I was pushing to hold desk meetings back before we were in COVID.
Why am i stopping everything I’m doing to go sit in a room for 30 minutes and listen to everyone else talk about crap not related to me in which I’ve got maybe 5 minutes worth of things to say by the end.
In most cases we were already broadcasting the meeting to someone not in the room across the country.
I see all these posts/comments about meetings that are obnoxiously inefficient, and I’m so sorry for everyone who has to deal with them; it’s almost completely foreign to me
I work medical, and our meetings are usually reps teaching us about some new or revamped devices… but they gather us on-shift to listen to a 5 min schpiel and have us sign a paper. If I’m busy, too bad and you can try and catch me next time. If I get called mid-teaching… my name is signed, and nobody cares. If I somehow miss it entirely… oh well, guess it’s on me now to learn any changes. We have one formal review per year that takes all of 10 minutes. Maybe 2 or 3 formal meetings per year… and if I can’t make it, doesn’t matter
I already hate the few meetings we have, as is; and I’m only “required” to go to one per year… and it’s maybe 10 minutes. Or I can dodge it, and just say “my bad” (though not a good look for you). I simply can’t imagine being constantly pulled away for bullshit… and I guess I’m grateful for that
Granted, my job has it’s own special flavor of hell and I should’ve been an electrical engineer. But all the lack of meetings involved makes me feel a little bit better; as penance for the other rampant bullshit I have to deal with
These meetings y’all speak of — I just can’t imagine how antsy and aggravated I would be to have to attend such idiotic fluff that “could’ve been an email”. Fuck, I can even ignore my emails with almost no recourse. Kudos to y’all for getting through it, cause I’d really rather not. Let me work, leave me alone, and then I go the fuck home; that’s all I want
Quarterly employee feedback says people feel in general that they don’t understand what’s going on in the company and what projects / deadlines are coming up and how it all relates to other departments. Everybody’s pretty much in tune with what happens in their own department.
Project management spins up and creates confluence documents that contain all of this information. Analytics spins up weekly reports that go out to everyone.
Next quarterly, top issue is once again people don’t understand what’s going on at the company. We missed that, we didn’t hear about that, we didn’t understand those grass, we didn’t know the chart was updated. Bottom line is nobody’s reading the data there’s departments are churning it out for nothing.
And that my friend is how you get a daily 30 minute all-hands sync and a weekly all hands company meeting.
Sounds like a skill issue. Someone can’t write an update that isn’t the longest paragraph of text scientifically created to be the most boring and incomprehensible sequence of words put together as a biological weapon.
And by someone I mean everyone in the corporate world.
I think it’s an occupational hazard. If you don’t have people interested in numbers you don’t have finance people and analytics people. The people who are interested in numbers are unfortunately also generally the kind of people that don’t understand that other people aren’t interested in numbers. There are correlating data with excitement because it’s what they feel.
Or analytics guy was having a rough week and said he was burning out from dealing with The analytics report. On the 6th it does this and on the 8th it did this and the 9th we had this sale. 99% of the people in the meeting only care that it’s up and to the right, flat, or down into the right
The graph technically needs two to three points on it and you need to explain why it’s aimed in whatever direction it’s aimed.
My update isn’t exciting but it is important. I need people to know this stuff or I’ll be fielding questions on it for the next 6 months as everyone individually discovers the changes.
I’m not going to spend time rewriting my update to sound thrilling and engaging in order to attract the eyes of the lowest common denominators attention span.
So we have a meeting, everyone listens, and if they say afterwards that they weren’t told or weren’t paying attention, there’s a recording of the zoom call so they can try again.
It’s work, if it were fun and enjoyable 100% of the time we wouldn’t be paid to be there.
No, you write you shit once so it’s understandable, and if you can’t you learn how to do it since it’s your job. And then if someone has questions you refer them to your writing, and eventually they learn to read what you write, since it’s their job.
Your email explaining you shit has the same power of zoom recording, more even, because it’s concise.
It’s work, you’re paid to be there, no need to make it harder for everyone just because you can.
Noone listens to your ramblings either.
If noone reads the email and nothing bad is happening to them, then they are right to not read it. If it does, then it’s their fault to not read the email. It doesn’t matter if you waste 30 minutes of their life or 1 minute of their life, they will get or not get the info either way.
