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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.
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-11-05/
...these horrible technologies turn every hour of every day into an eternal meeting.
I've been sitting in an IRC channel with all the devs all day every day. Sounds like an all-day meeting to me, it's just more efficient.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
To succeed in the long term and at scale, stream-of-consciousness management must be supplemented in the following ways:
All of you using IRC and email now have experience in "stream-of-consciousness management". Don't forget or otherwise the resume scanners will pass you over and when you're in the first interview, the HR drone will say you don't have up to date skills and chuck your resume away.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
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.
I work for a very successful, young company which is run by a very young CEO. On average, I have no meetings at all. We're currently in a huge crunch right now, which means I have 3-minute check-ins at the beginning and the end of the day.
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 looks very much like one of those articles people will be mocking in 10 years. This really makes Forbes look like they're clinging to the 20th century...how embarrassing.
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.
...until morale improves.
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.
Technology, in and of itself, will not improve meetings. Effective management improves meetings.
Give a group of inefficient people an IM client, and they will be inefficient people IMing all day and interrupting.
I learned a lot about running meetings from effective managers and ineffective ones. My favorite example was a Senior VP for a regional bank. He held monthly meeting with all managers. Each manager was alloted time to speak. But you better damn well have something to say. Most managers passed time off to the next. Only the hihglights that really impacted the group as a whole got shared. Generally 15-20 people invited. Meetings 15-20 minutes. It was effective use of time, effective information. managers could seek each other out if they had other things to discuss.
Want to have good meetings?
* Invite only those that should be there. You don't need 3 marketing guys for your project kickoff meeting
* Above 8 or 9 invitees is a big fat warning sign.
* Have a written agenda. Circulate it beforehand.
* Have a hard end time to meetings. Make it intentionally shorter than it usually would go.
* 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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Man, two hours a week isn't nearly enough time for the micromanagement, pontification, self-promotion, idle chatter and general dumbfuckery that has become the mainstay of my job -- I can't see anyone in management in any serious-size company (where the most important job qualification for middle management is, of course, meetings) going for this.
My God, can you just imagine having eight hours to sink into work, unbroken by pointless meetings? Being able to concentrate on a task rather than sit in some soul-crushing little room with fluorescent lighting just to realize that your boss brought you in just so he'd have people sitting there to look impressive to some other department? Getting things done rather than listen to your coworkers discuss the specifics of your job even though they're not vaguely qualified to do so?
It'd be glorious.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
He needed to be in constant contact with me throughout the entire day.
I had gone down to the server room for about 45 minutes, and came back to this IM:
"ANSWER ME!!!! YOU MUST ANSWER ME! I AM YOUR MANAGER AND NEED TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!" I'm not kidding. It was that obnoxious.
Never mind the fact that we all carried around cellphones and he could have easily called me if he so desperately needed to talk to me.
It turned out that, as usual, all he wanted was a "status update" on an install I was doing. Honestly, this was more of a quite common tech-to-management role switch problem, but the fact that he had IM at his disposal just made workdays damn near unbearable.
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.
Perhaps a better article title would be "How Meetings and those Who Like them are Killing Productivity".
Best idea from Extreme Programming
By the headline I thought this might be about people using IM during meetings killing things. I tend to agree that having multi-hour meetings usually is pretty useless. If you really have that much information that needs to be shared chances are no one in your audience can absorb it all in a long tedious non-interactive meeting.
OTOH, I hope people don't try to take this as "we can do everything without face to face interaction!" This is also problematic. I work with a number of people who live far away and only come into the office every few weeks. We work pretty well over the interwebs but the couple days we get for face to face interaction is invaluable.
Back to my first thought, when you do have to be in a meeting and bring a laptop, just don't bury yourself in IMing with other people, checking e-mail, etc. It's distracting and I really hate it when someone has to repeat a question because someone was reading the latest Slashdot headlines. It's a level of inconsiderateness that shouldn't be found in a professional environment. That said, if I called a meeting and it seems useless to you, tell me!
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.