Useless work meetings

[John Clark]

I once had a boss who had a regularly scheduled team meeting at 3:30pm on Friday afternoon.

The only purpose of that was to make sure that nobody was, god forbid, leaving early on a Friday afternoon when all the work was done.

She lived and breathed her work so I guess assumed everybody else should. First thing I did when I replaced her was axe the Friday afternoon meeting.

Some of our people have been asked to phone into meetings around midnight our time (Because the main portion of the meeting is being held in a different country). - Said people are ordered to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week literally.

Thank god I'm not one of them.

 

[Ruaidhri]

I knew my company was getting meetingitis when we started having meetings to prepare for other meetings.

Nonsense.

We had almost half our management laid off and one of the unexpected benefits to those who survived has been that everyone is far too busy to be spending much time in meetings.

 

[Mallory]

I once had a boss who had a regularly scheduled team meeting at 3:30pm on Friday afternoon.

The only purpose of that was to make sure that nobody was, god forbid, leaving early on a Friday afternoon when all the work was done.

She lived and breathed her work so I guess assumed everybody else should. First thing I did when I replaced her was axe the Friday afternoon meeting.

As a manager, I hate holding meetings. I'd rather deal with issues as they come up rather than scheduling some formal event to address them. When my company was acquired in 1997, I was forced to hold a weekly staff meeting so that the new owner could attend. So I scheduled them for 11:30am on Mondays. People either kept things to a bare minimum so that we were done in 30 minutes or they started getting hungry since it was dragging over into lunch hour.

The best tool I ever saw for managing meetings was in my second job, back in the 70s. The person who was responsible for the meeting had to complete a form with the start time, end time, the attendees and their billing rates. At the end of the meeting they had to total it all up and turn it in so management would know just how much company money they had just wasted. There were very few meetings in that company and the ones that were held were brief.

 

[ancientone51]

Not useless "meetings" per se but Hubby has to go to the kidney doc twice a month now instead of once.

Seems the Gov'mnt said that the patients had to go in to get blood samples taken...Duh! can't call that one in and then HAS to go in to get the results discussed two weeks later.

We used to just get them by mail and/or a phone call to discuss any changes. But no, we make the 80+ mile trip twice now.
PLUS, ALL the members of the team, doc, nurse, dietitian and social worker are supposed to be in the room to discuss it with everyone else.

Talk about a waste of so much.

 

[B.J.]

I once had a boss who had a regularly scheduled team meeting at 3:30pm on Friday afternoon.

The only purpose of that was to make sure that nobody was, god forbid, leaving early on a Friday afternoon when all the work was done.

She lived and breathed her work so I guess assumed everybody else should. First thing I did when I replaced her was axe the Friday afternoon meeting.

Some of our people have been asked to phone into meetings around midnight our time (Because the main portion of the meeting is being held in a different country). - Said people are ordered to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week literally.

Thank god I'm not one of them.

Not as bad as midnight meetings, but we've got some time zone issues with meetings where I work. We're in the Central time zone, and we have to tie into many meetings with people in the Pacific time zone. Quite frequently, they schedule meetings for 9am or 2pm, which is 11am (lunch time!) and 4pm (time to go home!) for us. It's really annoying when they do the "2pm" ones on Friday. What's worse is they're clueless that this is a problem for anyone, regardless of how many times we remind them!

 

[Timby]

The only meetings worth going to are the ones that can't start without you.

 

[Crusher Disciple]

I don't know about you, but I get tired of full-blown meetings that don't actually accomplish anything. These new managers have actually been spending a lot of money and making really good changes to the restaurant; I figured they'd talk about that kind of stuff this morning. Lame.

All organisations are like this.

There are two Golden Rules:

1) The larger the organisation, the more useless meetings there will be.
2) The higher up in the organisation you move, the more of these useless meetings you will be asked to attend.

