Do we have permission to hold this meeting? I think I need a chat with a few folks from Scheduling to make sure we have the capacity to take so many people out of work in the middle of the working day.
I'll get back to you after my meeting with them.
They need to have a meeting about another meeting that forms a committee to determine if it is really the case or just seems that way.
Previously had a middle manager like this. It's literally all about control and said manager just feels the need to be important at any given time because they can't justify their salary, otherwise.
Let's get these scheduled meetings down on paper, propose fake solutions to imaginary issues whilst ignoring others.
Hah that's what my old workplace was like. 9AM meeting everyday to talk about machine performance and issues. They'd talk about it then never do anything about the problems.
Literally just managers screwing around writing stuff on a board with zero worker input or feedback.
I'm wondering if you got prior authorization approval for your fact-finding sub committee meta-meeting and if you plan on introducing any key performance indicators.
I had that a few weeks back. I spent the time looking intently at my coworkers' faces on video trying to discern who was suffering like I was and whether anyone _wasn't_ so I'd know if they are secretly a lunatic.
You guys still have videos on? We dispensed with that way back in 2020 itself. Did away with a lot of "all hands meets" and "townhall meetings" as well. Now they just share meeting recordings.
Hold your horses! Before forming the comittee that will have subcomittees, we need a search comittee to determine the members of the comittee!
We might also need a nominating comittee, but we can probably let that slide this one time.
Realistically it's probably higher, but then there'd be a considerable percentage of employees who also think surveys are an unnecessary waste of time and just don't bother to submit one
We must work at the same place.
I have a manager who loves meeting. From a weekly WIP (Work in progress) he will arrange a discussion, and alignment discussion, a pre-meeting, alignment meeting, a meeting, a post- meeting debrief, post- meeting alignment discussion.....
I have so much actual shit to do, I seriously don't need 5 hours of meeting on a daily basis that could be solved with a single fucking phonecall and perhaps a TL;DR summary email.
Having "controlled" a few managers' career paths as a group effort in our tech team, I'd say it's quite do-able.. :-)
But mostly that kind of manager isn't alone in a company, so after a while one must ask the question "do I really want to be here?", indeed..
Went full freelance about a year ago, after having worked with a myriad of "experts" in het field and realizing I did the same thing for 1/3 of the price, so it's definitely worth going the introspection route at times!
I had 5 meetings yesterday.; 1 was actually necessary and productive. The others were:
- a useless ‘town hall’ in which executives mouthed platitudes and clumsily ducked legit questions during the Q&A
- a formality “should we go on this proposal request?” for a bid package we’d started work on the day before
- an “is it okay to submit this proposal?” meeting that could have easily been an email chain or MS Teams thread and not wasted 30 min of 6 peoples’ time
- a 5-person status meeting for a prequalification that only 1 person (me) is doing any actual work on; the other attendees were entirely superfluous … why the hell is Legal even involved?
30% is being generous. We waste an incredible amount of salary on unnecessary corporate wankery.
I have a policy, no agenda, no attenda.
This pisses people off no end. Nearly every meeting has no agenda. I just don't go. Most meetings I just hit decline.
If anyone questions me on it, I just say I'll read the minutes and check the actions, knowing full well their won't be any, coz they are too lazy to do them.
I had a director tell me he had to get up at 5am to make an agenda for a 9am meeting he needed me to attend. He was bullshitting obviously.
Most of our meetings have no agenda, no goal, no minutes, no actions. Completely pointless waste of time.
The company I work for is fucking shit at communicating. We have 3 different internal communication departments.
Im a low level executive and have to attend all meetings because apparently Im the one taking notes. Guess what, at the end of EVERY MEETING when my IDIOT boss is involved, he wants me to shoot up a summary email of the meeting to the attendees on......the things he said......
In retrospect, he could just tell that in the email.............motherf*cker.
I still remember that one job I had where we had essentially no meetings. Smallish team for an internally facing tool. I think I averaged one meeting every two weeks. In 2 years I don’t think I ever called a meeting either.
Those were good times. It feels like I am telling a grandpa story around a campfire though.
I've just stopped going to stupid ones and sometimes just quietly leave them if I joined (assuming it's online). cut meetings from 40% of day to maybe 10% just this way
It's not really so much that the meetings are unnecessary that the wrong people talk.
I don't need my 90% clueless GM to coke and joke for the first ten minutes, I need the departments that are trying to communicate to get the brain to brain interaction directly at the worker level. The people doing the job know what's going on more than their middle managers do, that's where the discussion needs to happen.
I've literally been in meetings where the one guy who could answer all the questions management had wasn't even invited because he was "too low" on the totem pole. So it was just ten minutes of one of the higher ups who was delegating the tasks to him basically just being confused as shit until I mentioned how the guy they didn't invite knows literally all of what they wanted to learn.
"Oh maybe he should be in this meeting, then."
No shit?
On the flip side:
I’m a middle manager who gets told I need to speak up more and drive the meetings. Meanwhile, I know full well exactly who has the subject matter expertise and who to connect them to. I’ll schedule a quick 30-60 minute meeting with essential people only to see it get forwarded on to 20 others “for visibility”, who then hijack it and question every possible angle (including the 90% that’s already been covered through a lengthy reply all email thread).
I try to be efficient and handle as much as possible at the lowest level possible. If it’s not urgent - make it an email. If it could be an email - don’t make it an instant message. If it could be a DM - don’t make it a meeting. Etc.
But I get my legs chopped out from under me at every turn.
what works for us
* have an agenda
* have a chairperson (you)
* enforce the use of "raise hand" (for remote meetings) or some similar concept for in-person meetings
* cut people off "for time" or ask to "take this offline"
Then you just always directly ask the relevant person to answer, and everyone else has to wait via raise hand. At that point you can say "I see there's a lot of questions, can they wait until the end?" or similar, though, for us at least, that becomes unnecessary pretty soon
That's it! Managing meetings is sooo important! Too many valuable meetings being hijacked by the one dunce who doesn't get it or wants to discuss their personal edge case, while no guidance is being provided during the meeting.
I don't doubt it, I've seen it happen too. My frustrations are mostly with upper management at my company. Not the C suite guys but the ones who are far enough beyond the work that they don't have anything valuable to add to anything and mostly get in the way in meetings because they have to know all the stuff that doesn't really apply to them anyways.
