Meeting to Meet

I think one of the banes of any office worker's existance can easily be meetings. These occasional or frequent (depending on your office) enforced get-togethers can often lead to a loss of productivity to the point that you begin to hold meetings to discuss why you aren't being productive anymore. It's a vicious circle that keeps itself alive by the fact that it's self-feeding and never ending unless someone steps up and boldly refuses to attend them. Of course then you'll be holding a private meeting to discuss how you aren't a team player or that it is reflecting badly on your performance. So suffice it to say that we all have attended meetings that we all have hated all the while wondering why we're bothering to meet in the first place.

I think most people will agree that meetings these days can often end up being very counterproductive. I say this because as I have been studying business models during my pursuit of my MBA I have encountered cases where businesses have described how the greater the hierarchy in their operations, the less productive or inventive that organization has become. Basically this is because they found that the more levels of hierarchy there is the more discussions need to be held so 'progress' can be reported up the chain of command until it reaches the very top. The problem I see with this is that often times things are 'lost in translation' and the findings are sometime so misinterpreted by the time they reach the top that you're at a loss to explain how and why certain things are the way they are.

But one thing I've never understood about meetings is that there never seems to be a good time for them. If you're being led by a very early rising manager then you will undoubtedly have meetings the first thing in the morning at such a time that if you're running late, you won't have time for coffee or breakfast before it's time to own up to what you have been doing the last week or so. If you have a manager that likes to see how the day pans out then he'll likely call the meeting for the later afternoon when most of the civilized world is looking to head home and do some relaxing for a change. Then of course there are those who like to loosely refer to meetings held around 11:30 or noon as 'working lunch' meetings but there are far fewer who actually provide lunch or give you time to get lunch before the meeting kicks off. The consequence of that is that you have the occasional rumble of someone's stomach at an inopertune time. Sometimes the noises are so loud that those on teleconference seem to think someone has spoken and the message came out garbled. "I think the line is a little messed up; did someone say something?"

And what's the deal with having meetings at the end of the day with a deadline for the action items being the next day? If managers didn't sit on their meetings until the end of the day their staffs would have more time to accomplish their work rather than working late. Stands to reason doesn't it? I know that there have been some weeks with me where I've had meetings the first three days of the week; one on each day. And the basic result of this was that we explained to varying levels of management what we had worked on since our last meeting and what we were aiming to work on. Monday was our direct manager (our team lead) then was his manager (his lead) and then the section manager on the third day (the lead's lead's lead). All naturally insistent that everyone have their team's on hand so that everyone knows what's going on. Because these initial meetings last so long we end up attempting to find ways to streamline the process. So then we have joint meetings to discuss how to shorten the process for our meetings.

I remember working on one job where we would put briefing charts together for the month end briefing before the previous month had even ended. For example, we would start assembling February's charts at the end of January. The reason being that by the time we got through the levels of management, it was time to present the actual data. We spent more time meeting and vetting our draft charts then we did in actually working on what the charts were showing us. I remember sitting there in one meeting when one of the managers asked why our productivity was down for the month and I sat there screaming in my mind that if we didn't spend so much time on putting charts together perhaps we could be productive.

Some people out there live for meetings because it's a more-or-less legal excuse to socialize on company time while at work. I don't mind general chit-chat for a bit but then when the chit-chat ends up taking longer than the actual content of the meeting is when I start to get worried. We had a manager on one of our teams who was so good at making small-talk that lasted for 45 minutes that we used to get worried when she started off by saying "I won't keep you long." That was an indication to us that the actual content of the meeting was very small so in order to utilize the entire hour that the meeting was scheduled for, we would spend the first 15 minutes discussing the work and then the rest of the time in idle talk. It led me to conclude that in meetings with briefing slides, the time in the meeting was inversely proportional to the amount of time you would spend in the meeting. For example if there were only ten slides you could probably count on being there for four hours. If you had 115 slides then you'd probably be there for two minutes. There are exceptions to the rule of course but more often than not that theorem holds true. Now if you'll excuse me... I'm off to a meeting.