Holdfast's 10 Handy Hints to understand how these meetings work, especially when you deal with middle management:

1) Introductions (the noobs say hello: "Hi, I'm Bob, and I'm a mindless drone who doesn't know what he's doing here")
2) Apologies (including suppressed envy at those who avoided the meeting)
3) Agenda review. There are 9 points. (oh shit)
4) Let's spend 80% of the time discussing point 1 (chairman will inevitably be hopeless at guillotining discussion)
5) We can't decide what to do about point 1 - form a subcommittee to report in 3 months time. (eyes down so as not to be chosen for subcommittee)
6) Move onto point 2, including hearing report from the subcommittee we set up 3 months ago to review it. (the subcommittee will have forgotten to meet until yesterday)
7) The subcommittee couldn't decide what to do about it so referred it back to the full committee. (surprise, surprise)
8) Full committee ponders for 15% of the total time of the meeting on what to do, can't decide, so refers it upwards to the full board of directors (who won't understand it).
9) Committee realises there's less than 5% of the time to discuss the remaining 7 points, so rushes through them, making half-assed decisions on 4 of them, and postponing discussion on the remaining 3 until the next meeting (when exactly the same will happen).
10) Let's convene again in 3 months time (the fun part, where everybody gets their Crackberrys out to compare diaries and argue over how important their schedules are and why everybody else needs to make allowances for them).

Ah, the joy of working in the NHS....

And the State of Texas.

I knew my company was getting meetingitis when we started having meetings to prepare for other meetings.

That's what we do, literally. We have meetings to determine who isn't at the meeting that we need to chase down and schedule a meeting with.

And the meetings to make a decision? Somebody always finds a reason to not make the decision and leave it to an e-mail. An e-mail that no one in a decision position will read or make a comment on.

I'm barely in my office since I'm always in meetings, Tweeting and Facebooking away for someone to kill me and put me out of my misery. And my idiot boss wonders why I never get anything done.

 

[John Clark]

Not as bad as midnight meetings, but we've got some time zone issues with meetings where I work. We're in the Central time zone, and we have to tie into many meetings with people in the Pacific time zone. Quite frequently, they schedule meetings for 9am or 2pm, which is 11am (lunch time!) and 4pm (time to go home!) for us. It's really annoying when they do the "2pm" ones on Friday. What's worse is they're clueless that this is a problem for anyone, regardless of how many times we remind them!

For that particular meeting, I think some people had it at 8am local, others had it at 5pm local and our guy was just really unlucky. - No matter what time it had been scheduled for, someone would have been screwed

Even when it's just us and Head office, they seem to schedule it for just after lunchtime their time which is usually just about the time most of us are either wanting to go home or have left.

 

[MetalPants]

When I hold meetings, it's quick and (usually) painless. I go in knowing the key points I need to cover, I adress the points and any concerns my subordinates have, and then done, back to work. I think the longest meeting I've held at work was ten minutes.

 

[judge alba]

we used to get bi monthly meetings when our new boss arrived. lways during our own time and we weren't getting paid for it.
he would tell us every time how we were all slacking and he was going home exhausted every night after doing our work (which was BS), to him we were all shite at our jobs some of us have been there over 15 years then he'd tell us to bring two things each to bring up to the meetings. after six months of this we had gotten to the point where me and a few co-workers decided to play him up. so we would ask very daft questions like.
is it time to go? or why cant I be a budgie?. though my friend (and ex co- worker) decided to puke over the guy next to him afterwards saying
" sorry that was all i could bring up".
the boss decided on a monthly meeting instead and things got more positive. he even dose the meetings at the last hour of the day and we get paid for it ( my mate got fired two days later though)

 

[Commander Vaughn]

In my experience, I've always enjoyed meetings. But I've always been paid by the hour, which means I get paid to sit in the workplace equivalent of class. My dream has often been to be paid for going to class.

