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."

Comments

Bravo, Bravissimo

[ls671]

> 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

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[eln]

As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed. I've seen email exchanges go on for days arguing about something that could have been resolved in about 15 minutes with a simple conference call. There's also the issue that workers can tend to feel lost or abandoned if they don't have at least semi-regular communication with their bosses, even if it's just a weekly status meeting. For whatever reason, email communication just doesn't serve the same purpose as effectively.

30 hours per week of meetings is definitely excessive (and lots of people in my organization have that and even more scheduled every single week), but 2 hours is, in most cases (especially for management), too little. The key is balance and making sure the meetings you schedule are effective and serve a definite purpose. Further, invitee lists for individual meetings should only include essential personnel. I've seen plenty of times when someone isn't quite sure who to invite, so rather than taking the time to find out they'll just invite anyone they can think of who might possibly have some input, which makes meetings chaotic and overly long. Further, recurring meetings should be kept short and to the point. Scheduling an hour every week is usually not necessary for most things, and if you schedule it people tend to try to fill that time, even when they don't have anything of real substance to add.

Meetings are not the scourge of business, improperly managed meetings are.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[nomadic]

I mean, they do realize that there are only 40 hours in a work week, right?

Can I have your job?

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Pharmboy]

Some of us really LIKE the work we do. Its the people we do it with that we don't like. If I had to do less actual work, and spend more time with the people I do the work with, I would quit.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Lumpy]

I've seen meetings go on for a solid day because no manager in the place would man up and take charge ore responsibility. everything kept going around and around, it's what jaded me against MBA's and how worthless they are.

I have wasted 8 hours in a meeting over a data protocol that I finally gave up and said," I'll write the damned spec, Hell I came up with a working prototype over the last 4 hours and it's already installed on the test server. Want to take a look?"

I was afterward talked to about stepping out of my bounds and embarrassing a couple of managers. I shrugged, and said, "if they would do their jobs, I would not have to do it for them"

I am so glad I don't work at a large corporation anymore...

P.S.: they used my spec, After a manager tweaked it by flipping two data fields and claiming it as his own.

Obligatory

[andyh3930]

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-11-05/

Or you could say...

[Anonymous Coward]

...these horrible technologies turn every hour of every day into an eternal meeting.

Update your resumes guys.

[AnonymousClown]

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.

Help! We're wasting our time Doing Stuff!

[Rogerborg]

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".

Justify their Existence

[Qzukk]

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.

What is a meeting for?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

The meetings will continue...

[Lendrick]

...until morale improves.

Actually misguided

[MyLongNickName]

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.

Re:Actually misguided

[NeutronCowboy]

* 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.

This'd be my boss's worst nightmare

[Skyshadow]

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.

No kidding...

[IANAAC]

When I was still working in IT, the last contract job I had, I had a micro-manager from hell. He'd never held any sort of management job before, but technically was brilliant.

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.

The real problem ...

[khasim]

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.

no chairs at meetings

[peter303]

Best idea from Extreme Programming