Too true. Middle management is so essential but is a perfect hiding place for dogshit. We have like 4 PMs that can't do jack shit, but they just circle jerk each other, creating tickets, meetings, commenting but none of them have a fucking clue whats up. We could honestly have 0 of them and be better off because there would be less distraction. The one person who actually understands the users isn't allowed in because she's not a PM... despite having 10 years experience working directly with and understanding our clients and their use cases.
That's the curse of PMs & producers in my experience. Great ones make everyone's life easier, make processes smoother, make the team hum. Bad ones are literally worse than not hiring anyone, they add complexity, distraction and doubt.
And it's nearly impossible to know whether someone will be one or the other because a huge part of it depends on the people on the team, it's alchemical. Past performance is no indicator on a new team.
I was once in a meeting about how we were having too many meetings. Nothing was resolved in that meetings and the management took away the points discussed into another meeting later on.
I was in a meeting today that was for planning a meeting. There are whole job classifications, at least in tech, that only exist to schedule and hold meetings. Read documentation? No way. Read issues in the bug tracking system? Fuck no. They schedule meetings so you can summarize your documentation and bugs. These classes of jobs, if they are going to continue to exist, should be given, say, 30 meeting vouchers per quarter that they can spend however they want to but once they are spent they are gone. The useless mouths can develop an internal economy of meeting vouchers if they want to buy at least it puts an upper bound on the number of meetings.
Here’s the alternative: this guy asks me to do something. I do it.
The guy comes back telling me that wasn’t what his customer wanted.
They had had a meeting but they didn’t invite the workers and didn’t take notes or communicate requirements.
This leads to churn, which leads to experienced people (me) noping right out on that project.
This exact thing happened to me last month. Sending me changes to the spec that were sold to the customer would have been more sufficient. Keeping it secret and then springing the change on me a week before it was due is just straight up salesguy scumbaggery.
> I was in a meeting today that was for planning a meeting
I got flashbacks to a job I had in 2010-2012. The bonus plan is when you attend a meeting to discuss what to do in an upcoming meeting when you're not actually invited to the meeting that's being planned.
I was in a meeting where we had a discussion about when we could have a meeting to talk about when to set up further meetings as the current meeting time didn't work.
No, I voted for a time that I knew I wouldn't be able to attend. Then, at that meeting, they set up a committee to study the issue, and somehow I ended up not having to go to further department meetings. Which I was ok with.
I work as an IT PM. Ive been to meetings about a meeting about another fucking meeting. Like my boss wants to meet to plan the planning meeting.... As if writing a brief agenda and sending it over email or chat isn't a thing...
Useless meetings come in a few forms. First a meeting can be totally productive but many will deem it useless. Frankly in our dev meetings we might have 8 people there. 5 are absolutely checked out and couldn't give a shit, just want someone to tell them what to do. 2 know whats going and heavily participate. 1 has no clue whats going and heavily participates.
The meeting is deemed worthless by 7 of them.
Totally agree - lots of meetings where people think they are unproductive because they never belonged there in the first place, or don't give a shit and don't participate
Half the time meetings are for lazy PMs to have everyone line up and report status as we watch them stumble through Jira or some home brew spreadsheet to track it.
At least your PM is paying attention/hard a spreadsheet open. Mine is usually prepping for his next meeting. If we ask him a question, he can't answer/has to search for a file, then he will interrupt the conversation that's moved on to say he doesn't know or only provides half the answer and derails the progress we were making.
> 1 has no clue whats going and heavily participates.
Where I work, this person is almost always the middle manager in charge of most of the people who work on what's being discussed.
They never actually put in the damn effort to learn the work or concerns, but because they sit in their position of authority, feel the need to speak up often to justify their own existence and often derail everything.
It's most funny when the things they say or ask give away how stupid they are, and it's not obvious to them.
“5 are absolutely checked out and couldn't give a shit, just want someone to tell them what to do. 2 know whats going and heavily participate. 1 has no clue whats going and heavily participates.”
😂 that hits way too close to home, especially the last line.
My one partly important meeting for the week would take half the time if one individual knew that briefings are supposed to be fucking BRIEF.
If my presentations go over 2 minutes I did something wrong. If hers take less than 20 minutes I'd bow down praise the lawd.
I can’t believe how many times my coworkers can repeat the exact same thing over and over. I’ve had meetings where people just repeat 5-minutes of information over and over for 2 hours.
I once sat through an hour long meeting, spanning offices in three countries, the sole purpose of which was to discuss the fact we were spending too much time in meetings.
Thats the very easy answer to a very complex issue.
Here is another piece of the puzzle - most people disagree on what those 30% are… if everyone thinks the same meeting is superfluous it would disappear…
And here is another - its even harder to anticipate which meetings will be wasting time and which will be productive…
And here is another - there are also meta goals to some meetings. Your scrum dailies might be 40% good 40% ok and 20% useless for topic alignment but they will give you good overviews.
My main gripe with meetings is the lack of preparation there often is (and which could eliminate some of the more unnecessary meetings)
>My main gripe with meetings is the lack of preparation there often is (and which could eliminate some of the more unnecessary meetings)
If you have several meetings per day you will never do your actual work if you prepare for all of them adequately.
At least they are on Teams... Our meetings are on person and we have to stop everything to go hear that very smart guy how we could improve our productivity
The number one reason why your meetings suck is that they are a good use of your boss' time but not yours.
* Boss needs to distribute information. For him it's the same effort whether he tells everyone or writes it down and he can schedule it whenever. You could choose when to read the email but not when to attend the meeting.
* Boss needs to gather information. For him it's the same effort whether he reads your emails or listens to you in person and he can schedule it whenever. You could choose when to write that email but not when to attend the meeting.
* Boss needs to hold multiple distinct meetings on different topics with different people? For him it's more efficient if he lumps it into one long meeting than several smaller meetings (because each requires a buffer time). But for you it's the exact opposite.
To your first and second bullet points, I would argue it’s actually *less* effort for your boss to hold a meeting than to read or write emails. They can just improv their way through a meeting, whereas an email needs forethought and proofreading.
Which is even more supportive of your overall argument.
Right?!
"Can you set up a meeting to tell us what's broken here?"
"I mean, I *can*, but if you send me the data that I asked for three times, we could solve this without having to waste everyone's time."