It's especially nice when meeting hours lead to overtime later in the week. Or when lunch is provided. Basically, hourly worker + meeting = easy money

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I've been in all kinds of meetings. Some of them, I really have no reason to be there and I just kinda space out. I had those all the time at my last job. I liked that job, but the amount of meetings got to be pretty ridiculous at times. There was some variety, at least:

1. Weekly group meetings where we got information about the company and most of us usually had nothing of our own to offer. Everything we worked on was complex enough that we couldn't say more than "yeah, I'm working on that" or "yeah, I'm done with that."
2. All-staff meetings, held once a quarter. It was hard not to fall asleep because 90% of the meeting was them bullshitting us about how well the company was doing. (Hint: they laid off a third of the company last December, including me.)
3. Stand-up meetings. Those were nice, because we had them every day but everyone had to stand up, so no one wanted it to take any longer than necessary. We were normally done in 5-10 minutes. 15 at the max.
4. Emergency meetings. These would happen when something went wrong. Usually, it was someone trying to pin shit on me (or some other poor sucker) and our manager having to back us up. Blame diffusion, basically. Nobody wanted to be left holding the bag or considered responsible for any particular problem.

At my new job, which I like better in some ways and dislike in other ways, we only have a couple meetings a week, and they're about an hour long. The time is usually well-used. There's only a handful of people who go to these, so we can have technical discussions or whatever we need. The guys who own the company generally don't hold meetings unless something big happens, like they've bought another company.

I have fewer boring meetings here, but that's because the middle management tier is quite small. The entire company--which is actually made up of four distinct, small companies--is a bit over 100 people. So, not a lot of use for management overhead.

 

[Holdfast]

I have fewer boring meetings here, but that's because the middle management tier is quite small.

This is precisely the issue that determines the number of meetings.

I work in an organisation of well over 1 million people (I think it's actually closer to 1.5 million). Even if you just count my direct employer rather than the NHS as the whole, that's still well over 2500 employees.

You can figure out how many middle managers there are, and how many pointless meetings there are....

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I have fewer boring meetings here, but that's because the middle management tier is quite small.

This is precisely the issue that determines the number of meetings.

I work in an organisation of well over 1 million people (I think it's actually closer to 1.5 million). Even if you just count my direct employer rather than the NHS as the whole, that's still well over 2500 employees.

You can figure out how many middle managers there are, and how many pointless meetings there are....

Well, it does have its downsides. My boss is terminally overworked and is almost never available because of that. She also has so much stuff coming onto her plate that she has trouble delegating all of it. And since she's the "single point of failure" for over 30 people, her being utilized beyond capacity has ripple effects. Things don't get done.

I definitely don't want superfluous meetings, however this company could probably use some clearer direction and guidance from the top, and a better distribution of management resources to ensure things get delegated and worked on.

 

[Holdfast]

I have fewer boring meetings here, but that's because the middle management tier is quite small.

This is precisely the issue that determines the number of meetings.

I work in an organisation of well over 1 million people (I think it's actually closer to 1.5 million). Even if you just count my direct employer rather than the NHS as the whole, that's still well over 2500 employees.

You can figure out how many middle managers there are, and how many pointless meetings there are....

Well, it does have its downsides. My boss is terminally overworked and is almost never available because of that. She also has so much stuff coming onto her plate that she has trouble delegating all of it. And since she's the "single point of failure" for over 30 people, her being utilized beyond capacity has ripple effects. Things don't get done.

I definitely don't want superfluous meetings, however this company could probably use some clearer direction and guidance from the top, and a better distribution of management resources to ensure things get delegated and worked on.

It does sound like your workplace needs an operations officer on-site, to back up her executive role and free her time up. That is another layer of management, but in such a small workplace as yours, I don't think it would lead to superfluous meeting but could act to actually stratify the organisation better.

If you're game and can work up a viable model whilst phrasing it diplomatically, it could be an opportunity for you to flag up the concern, together with a potential solution. You never know, they might even ask you to do it!

 

[Captain Ice]

Not as bad as midnight meetings, but we've got some time zone issues with meetings where I work. We're in the Central time zone, and we have to tie into many meetings with people in the Pacific time zone. Quite frequently, they schedule meetings for 9am or 2pm, which is 11am (lunch time!) and 4pm (time to go home!) for us. It's really annoying when they do the "2pm" ones on Friday. What's worse is they're clueless that this is a problem for anyone, regardless of how many times we remind them!

I think if I were in your shoes, I'd be tempted to schedule meetings that my office had control over at either 8am or 2pm local time to compensate (6am and noon Pacific time).

Don't complain to much though - I used to have meetings that not only were on my day off, but would require me to drive 180 miles to attend.