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How to Attend Meetings

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Re: How to Attend Meetings

#101

Post by paganel »

garciasn wrote: post #7

I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it. --- For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of…

> And, even if it did, 99.99999% of folks wouldn't read any of it anyway.

Because meetings have become part of the job for many office workers, I'd say the majority of them, they (the meetings) are not sees as a means to an end anymore (as in "we hold this meeting in order to solve a specific problem"), and I'm not even sure that that hasn't always been the case, meetings are seen as a mainstay of holding an office-job, as means in themselves: "We go to (office) work so it's only natural that we'll hold meetings".

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#102

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

mvkel wrote: post #87

The problem with time-bounding is it becomes an obsession with meeting optimization, and the content of the meeting comes secondary. "Ok let's quickly do X Y and Z so the meeting can be over and we can be outta here!" "Hey, it's been 8 minutes and we have only allocated 30 so we need to move to the next topic." Letting meetings be dictated by the clock has the effect of making them feel a bit like reading an executiv…

I been a part of endless meeting with ”lively discussion” with the whole team. Results are always slim to none. Instead if you allocate 15 minutes for a topic and there is no conclusion, stop the discussion and say that it must continue on another allocated time. This way people come better prepared with an actual agenda to get things done.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#103

Post by krackers »

arjie wrote: post #18

I wonder if the (AFAIK original to) Bridgewater technique of recording all meetings will spread. One thing I think that would have helped me quite a bit is to have a transcript (with speakers annotated) of a meeting. With a sufficiently advanced LLM summarizing, I could probably a handle a much larger volume of meetings where I needed to know what was going on just as a tail-risk capturer. e.g. if someone has a meeti…

This won't happen in tech companies because that would make legal discovery a lot easier.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#104

Post by willio58 »

mvkel wrote: post #87

The problem with time-bounding is it becomes an obsession with meeting optimization, and the content of the meeting comes secondary. "Ok let's quickly do X Y and Z so the meeting can be over and we can be outta here!" "Hey, it's been 8 minutes and we have only allocated 30 so we need to move to the next topic." Letting meetings be dictated by the clock has the effect of making them feel a bit like reading an executiv…

As someone who leads meetings and sets agendas, I’ve basically accepted there is no perfect meeting for everyone. I regularly get oscillating feedback. One day I’ll hear “We spent too long on a couple of topics and didn’t get to enough topics” then if we try to start limiting topics to a certain amount of time I’ll hear “we never actually _solve_ anything, it’s all just too high level!”. The best I can do when I lead these is gauge the importance of each topic myself, which is not a perfect science, and allow time to run over for important topics.

Sometimes, things just work out super well. We touch on everything people want to touch on, we fly through it and everyone leaves the meeting happy. If I’m honest though, the biggest predictor of that outcome seems to be the mood of people coming into the meeting. Meetings after long weekends get above-average reviews.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#105

Post by throw4847285 »

I have a feeling, though I lack proof, that opinions about meetings are strongly correlated with temperament. Specifically, extraversion as defined in the Big Five. I suspect that people low on extraversion are overrepresented on this site, and those people tend to hate meetings most.

To be clear, I think the reason why temperament is important is that if you put a gun to everybody's head, they actually agree on the ideal type of meeting, though they will quibble about the details. The amount of quibbling reveals that the real issue is more emotional than practical. Some people, by nature have a much higher tolerance for imperfect meetings, and even enjoy an unstructured conversation to recharge their social battery. Some people very much do not, and are correct that this is a waste of their time, and if they don't get anything out of it, they shouldn't have to take part.

I'm in the camp where I don't mind meetings at all, but I can be empathetic to people who hate them. Plus, Zoom meetings feel like methadone anyway. Real in-person conversation feels both better and more productive, but don't let the bosses hear me say that. They don't need any more ammo for forced RTO.

Anyway, somebody should do a study.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#106

Post by superconduct123 »

ngriffiths wrote: post #88

One of the costs of saying no to meetings is that going to other people's (useless) meetings is a super low effort way to say "I value our working relationship." Not going often explicitly sends the opposite message. Sometimes there is a whole set of rituals used to "prove" you actually care about the group, and the rituals only ever happen in meetings, and you cannot change them without bothering a lot of people.

Also sometimes who gets to work on a future project is just based on perceived interest

And not going to a meeting may be perceived that you aren't interested in that project

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#107

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

tyre wrote: post #39
nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #9

Had an idea These are ideals but in reality your boss calls a meeting you go and forget the rules. So... What if there were decoy meetings. Useless fake ones where if you accept you get a reminder of the rules. People are motivated by power lines so doing this reverses it so that non attendance or thinking about attendance is aligned.

When I was at a large company I made meetings with fellow EMs to prevent others from scheduling with us. It was the only way to get quality heads down time. All of them were titled something like “$X WG” where X was what we needed to work on and WG is an acronym for “Working Group”. We fooled our manager for a long time, though sometimes she would join the automatically-attached Zoom to find us.

Fuck Off We're Working Working Group

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#108

Post by [deleted] »

mvkel wrote: post #87

The problem with time-bounding is it becomes an obsession with meeting optimization, and the content of the meeting comes secondary. "Ok let's quickly do X Y and Z so the meeting can be over and we can be outta here!" "Hey, it's been 8 minutes and we have only allocated 30 so we need to move to the next topic." Letting meetings be dictated by the clock has the effect of making them feel a bit like reading an executiv…

[deleted]

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#109

Post by garciasn »

parliament32 wrote: post #34
garciasn wrote: post #7

I agree with each and every single slide in this presentation; I do. I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. Especially, "Attending meetings is a choice." Just like paying taxes is a choice; got it. --- For decades, I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested that we have solid outcomes. None of…

> I also know that in each and every company I have ever worked for, none of this is going to fly. My favourite part of climbing the corporate ladder is finally having enough clout to just say "no". > I have been asking for agendas; I have asked for clarification on what to do to prepare; I have even suggested Try "I am unable to attend meeting without an agenda. Let me know when one has been posted." in your decline…

I’m a Senior Director. I can and do say no. But, let me tell you, it doesn’t go over well—especially for declining meetings.

Sure; they can go to my boss and he’ll largely cover, but it’s still not enough. I imagine unless you’re the CEO/equiv, this isn’t a thing you can do without fallout.

Re: How to Attend Meetings

#110

Post by anomaly_ »

willio58 wrote: post #104
mvkel wrote: post #87

The problem with time-bounding is it becomes an obsession with meeting optimization, and the content of the meeting comes secondary. "Ok let's quickly do X Y and Z so the meeting can be over and we can be outta here!" "Hey, it's been 8 minutes and we have only allocated 30 so we need to move to the next topic." Letting meetings be dictated by the clock has the effect of making them feel a bit like reading an executiv…

As someone who leads meetings and sets agendas, I’ve basically accepted there is no perfect meeting for everyone. I regularly get oscillating feedback. One day I’ll hear “We spent too long on a couple of topics and didn’t get to enough topics” then if we try to start limiting topics to a certain amount of time I’ll hear “we never actually _solve_ anything, it’s all just too high level!”. The best I can do when I lead…

Basically my experience too. I've gradually come to the view that meetings are best as a place to communicate decisions/rubber stamp. If I need a particular outcome I will pre meet with the key people to get their input / socialise the decision / etc. And then the meeting just serves as formal approval.
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