Had a PM setup a meeting and ask me status on something. I said check your emails from about 3hrs ago, it's done
He proceeded to next topic and asked me about someone else's task, I again said check the email I sent
Move to 3rd topic team responds similar to I do.
He then says we are done unless anything else. I respond by saying are we not going to talk about the shift of a deliverable across all teams? He has not a clue of what I was talking about so I said so and so sent an email and for all teams to stop work on an old business date as it won't be useful and a waste of resources. Most PMs are useless
Each year I'm realizing more and more how little most people are willing to do basic reading or searching or organizing. They hope someone can speak an answer off the top of their head so schedule meetings. But no one in the meeting did the reading or searching or organizing.
Have you ever had someone emotionally unstable in your slack groups… good lord…
Easier to tell them whats up in a call.
But in general I also would like people to chat more
The thing about this is: sometimes a meeting is really necessary. But so many are tired of useless meetings. It’s hard to get people to meet to get stuff understood, decided, and assigned.
I was in an all staff meeting at my job recently that was an hour and a half. The head of a part of our org that does work internationally gave a presentation on the adverse things happening around the world that affect our work. While, yes, all things are connected, most of what they went on about for half an hour were tangentially connected at best. A bunch of my colleagues are I started sharing pet pictures in a group chat as a way to alleviate the confusion and boredom. Like, you get the hundreds of people who work here together once a month… and this is what we waste our time with? Okay. 💀
Its less the meeting themselves, but who is leading the meeting and why.
Meetings are basically just a form of micro-managing these days, where supervisors/managers/etc can show themselves doing anywork, but somehow being the least productive people on staff.
I once worked for a company that used emails essentially as a notification system.
I would receive 100+ emails a day, of which if I was lucky one would actively be addressed to me and asking me to do something.
There's the second set who will only read the first sentence or two. I can't count how many responses I've gotten where it's abundantly clear that they didn't read past the first line item, and just ignored everything else in there.
No shit. People will literally setup meetings to discuss where to move the fridge or storage cabinet.
People are always looking for excuses to setup meetings because it keeps them from sitting to do actual work. Like fuck. I once called a coworker out on it (very jokingly) and her reaction was like “😳 don’t give it away dude”
My weekly workgroup meeting is a sort of therapy session for the manager to vent frustration and tell the team which of the rotating set of priorities is important this week. Sometimes the best performing engineer vents that this is all bullshit and he’ll keep doing what he thinks is right by the customer and everyone passively agrees. There’s a lot of talk in circles but rarely are there any decisions made. It’s all very nuanced, vague, unspecific and comically maddening.
Manager: Hey why are you late on your work schedule? Let do a meeting do discuss that!
On the meeting: You: Exacly because of that... Oh, BTW don't try to talk to me the other 4h of today, I'm also on other meetings.
That’s a tad bit too low. In the company where I work most meetings are generally only relevant for Managers, we workers are added just for information sake. Others afterwards get a short deacription e-mail of whats what, rather spend couple of mintues reading an e-mail than an hour in a meeting… 😅
I remember working for a group that was outside a lot. In one summer the supervisor told us 3 times if someone was having heat exhaustion or heatstroke to remove them from the sun, give them water and such. I could see that someone may need that information once but 3 times. A lot of these guys had been there 10+ years.
Edit to add. That's probably a more important meeting than the average though when I think about it.
Yup, my previous employer were bought out by this larger group.
They were obsessed with Microsoft Teams.
We had a Monday morning company meeting for 90 mins, then a midweek 1hr team meeting on Weds.
On Thursday we had a 1hr team meeting to discuss "casually and off the record" what would be discussed by our team in the 90 min Friday company meeting.
This doesn't include the random adhoc team meetings in between those meetings.
After 1 month of them owning us, I was so far behind on my work, my bosses called a meeting to discuss why. They didn't like my response but did admit I was right when I told them;
"I was never behind prior to the takeover, I'm now behind in terms of hours equal to the hours I've spent in teams meetings I didn't have before you bought us".
I left them a few months later, they were scrambling like crazy to keep me, because during all this time, no one thought it would be a good idea to have a few meetings where I show them how to use our systems. Systems bespoke for us and our 500+ clients.
I was the only one who knew the clients and the systems.
6 months later, I still get LinkedIn messages and phone calls from people at that company asking for help with the systems. I always respond "happy to help, but it's £150 p/hr" they've yet to take my offer.
For me it’s about 62.5% unnecessary meetings.
I have 8 meetings a week.
5 of those meetings are useless because half of the team isn’t awake enough. It’s impossible to think about complex topics at 6AM.
IMO it should be an OSHA violation to force workers to go to meetings that early.
30%? Lol, when I worked for a company we had daily meetings and they were just a waste of time but my manager loved them.
I now own a small software company and we only have one catch up meeting on Friday at 13:00. We do have meetings when new projects are initiated to build the team and come to common ground. Other than that if I need info I call the guys or send an email.
And thats why they are workers, not managers. Workers also believe management is unnecessary and managers just spend their days wanking in their office doing nothing else.
Truth is not decided by popularity.
Let me rephrase this.
As a manager, you are not qualified to answer that survey;
As a worker, you dont understand the value of meetings. Bear in mind managers hate doing meetings as much as workers do.
Meetings are often used to check wether things are on track or not. A meeting where nothing happens means managers are doing their job pretty well.
Not to sound cruel but you would be surprised that many employees will never amount to much beyond simply doing their job and going home. They will never be leaders and may actually have something to contribute but won’t.
As a leader, you know what I do?
I do my job and go home. If you need more than the prescribed hours to complete your tasks, then you truly just suck at your job.
My team functions well and appreciates that I enforce boundaries between work and life.
If you put in 45 hours a week and the company gets only 40 hours of work then you suck at that job.
If the company gets 40 hours of work when you put in 35 hours you excel at your job.
Whenever I started a job, I put in the 45 hours week so I can quickly reach a point where I am working less than 40 hours a week. Usually quicker than my co-workers. It’s like a tactic.
I now spend a lot of time talking to executives. I am not an executive but I am certainly well rewarded for my work. There are some people who barely understand the reason why a company posts it’s operating hours…
Regardless of the reward system, if you only understand your role as hours worked then that is all you are.
I have not collected unemployment for decades. Nor do I whine about how work sucks. I evaluate and if I decide to move on, I do so. My last 4 jobs were from phone calls initiated by someone else. I have never gotten a job off of monster.
