I think anyone who works for a big company, or at least most who do, will have experienced going to meetings that should’ve been e-mails?
Some of those probably shouldn’t have even been that. Like, for instance, yesterday’s all-departments show-and-tell meeting, where literally no departments had anything new to show.
We had a reorg about a year and a half ago. Before that, there was an app team, a web team and a backend team. Now there’s a webshop team and a website team, each containing app, web and backend people.
The web and app people have been complaining that whenever people from the other product talk about in daily doesn’t matter to them. That wastes 5 minutes a day of their time. So we had 4 retrospectives, 4 workshops and 3 discussion meetings on how to restructure the dailies to save time during daily. That’s about as much time as would be wasted over the course of maybe 200 dailies. We still don’t have a decent plan. The current idea is to split the dailies and have two dailies, and everyone who is not web or app (so backend, testers, product owner, team manager and UX designers) need to be in both dailies where all the announcements will be repeated twice.
We apparently don’t have bigger issues.
(And there’s me, backender, sitting there listening to both web and app people chatting away for 10 minutes a day about things like accessibility and layouting that really don’t matter for me, just barely listening in case someone mentions my name, so I can quickly scramble and act as if I was following along what they were saying.)
I’ve heard this in a podcast and the same principle applies at work:
Most books should have been short essays, most essays should have been pamphlets, most pamphlets should have been blog posts, most blog posts should have been tweets, most tweets shouldn’t exist.
I really appreciate it when colleagues check in right before a meeting via chat just to make sure at least one person has something they actually need to talk about. If not, we skip it and go back to our work. Some teams do this as a habit, others meet anyway just to shoot the shit if there’s nothing work-related to discuss. My team is the former, thankfully.
We have some recurring meetings where team members are expected to add discussion topics to a doc beforehand. If nobody does the meeting gets cancelled, it’s great.
Damn, where do you hire your middle management? My company’s management needs those meetings to feel like they have a job.
At least since I work remotely, I can mostly keep working while listening in.
Yep, this is one of those meetings, except the “doc” is an admin’s e-mail address, and we don’t find out what’s on the agenda until we turn up.
I suspect it’s job security for the admin, and it’s half an hour a week I don’t have to break down pallets, so I’m ok with it.
others meet anyway just to shoot the shit
Hey now. Shooting the shit is how we test our mics before the meeting. If you can’t make the pre-meeting, then suffer and never know whether your mic is shit.
That’s why I support WhatsApp work groupchats! Sometimes it just requires a message and a little ❤️/👍 emoji reaction to confirm you’ve read it.
This should have been a documentation page!
Good management is supposed to protect you from pointless meetings. Unfortunately some meetings only seem to exist so that management can say they have done something.
