91–100 of 380 posts
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In my experience, most folks appreciate a gentle hint to stick to the agenda. I don’t hang out with “execs” though.
Execs that have responsibilities appreciate sticking to agendas. But there are a lot of Elon Musks in the world.
If I was in the room, I'd be relieved. I always found that meetings at large companies dragged on unless there was a forcing factor (like a doorknock) that got someone to bring it to an end.
> When 2:50 rolled around and your meeting was supposed to end, do you think people actually ended the meeting? Noooooo. Absolutely not! At U of M, they solved this problem by having classes officially start 10 minutes after the time they were advertised as. That is, a class listed as being 10-11am was actually 10:10-11am; nobody showed up until 10:10. Sure, technically it's the same thing, but there's a pretty massi…
When I studied it had already been mostly abolished. Sometimes starting times were explicitly marked “sine tempore”.
The solution to the "50 minute meetings always stretch to an hour" problem is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am. If you schedule them for 9am of course nobody will stop at 9:50am.
I presume in that case each meeting would just stretch to 10 over the hour.
For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.
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Unfortunately that isn't the solution. As the article correctly notes, meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out. This is a universal truth in office buildings.
> meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out. The meeting itself might continue, but as an individual, once the meeting passes the scheduled finish time, you stand up and say "sorry, I've got another meeting to get to". The worse your company's excessive meeting culture is, the better this works.
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> and getting each other unstuck Let me guess, there is no group text chat where people can randomly whine and get unstuck by whoever notices and is an expert on the problem?
This is the thing I dislike most about chat. It encourage people to be lazy. Don't make any effort, just throw your problem out to the group the moment you don't immediately know what to do next.
>Everybody in a meeting should give input or they shouldn’t be in the meeting. This is wierd and terrible, what does it mean, no interns and juniors get to attend engineering meetings? Tagging along to those meetings is how they learn and it's not expected that they have input at every one, sometimes it's just a question or two.
They’re talking in the context of C level meetings. Not many juniors there.
If I was in the room, I'd be relieved. I always found that meetings at large companies dragged on unless there was a forcing factor (like a doorknock) that got someone to bring it to an end.
Suggestion: Have an agenda, have rules to religiously follow the agendas and help each other follow the agenda. Once completed, meeting over.
Following this with "What outcome should we expect at the end of this meeting? If there are next steps, what would we like them to be?" helps cut to the chase, and in my experience, things got better across the board. Sure, there were one or two folks who still struggled to create agendas for meetings - but it wasn't long before they were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Accountability can do that sometimes.
> Everybody in a meeting should give input or they shouldn’t be in the meeting At several companies I was at this rule would have removed the last slack time I had to fix, refactor and maintain systems. I actually asked a manager to add me to a monthly 2 hour 50+ people reoccurring meeting just so I could do some refactoring. I guess that is a form of Malicious compliance.
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Heh some people are on time, some people are late. It's seemingly a culture thing, and neither side understands the other. You say "of course nobody will stop at 9:50am" and that is exactly what I would do.
> neither side understands the other. Being late is viewed as rude or lacking respect for others by a lot of people. Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180729-why-brazilians-a...