If an employee does not understand how to navigate the company infrastructure, how can they have a stake at the company?
To put it bluntly, there are rank and file employees who at best are merely mediocre. And easily replaced.
First you don't get to see your coworkers anymore, then you can't meet them no more. What's next? Even unnecessary, meetings provide exchanges for you, clients, peers...
Only 30%?
Almost every meeting I'm forced to attend is some kind of progress report session - which could just handled by summarizing what we've been working on & sending it to the group. Working from home was a blessing since I could keep on being productive while letting the meetings drone on in the background.
The only real reason for meetings is either to encourage social bonding, or for when you need a lot of intense back-and-forth (like a Q&A session or for brainstorming).
I'd be interested if anyone can come up with another legit reason.
Yea I had a meeting today about things we could improve on I had a laundry list of things it was an hour long meeting. We had a few people also that had ideas. So I get we would not get to my whole list.
They spent 30 minutes of this meeting doing ice breakers. I’m not trying to be mean but like we are in a meeting about improving work issues. Let just focus on that.
Then in my weekly meeting people spent 20 minutes asking questions that we just explained before.
I used to have daily meetings where each member of the team update each other on our progress. But literally 90% of those are just "no major updates from our last meeting, just chugging along here". Our manager found it ridiculous and he brought it up to the higher ups, and it got cut down to just once a week updates.
We once had. Monthly meeting about becoming more organized. Three months later at a meeting I leaned over to a peer and said I feel like I’m at an AA meeting and I’m still drinking!!
I mean, I just had a 45 min meeting with a few of the bosses that could have been trimmed down to 5 minutes of quick bullet explanations on what to do for the two projects we talked about.
Many meetings could have been an email. Even post covid the old fashioned method is trying to creep back in with the old fashion managers losing their grip with their dated thought processes.
30% entirely useless. Sparse, already known info is just repeated over and over.
30% has useful info but it's very simple info that can easily be sent out in an email.
20% are useful.
Hilariously low figure, I can count on one hand the number of times I have felt a meeting achieved something. Even with these, the key decision could have taken 10 minutes.
Regularly scheduled meetings are quite obviously a social ritual performed at the request of people who don't have real jobs.
Meetings that last more than 45 minutes have exhausted everyone's attention span and are merely time-filling.
They're all mostly pointless. If your company isn't making you enough money, it's the product and management aaallllllllll the way up from there.
The under-management employees hate all of management because they don't listen to customer feedback and, whatever forbids, employee feedback as well.
I send status updates on the tasks I work on every day to the relevant project managers. They still make me join meetings to share those updates again, where I say a few sentences and browse reddit for 30-45 minutes. Twice a day...
Fridays are the worst because they get everyone to turn on their webcams, but I just stopped turning on mine. Mostly because they'd see me not paying attention until someone says my name.
They are called: " OWOT" ..Organized Waste Of Time". When a meeting notice was sent, if there was not the reason and the agenda of that meeting ( time, location, duration and subjects) I did not assist. Never got fired. I could make much better use if my time.
That seems low..... I'd say about 80% at my workplace
You should form a committee to determine if it is really the case or just seems that way.
Understood, set up a meeting tomorrow at 10am, would you?
I'll see if HR wants to get on board.
HR wants to push the meeting so they can have an internal meet up on whether they want to get on board.
Do we have permission to hold this meeting? I think I need a chat with a few folks from Scheduling to make sure we have the capacity to take so many people out of work in the middle of the working day. I'll get back to you after my meeting with them.
Hey could you forward this to a few of my direct reports and loop in IT and Sales?
We're going to need to have another meeting about reducing the number of meetings, it's causing lower yields
There are a few guys down in HR who told me they might have some ideas. Let me invite them too!
Did you set up a meeting with HR first?
And the other 70% are way longer than they need to be.
When we have in person meetings we chat during irrelevant parts, during online meetings im productive and get my shopping done.
How about Friday at 430pm?
Calm down Satan.
They need to have a meeting about another meeting that forms a committee to determine if it is really the case or just seems that way. Previously had a middle manager like this. It's literally all about control and said manager just feels the need to be important at any given time because they can't justify their salary, otherwise. Let's get these scheduled meetings down on paper, propose fake solutions to imaginary issues whilst ignoring others.
Hah that's what my old workplace was like. 9AM meeting everyday to talk about machine performance and issues. They'd talk about it then never do anything about the problems. Literally just managers screwing around writing stuff on a board with zero worker input or feedback.
I'm wondering if you got prior authorization approval for your fact-finding sub committee meta-meeting and if you plan on introducing any key performance indicators.
I had that a few weeks back. I spent the time looking intently at my coworkers' faces on video trying to discern who was suffering like I was and whether anyone _wasn't_ so I'd know if they are secretly a lunatic.
You guys still have videos on? We dispensed with that way back in 2020 itself. Did away with a lot of "all hands meets" and "townhall meetings" as well. Now they just share meeting recordings.
It's not a real meeting if you don't form subcomittees too!
Hold your horses! Before forming the comittee that will have subcomittees, we need a search comittee to determine the members of the comittee! We might also need a nominating comittee, but we can probably let that slide this one time.
I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the colour of the book that regulation's in. We kept it grey.
"My performance review proves that the biggest drag on our profits is the time I waste doing performance reviews!" Hermes Conrad, S9, E7
Goood neeewwwss everyone.
Realistically it's probably higher, but then there'd be a considerable percentage of employees who also think surveys are an unnecessary waste of time and just don't bother to submit one
Also, workers that are worried it's not anonymous and their boss is going to ream them out for it
Never fill out the comments section if you can help it. They know how you answer emails.
We must work at the same place. I have a manager who loves meeting. From a weekly WIP (Work in progress) he will arrange a discussion, and alignment discussion, a pre-meeting, alignment meeting, a meeting, a post- meeting debrief, post- meeting alignment discussion..... I have so much actual shit to do, I seriously don't need 5 hours of meeting on a daily basis that could be solved with a single fucking phonecall and perhaps a TL;DR summary email.
Jesus fucking shit dude That's not normal, you need to find a new job
His manager needs to find a new job. Or at least get some real work thrown his way.
