what people are calling a "standup". More seriously, even if standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory, no interruption takes less than half an hour to recover from and resume flow.

> standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory

Jeff Sutherland who invented scrum thinks it should be 15 minutes, so according to theory they should be 15 minutes:

> The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours. This optimizes team collaboration and performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and forecasting upcoming Sprint work. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity

https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum...

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

#197

Post by sveme »

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…

Information exchange meetings are useless and a source of boredom. What‘s important are decision meetings - and this is where you need a precise agenda and where you always need to communicate the expected outcome.

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

#198

Post by rightbyte »

eitland wrote: post #171
Timberwolf wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thei…

If my boss is too fancy to recook coffee so am I. Communal assets only work out if they are properly cared for by almost everyone except the usual antisocial free-riders who you have to ignore.

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway68AC2 wrote: post #53

I feel fairly alarmed and skeptical at the idea of managers being therapists, not because I think it’s a bad idea — in fact I think it ought to be a good one — but because in my experience, most of the folks asking for your vulnerability in the business world aren’t willing to off any in turn.

[deleted]
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