Slashdot Mirror
How Chat and Youth Are Killing the Meeting
dominique_cimafranca writes "Forbes columnist Dan Woods describes a change in the way some companies handle meetings. Owing to instant messaging and younger tech-savvy CEOs, meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week. Woods proposes ways to make this 'meetingless' management effective."
> meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week
Bravo, Bravissimo. Many of us have been aware of time wasted on meetings for quite a while.
Let's be clear, planning is necessary and some meetings still might be needed. I guess almost everybody knows what I am talking about... ;-))
I am sure Dilbert hasn't got the monopoly on this topic but here are some links anyway...
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-11-23/
http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2001-12-15/
http://www.revold.no/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Dilbert_MeetingMadness.jpg
http://brontesaurus.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/dilbert-meeting.gif
http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/30000/1000/900/31967/31967.strip.gif
http://slcta.net/images/dilbert2007112223221.gif
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
...these horrible technologies turn every hour of every day into an eternal meeting.
How IM and SMS Are Killing the Languages All Over the World.
We need to get back to the Old Ways, where we invested all of time more wisely in Talking About Doing Stuff. We fear this new fangled "work".
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Thirty hours of a forty-hour workweek devoted to meetings? I'm sure managers are getting nervous at the idea you can spend two hours a week on meetings and 38 hours a week getting stuff done.
Just like I have to show that I've gotten something done for the company in order to justify my paycheck, maybe it's time for the meeting-happy managers to show that their meetings have provided value to the company.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Ostensibly you hold meetings to do three things
1) Share current status
2) Discuss ideas
3) Plan
A good manager has all these worked out beforehand, and uses this preparation to lead the meeting effectively and efficiently.
If you are spending hours and hours in meetings with your team, something is terribly wrong.
Good news: Fewer and shorter meetings.
Bad news: Now every time you're IM'd by your manager it is a meeting.
Good news: Everyone can be 'in the loop' all of the time
Bad news: It's even easier to keep people out of the loop
Good news: Everything is less formal -- no more meeting minutes or meeting rules
Bad news: Now every single scrap of paper and electronic barf that crosses your desk must be recorded and filed.
Good news: With laptops and smart phones you can have a 'meeting' at any time day or night ti fit your schedule
Bad news: Your manager does not know or care about your schedule -- just his own.
Good luck with that.
Long meetings have been the butt of jokes for as long as I can remember, and for good reason: they're a giant waste of time, especially for technical people.
This is usually true. But I have come around to the power of meetings 'once and awhile'. Sometimes it is better to cut off the stream of IM's and emails and just stick everyone in the same room and hash it out. This does have upsides. EVERYONE is focused on the task at hand and not the other 20 things they were doing. Everyone works towards a solution. Now do this too much though and you never get anything done. Dont do it enough and you start to see the other 'micro meetings' getting hijacked for other tasks with the wrong people in them.
Balance is key. Too much is bad too little is also bad.
Good grief, if they had 30 hours of meetings per week, and probably a few more hours walking to the next meeting and whatnot, when did they have time to do any actual work? I'm affraid that just hearing about spending 30 hours a week in meetings tops everything I've ever read in a Dilbert strip.
That gives me kind of a snarky idea, though. I've long been under the impression that most meetings (or a large part of the time allocated to them) falls basically into two categories:
- substitute for a social life (think: the boss just wants to talk to some people)
- responsibility avoidance (think: we all talked about it for hours, hence nobody is personally responsible for any given decision or lack thereof. Sorta like why they give firing squads blanks too.)
There are of course sub-categories and nuances (e.g., the crying on each other's shoulder instead of taking a decision kind of meeting, or the kind that's not just a substitute for social contact, but a one-sided occasion to brag too.) But I think that as top-leve categories, those two would account for more than half of the time wasting.
I wonder if the reduction in meeting hours just has to do with, well, if you give a lonely boss email and IRC and IM and all, he can get his socializing fix without preventing his subordinates from working in the process.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It is hilarious/annoying as hell when you get an older "C" level executive who uses the corporate IM like this:
Bossman: Are you there?
Me: yes
*phone rings*
I usually answer their questions, which are always about *impossible to say verbally* statistics within the IM window, even while they are talking on the phone... Kind of as a way to Passive-Aggressively say "hey you know all that licensing money you pay to Microsoft for this nice IM solution? it would work better than the phone if you would just use it.
Meetings are really dick-size wars. The manager that can call the most people to a meeting obviously has the biggest dick. And if you have to attend that meeting, your dick is smaller than his.
Once you get past the need for the ego boost, you notice that meetings drop off to almost nothing. No matter what the technology used, no matter what the industry.
Don't forget that every single decision made in the meeting must have an associated "next action" assigned to somebody. Otherwise, there's no point in making that decision.
So one of your solutions to effective meetings is to... have another meeting first? If you're making decisions prior then your main meeting sounds more like a "progress report".
The problem with replacing face-to-face with IMs and emails is that you turn what should be a few short meetings into long, drawn-out discussions that can continue pulling attention away for hours.
* Make decisions beforehand with the key people. Most decisions don't really get made in the big meeting. Two or three key decision makers on the same page and the rest follow or simply refine the decision.
I can't stress this one enough. Meetings are not the place to hash out decisions - especially if they're cross-departmental meetings. I've had untold meetings wasted where we finally managed to get all the head honchos together in the same room, and we spend the hour trying to come to an agreement on point 1, sub-point a.
Instead, have an individual talk with the people who either sign the pay checks or who have some sort of authority to make things happen. Come to an agreement before the meeting, and then just present the conclusions. Yes, you should still listen to objections from others in the meeting - after all, everyone's there for a reason. But you should never, ever walk have a meeting without knowing exactly who is going to say what.
If you can make this happens, meetings are short, productive, and leave people happy. Everything else is icing on the cake.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.