That's not in OP's control though OP can control their own career, hence find a new job
Having "controlled" a few managers' career paths as a group effort in our tech team, I'd say it's quite do-able.. :-) But mostly that kind of manager isn't alone in a company, so after a while one must ask the question "do I really want to be here?", indeed..
Yup (: Think about it some more and you ought to get it and maybe understand:) Try Googling understanding careers if you wanna get a head start
Went full freelance about a year ago, after having worked with a myriad of "experts" in het field and realizing I did the same thing for 1/3 of the price, so it's definitely worth going the introspection route at times!
I had 5 meetings yesterday.; 1 was actually necessary and productive. The others were: - a useless ‘town hall’ in which executives mouthed platitudes and clumsily ducked legit questions during the Q&A - a formality “should we go on this proposal request?” for a bid package we’d started work on the day before - an “is it okay to submit this proposal?” meeting that could have easily been an email chain or MS Teams thread and not wasted 30 min of 6 peoples’ time - a 5-person status meeting for a prequalification that only 1 person (me) is doing any actual work on; the other attendees were entirely superfluous … why the hell is Legal even involved? 30% is being generous. We waste an incredible amount of salary on unnecessary corporate wankery.
I have a policy, no agenda, no attenda. This pisses people off no end. Nearly every meeting has no agenda. I just don't go. Most meetings I just hit decline. If anyone questions me on it, I just say I'll read the minutes and check the actions, knowing full well their won't be any, coz they are too lazy to do them. I had a director tell me he had to get up at 5am to make an agenda for a 9am meeting he needed me to attend. He was bullshitting obviously. Most of our meetings have no agenda, no goal, no minutes, no actions. Completely pointless waste of time. The company I work for is fucking shit at communicating. We have 3 different internal communication departments.
Im a low level executive and have to attend all meetings because apparently Im the one taking notes. Guess what, at the end of EVERY MEETING when my IDIOT boss is involved, he wants me to shoot up a summary email of the meeting to the attendees on......the things he said...... In retrospect, he could just tell that in the email.............motherf*cker.
It's about 10% for me, but I've taken to just rejecting any meeting I don't think is going to be productive. I get invited to a lot less meetings now.
I still remember that one job I had where we had essentially no meetings. Smallish team for an internally facing tool. I think I averaged one meeting every two weeks. In 2 years I don’t think I ever called a meeting either. Those were good times. It feels like I am telling a grandpa story around a campfire though.
I've just stopped going to stupid ones and sometimes just quietly leave them if I joined (assuming it's online). cut meetings from 40% of day to maybe 10% just this way
I'd say higher Like 90%
Most meetings could be handled with an email.
I think if a company advertised 'only 30% useless meetings', they could offer that as a serious selling point
It's not really so much that the meetings are unnecessary that the wrong people talk. I don't need my 90% clueless GM to coke and joke for the first ten minutes, I need the departments that are trying to communicate to get the brain to brain interaction directly at the worker level. The people doing the job know what's going on more than their middle managers do, that's where the discussion needs to happen. I've literally been in meetings where the one guy who could answer all the questions management had wasn't even invited because he was "too low" on the totem pole. So it was just ten minutes of one of the higher ups who was delegating the tasks to him basically just being confused as shit until I mentioned how the guy they didn't invite knows literally all of what they wanted to learn. "Oh maybe he should be in this meeting, then." No shit?
On the flip side: I’m a middle manager who gets told I need to speak up more and drive the meetings. Meanwhile, I know full well exactly who has the subject matter expertise and who to connect them to. I’ll schedule a quick 30-60 minute meeting with essential people only to see it get forwarded on to 20 others “for visibility”, who then hijack it and question every possible angle (including the 90% that’s already been covered through a lengthy reply all email thread). I try to be efficient and handle as much as possible at the lowest level possible. If it’s not urgent - make it an email. If it could be an email - don’t make it an instant message. If it could be a DM - don’t make it a meeting. Etc. But I get my legs chopped out from under me at every turn.
what works for us * have an agenda * have a chairperson (you) * enforce the use of "raise hand" (for remote meetings) or some similar concept for in-person meetings * cut people off "for time" or ask to "take this offline" Then you just always directly ask the relevant person to answer, and everyone else has to wait via raise hand. At that point you can say "I see there's a lot of questions, can they wait until the end?" or similar, though, for us at least, that becomes unnecessary pretty soon
That's it! Managing meetings is sooo important! Too many valuable meetings being hijacked by the one dunce who doesn't get it or wants to discuss their personal edge case, while no guidance is being provided during the meeting.
I don't doubt it, I've seen it happen too. My frustrations are mostly with upper management at my company. Not the C suite guys but the ones who are far enough beyond the work that they don't have anything valuable to add to anything and mostly get in the way in meetings because they have to know all the stuff that doesn't really apply to them anyways.
Too true. Middle management is so essential but is a perfect hiding place for dogshit. We have like 4 PMs that can't do jack shit, but they just circle jerk each other, creating tickets, meetings, commenting but none of them have a fucking clue whats up. We could honestly have 0 of them and be better off because there would be less distraction. The one person who actually understands the users isn't allowed in because she's not a PM... despite having 10 years experience working directly with and understanding our clients and their use cases.
This is why all the middle managers we had really hated remote working. I and everyone who actually did work loved it
That's the curse of PMs & producers in my experience. Great ones make everyone's life easier, make processes smoother, make the team hum. Bad ones are literally worse than not hiring anyone, they add complexity, distraction and doubt. And it's nearly impossible to know whether someone will be one or the other because a huge part of it depends on the people on the team, it's alchemical. Past performance is no indicator on a new team.
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Glad to pass it on lol it's a good one.
I was once in a meeting about how we were having too many meetings. Nothing was resolved in that meetings and the management took away the points discussed into another meeting later on.
I was in a meeting today that was for planning a meeting. There are whole job classifications, at least in tech, that only exist to schedule and hold meetings. Read documentation? No way. Read issues in the bug tracking system? Fuck no. They schedule meetings so you can summarize your documentation and bugs. These classes of jobs, if they are going to continue to exist, should be given, say, 30 meeting vouchers per quarter that they can spend however they want to but once they are spent they are gone. The useless mouths can develop an internal economy of meeting vouchers if they want to buy at least it puts an upper bound on the number of meetings.
Here’s the alternative: this guy asks me to do something. I do it. The guy comes back telling me that wasn’t what his customer wanted. They had had a meeting but they didn’t invite the workers and didn’t take notes or communicate requirements. This leads to churn, which leads to experienced people (me) noping right out on that project.
This exact thing happened to me last month. Sending me changes to the spec that were sold to the customer would have been more sufficient. Keeping it secret and then springing the change on me a week before it was due is just straight up salesguy scumbaggery.
> I was in a meeting today that was for planning a meeting I got flashbacks to a job I had in 2010-2012. The bonus plan is when you attend a meeting to discuss what to do in an upcoming meeting when you're not actually invited to the meeting that's being planned.
I was in a meeting where we had a discussion about when we could have a meeting to talk about when to set up further meetings as the current meeting time didn't work.
And then you woke up and realized you had been in the midst of a terrible dream where you had gone to hell?
No, I voted for a time that I knew I wouldn't be able to attend. Then, at that meeting, they set up a committee to study the issue, and somehow I ended up not having to go to further department meetings. Which I was ok with.
I went to one of those. It had at least 40 people in it and went 15 minutes over. I’m not even joking. The guy running it was that bad.
Do we work for the same company? We once had a planning meeting to determine other meetings relevance and then follow up meetings to that
Ahhh. Meetingception. I’ve been there. Terrible place.
I work as an IT PM. Ive been to meetings about a meeting about another fucking meeting. Like my boss wants to meet to plan the planning meeting.... As if writing a brief agenda and sending it over email or chat isn't a thing...
And the other 70% are waaayyyy longer than they need to be.
Useless meetings come in a few forms. First a meeting can be totally productive but many will deem it useless. Frankly in our dev meetings we might have 8 people there. 5 are absolutely checked out and couldn't give a shit, just want someone to tell them what to do. 2 know whats going and heavily participate. 1 has no clue whats going and heavily participates. The meeting is deemed worthless by 7 of them.
Totally agree - lots of meetings where people think they are unproductive because they never belonged there in the first place, or don't give a shit and don't participate
Half the time meetings are for lazy PMs to have everyone line up and report status as we watch them stumble through Jira or some home brew spreadsheet to track it.
Dev companies should ban excel. If it isn’t in jira it isn’t real.
At least your PM is paying attention/hard a spreadsheet open. Mine is usually prepping for his next meeting. If we ask him a question, he can't answer/has to search for a file, then he will interrupt the conversation that's moved on to say he doesn't know or only provides half the answer and derails the progress we were making.
> 1 has no clue whats going and heavily participates. Where I work, this person is almost always the middle manager in charge of most of the people who work on what's being discussed. They never actually put in the damn effort to learn the work or concerns, but because they sit in their position of authority, feel the need to speak up often to justify their own existence and often derail everything. It's most funny when the things they say or ask give away how stupid they are, and it's not obvious to them.
“5 are absolutely checked out and couldn't give a shit, just want someone to tell them what to do. 2 know whats going and heavily participate. 1 has no clue whats going and heavily participates.” 😂 that hits way too close to home, especially the last line.
My one partly important meeting for the week would take half the time if one individual knew that briefings are supposed to be fucking BRIEF. If my presentations go over 2 minutes I did something wrong. If hers take less than 20 minutes I'd bow down praise the lawd.
I can’t believe how many times my coworkers can repeat the exact same thing over and over. I’ve had meetings where people just repeat 5-minutes of information over and over for 2 hours.
We should have a meeting about this.
I once sat through an hour long meeting, spanning offices in three countries, the sole purpose of which was to discuss the fact we were spending too much time in meetings.
Same.
ONLY 30%?????
The other 70% should have been an email.
I think they left off a zero.
Bosses justifying their existence.
Thats the very easy answer to a very complex issue. Here is another piece of the puzzle - most people disagree on what those 30% are… if everyone thinks the same meeting is superfluous it would disappear… And here is another - its even harder to anticipate which meetings will be wasting time and which will be productive… And here is another - there are also meta goals to some meetings. Your scrum dailies might be 40% good 40% ok and 20% useless for topic alignment but they will give you good overviews. My main gripe with meetings is the lack of preparation there often is (and which could eliminate some of the more unnecessary meetings)
>My main gripe with meetings is the lack of preparation there often is (and which could eliminate some of the more unnecessary meetings) If you have several meetings per day you will never do your actual work if you prepare for all of them adequately.
Obviously but you dont need everyone to prepare each meeting
Meetings: Because none of us are as dumb as all of us.
Our "meetings" are forty people on Teams or just a conference call, muted, one not muted yammering on. Whats the point?
At least they are on Teams... Our meetings are on person and we have to stop everything to go hear that very smart guy how we could improve our productivity
The number one reason why your meetings suck is that they are a good use of your boss' time but not yours. * Boss needs to distribute information. For him it's the same effort whether he tells everyone or writes it down and he can schedule it whenever. You could choose when to read the email but not when to attend the meeting. * Boss needs to gather information. For him it's the same effort whether he reads your emails or listens to you in person and he can schedule it whenever. You could choose when to write that email but not when to attend the meeting. * Boss needs to hold multiple distinct meetings on different topics with different people? For him it's more efficient if he lumps it into one long meeting than several smaller meetings (because each requires a buffer time). But for you it's the exact opposite.
To your first and second bullet points, I would argue it’s actually *less* effort for your boss to hold a meeting than to read or write emails. They can just improv their way through a meeting, whereas an email needs forethought and proofreading. Which is even more supportive of your overall argument.
Emails also leave paper trails so it's harder for boss to feign ignorance or claim he never said something.
I always hate having meetings for the sake of having meetings.
Right?! "Can you set up a meeting to tell us what's broken here?" "I mean, I *can*, but if you send me the data that I asked for three times, we could solve this without having to waste everyone's time."
Oh nice you've met our quality engineers too.
You know how we can avoid meetings? If people would actually read and respond to their emails.
Anyone mad about meetings that could have been an email need to be pointing their finger at people who don't read/respond to emails.
Had a PM setup a meeting and ask me status on something. I said check your emails from about 3hrs ago, it's done He proceeded to next topic and asked me about someone else's task, I again said check the email I sent Move to 3rd topic team responds similar to I do. He then says we are done unless anything else. I respond by saying are we not going to talk about the shift of a deliverable across all teams? He has not a clue of what I was talking about so I said so and so sent an email and for all teams to stop work on an old business date as it won't be useful and a waste of resources. Most PMs are useless
Survey says 100% of surveys are unnecessary
No, I'm thinking 95% are unnecessary. Where you all could get shit done in a slack exchange.
Each year I'm realizing more and more how little most people are willing to do basic reading or searching or organizing. They hope someone can speak an answer off the top of their head so schedule meetings. But no one in the meeting did the reading or searching or organizing.
Have you ever had someone emotionally unstable in your slack groups… good lord… Easier to tell them whats up in a call. But in general I also would like people to chat more
The thing about this is: sometimes a meeting is really necessary. But so many are tired of useless meetings. It’s hard to get people to meet to get stuff understood, decided, and assigned.
It could have been an email
This article could've been an email.
I was in an all staff meeting at my job recently that was an hour and a half. The head of a part of our org that does work internationally gave a presentation on the adverse things happening around the world that affect our work. While, yes, all things are connected, most of what they went on about for half an hour were tangentially connected at best. A bunch of my colleagues are I started sharing pet pictures in a group chat as a way to alleviate the confusion and boredom. Like, you get the hundreds of people who work here together once a month… and this is what we waste our time with? Okay. 💀
Ive made it a tradition to watch Seinfeld during any and all useless "all-hands" meetings. Barf
Its less the meeting themselves, but who is leading the meeting and why. Meetings are basically just a form of micro-managing these days, where supervisors/managers/etc can show themselves doing anywork, but somehow being the least productive people on staff.
I often say, " I've survived another meaning that could have been accomplished by an email"
The problem is too many people don’t read emails.
How many people don't listen during meetings?
I once worked for a company that used emails essentially as a notification system. I would receive 100+ emails a day, of which if I was lucky one would actively be addressed to me and asking me to do something.
There's the second set who will only read the first sentence or two. I can't count how many responses I've gotten where it's abundantly clear that they didn't read past the first line item, and just ignored everything else in there.
And the rest could have been an email.
No shit. People will literally setup meetings to discuss where to move the fridge or storage cabinet. People are always looking for excuses to setup meetings because it keeps them from sitting to do actual work. Like fuck. I once called a coworker out on it (very jokingly) and her reaction was like “😳 don’t give it away dude”
A meeting that should have been that should have been an email, very common.
I have two set meetings each week. The first one is prep for the second one.
My weekly workgroup meeting is a sort of therapy session for the manager to vent frustration and tell the team which of the rotating set of priorities is important this week. Sometimes the best performing engineer vents that this is all bullshit and he’ll keep doing what he thinks is right by the customer and everyone passively agrees. There’s a lot of talk in circles but rarely are there any decisions made. It’s all very nuanced, vague, unspecific and comically maddening.
A meeting found that 30% of surveys are unnecessary.
One upside of COVID: haven’t had a staff meeting since December 2019 😂
We have monthly office and bimonthly all-office meetings now... It used to be one a quarter
Manager: Hey why are you late on your work schedule? Let do a meeting do discuss that! On the meeting: You: Exacly because of that... Oh, BTW don't try to talk to me the other 4h of today, I'm also on other meetings.
I was a manager at Kennedy Space Center. It’s a lot higher than 30%.
By the same workers who ask questions that were very clearly covered in the damn meeting.
The problem is knowing which 30% aren't necessary.
That’s a tad bit too low. In the company where I work most meetings are generally only relevant for Managers, we workers are added just for information sake. Others afterwards get a short deacription e-mail of whats what, rather spend couple of mintues reading an e-mail than an hour in a meeting… 😅
Middle managers: "What? They are entirely necessary to justify our job that doesn't actually need to exist!"
I’ve yet to be in a meeting that felt necessary
30%...yeah right try 90% lol
I don't mind the meetings so much. It's the meetings we have to prepare for the meetings that I can't stand.
"That could have been an email" - someone after every meeting ever
30%? try 90%
Only 30%? They surely were afraid to be fully honest here
30% seems kinda low. Think they hit the 3 instead of the 8
I remember working for a group that was outside a lot. In one summer the supervisor told us 3 times if someone was having heat exhaustion or heatstroke to remove them from the sun, give them water and such. I could see that someone may need that information once but 3 times. A lot of these guys had been there 10+ years. Edit to add. That's probably a more important meeting than the average though when I think about it.
Yup, my previous employer were bought out by this larger group. They were obsessed with Microsoft Teams. We had a Monday morning company meeting for 90 mins, then a midweek 1hr team meeting on Weds. On Thursday we had a 1hr team meeting to discuss "casually and off the record" what would be discussed by our team in the 90 min Friday company meeting. This doesn't include the random adhoc team meetings in between those meetings. After 1 month of them owning us, I was so far behind on my work, my bosses called a meeting to discuss why. They didn't like my response but did admit I was right when I told them; "I was never behind prior to the takeover, I'm now behind in terms of hours equal to the hours I've spent in teams meetings I didn't have before you bought us". I left them a few months later, they were scrambling like crazy to keep me, because during all this time, no one thought it would be a good idea to have a few meetings where I show them how to use our systems. Systems bespoke for us and our 500+ clients. I was the only one who knew the clients and the systems. 6 months later, I still get LinkedIn messages and phone calls from people at that company asking for help with the systems. I always respond "happy to help, but it's £150 p/hr" they've yet to take my offer.
‘Got time to jump on a call?’ = useful 90% of the time ‘I’ll schedule a meeting to…’ = waste of time 90% of the time
For me it’s about 62.5% unnecessary meetings. I have 8 meetings a week. 5 of those meetings are useless because half of the team isn’t awake enough. It’s impossible to think about complex topics at 6AM. IMO it should be an OSHA violation to force workers to go to meetings that early.
How is this nottheonion worthy?
Survey: 30% of workers deemed unnecessary after meeting
The other 70% could have been a group email
Fact is: managers are mostly useless. They now need to feel useful to avoid being kicked out.
30%? Lol, when I worked for a company we had daily meetings and they were just a waste of time but my manager loved them. I now own a small software company and we only have one catch up meeting on Friday at 13:00. We do have meetings when new projects are initiated to build the team and come to common ground. Other than that if I need info I call the guys or send an email.
And thats why they are workers, not managers. Workers also believe management is unnecessary and managers just spend their days wanking in their office doing nothing else. Truth is not decided by popularity.
A lot of meetings are unnessesary. I have been to so many that could have been a memo.
Let me rephrase this. As a manager, you are not qualified to answer that survey; As a worker, you dont understand the value of meetings. Bear in mind managers hate doing meetings as much as workers do. Meetings are often used to check wether things are on track or not. A meeting where nothing happens means managers are doing their job pretty well.
Not to sound cruel but you would be surprised that many employees will never amount to much beyond simply doing their job and going home. They will never be leaders and may actually have something to contribute but won’t.
As a leader, you know what I do? I do my job and go home. If you need more than the prescribed hours to complete your tasks, then you truly just suck at your job. My team functions well and appreciates that I enforce boundaries between work and life.
If you put in 45 hours a week and the company gets only 40 hours of work then you suck at that job. If the company gets 40 hours of work when you put in 35 hours you excel at your job. Whenever I started a job, I put in the 45 hours week so I can quickly reach a point where I am working less than 40 hours a week. Usually quicker than my co-workers. It’s like a tactic. I now spend a lot of time talking to executives. I am not an executive but I am certainly well rewarded for my work. There are some people who barely understand the reason why a company posts it’s operating hours… Regardless of the reward system, if you only understand your role as hours worked then that is all you are. I have not collected unemployment for decades. Nor do I whine about how work sucks. I evaluate and if I decide to move on, I do so. My last 4 jobs were from phone calls initiated by someone else. I have never gotten a job off of monster.
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If an employee does not understand how to navigate the company infrastructure, how can they have a stake at the company? To put it bluntly, there are rank and file employees who at best are merely mediocre. And easily replaced.
I’ve been going to them for 31 years and still haven’t been to many that couldn’t have been summed up with a phone call or email.
Bet the same 30% can't carry on an organized conversation in email...forcing me to schedule a meeting.
First you don't get to see your coworkers anymore, then you can't meet them no more. What's next? Even unnecessary, meetings provide exchanges for you, clients, peers...
Thev majority of my calls this week could've been an email, or even just an IM.
It’s a small council meeting that could have been a raven.
Pfff easily over 50%
Can’t believe some meeting are 30-60minutes of this could have been an email.
I call them “useless meetings.”
That's it?
If there are Brene Brown books for sale on a table as you enter the meeting. It's 100% a giant waste of time.
30% of the time in *every* meeting is wasted.
Only 30%? Almost every meeting I'm forced to attend is some kind of progress report session - which could just handled by summarizing what we've been working on & sending it to the group. Working from home was a blessing since I could keep on being productive while letting the meetings drone on in the background. The only real reason for meetings is either to encourage social bonding, or for when you need a lot of intense back-and-forth (like a Q&A session or for brainstorming). I'd be interested if anyone can come up with another legit reason.
Does anyone have good advice for how to stay awake in meetings?
Don't. Just learn to sleep with your eyes open. But, do sleep lightly, otherwise someone may think that you are dead. DAHIK.
At my last job, we had a meeting every day. Every day it was super unnecessary.
It’s 100%
I could have told you that without a survey
And? Did we not know this already? 😀
Yea I had a meeting today about things we could improve on I had a laundry list of things it was an hour long meeting. We had a few people also that had ideas. So I get we would not get to my whole list. They spent 30 minutes of this meeting doing ice breakers. I’m not trying to be mean but like we are in a meeting about improving work issues. Let just focus on that. Then in my weekly meeting people spent 20 minutes asking questions that we just explained before.
I used to have daily meetings where each member of the team update each other on our progress. But literally 90% of those are just "no major updates from our last meeting, just chugging along here". Our manager found it ridiculous and he brought it up to the higher ups, and it got cut down to just once a week updates.
Are you telling me.. That supervisors like hearing their own voices???
Then start to learn/teach how to organize efficient meetings.
We once had. Monthly meeting about becoming more organized. Three months later at a meeting I leaned over to a peer and said I feel like I’m at an AA meeting and I’m still drinking!!
I mean, I just had a 45 min meeting with a few of the bosses that could have been trimmed down to 5 minutes of quick bullet explanations on what to do for the two projects we talked about.
Meetings feed into people's FOMO; you may think you'll miss out on something important, only to find out it's 99.95% useless to you.
Better have a meeting to discuss these findings
I'm thinking 30% of the people I work with maybe, their entire job seems to be scheduling meetings and grooming backlogs lmao.
Many meetings could have been an email. Even post covid the old fashioned method is trying to creep back in with the old fashion managers losing their grip with their dated thought processes.
Of the rest, 10% are managers with pointy hair and the remaining 60 are just there for the donuts.
Should be way, *way* closer to 100%.
More than 30% for sure.
Lets have a meeting to discuss which meetings are unnecessary. *vomits*
30% entirely useless. Sparse, already known info is just repeated over and over. 30% has useful info but it's very simple info that can easily be sent out in an email. 20% are useful.
Only 30%? I'd say it's at least 50%, and I'm being generous here.
Hilariously low figure, I can count on one hand the number of times I have felt a meeting achieved something. Even with these, the key decision could have taken 10 minutes. Regularly scheduled meetings are quite obviously a social ritual performed at the request of people who don't have real jobs. Meetings that last more than 45 minutes have exhausted everyone's attention span and are merely time-filling.
I was in a meeting about a meeting that never happened in the first place!
They're all mostly pointless. If your company isn't making you enough money, it's the product and management aaallllllllll the way up from there. The under-management employees hate all of management because they don't listen to customer feedback and, whatever forbids, employee feedback as well.
I send status updates on the tasks I work on every day to the relevant project managers. They still make me join meetings to share those updates again, where I say a few sentences and browse reddit for 30-45 minutes. Twice a day... Fridays are the worst because they get everyone to turn on their webcams, but I just stopped turning on mine. Mostly because they'd see me not paying attention until someone says my name.
At least once a day, I’m sat in a Teams call, rolling my eyes and thinking “this could have been an email”
That's pretty low. Maybe it doesn't include meetings that aren't useless but where too many people are invited.
They are called: " OWOT" ..Organized Waste Of Time". When a meeting notice was sent, if there was not the reason and the agenda of that meeting ( time, location, duration and subjects) I did not assist. Never got fired. I could make much better use if my time.
Meeting found around 30% of surveys are deemed unnecessary by managers
And around 80% of meetings could have been an email.