I was pushing to hold desk meetings back before we were in COVID.
Why am i stopping everything I’m doing to go sit in a room for 30 minutes and listen to everyone else talk about crap not related to me in which I’ve got maybe 5 minutes worth of things to say by the end.
In most cases we were already broadcasting the meeting to someone not in the room across the country.
I see all these posts/comments about meetings that are obnoxiously inefficient, and I’m so sorry for everyone who has to deal with them; it’s almost completely foreign to me
I work medical, and our meetings are usually reps teaching us about some new or revamped devices… but they gather us on-shift to listen to a 5 min schpiel and have us sign a paper. If I’m busy, too bad and you can try and catch me next time. If I get called mid-teaching… my name is signed, and nobody cares. If I somehow miss it entirely… oh well, guess it’s on me now to learn any changes. We have one formal review per year that takes all of 10 minutes. Maybe 2 or 3 formal meetings per year… and if I can’t make it, doesn’t matter
I already hate the few meetings we have, as is; and I’m only “required” to go to one per year… and it’s maybe 10 minutes. Or I can dodge it, and just say “my bad” (though not a good look for you). I simply can’t imagine being constantly pulled away for bullshit… and I guess I’m grateful for that
Granted, my job has it’s own special flavor of hell and I should’ve been an electrical engineer. But all the lack of meetings involved makes me feel a little bit better; as penance for the other rampant bullshit I have to deal with
These meetings y’all speak of — I just can’t imagine how antsy and aggravated I would be to have to attend such idiotic fluff that “could’ve been an email”. Fuck, I can even ignore my emails with almost no recourse. Kudos to y’all for getting through it, cause I’d really rather not. Let me work, leave me alone, and then I go the fuck home; that’s all I want
Why not make a step further, and ask why do you even have 30 minutes meeting if it’s not useful?
My entire career could have been an email.
That’s a more complicated problem.
Quarterly employee feedback says people feel in general that they don’t understand what’s going on in the company and what projects / deadlines are coming up and how it all relates to other departments. Everybody’s pretty much in tune with what happens in their own department.
Project management spins up and creates confluence documents that contain all of this information. Analytics spins up weekly reports that go out to everyone.
Next quarterly, top issue is once again people don’t understand what’s going on at the company. We missed that, we didn’t hear about that, we didn’t understand those grass, we didn’t know the chart was updated. Bottom line is nobody’s reading the data there’s departments are churning it out for nothing.
And that my friend is how you get a daily 30 minute all-hands sync and a weekly all hands company meeting.
Sounds like a skill issue. Someone can’t write an update that isn’t the longest paragraph of text scientifically created to be the most boring and incomprehensible sequence of words put together as a biological weapon.
And by someone I mean everyone in the corporate world.
I think it’s an occupational hazard. If you don’t have people interested in numbers you don’t have finance people and analytics people. The people who are interested in numbers are unfortunately also generally the kind of people that don’t understand that other people aren’t interested in numbers. There are correlating data with excitement because it’s what they feel.
Or analytics guy was having a rough week and said he was burning out from dealing with The analytics report. On the 6th it does this and on the 8th it did this and the 9th we had this sale. 99% of the people in the meeting only care that it’s up and to the right, flat, or down into the right
The graph technically needs two to three points on it and you need to explain why it’s aimed in whatever direction it’s aimed.
My update isn’t exciting but it is important. I need people to know this stuff or I’ll be fielding questions on it for the next 6 months as everyone individually discovers the changes.
I’m not going to spend time rewriting my update to sound thrilling and engaging in order to attract the eyes of the lowest common denominators attention span.
So we have a meeting, everyone listens, and if they say afterwards that they weren’t told or weren’t paying attention, there’s a recording of the zoom call so they can try again.
It’s work, if it were fun and enjoyable 100% of the time we wouldn’t be paid to be there.
No, you write you shit once so it’s understandable, and if you can’t you learn how to do it since it’s your job. And then if someone has questions you refer them to your writing, and eventually they learn to read what you write, since it’s their job.
Your email explaining you shit has the same power of zoom recording, more even, because it’s concise.
It’s work, you’re paid to be there, no need to make it harder for everyone just because you can.
Noone reads the email.
Noone listens to your ramblings either.
If noone reads the email and nothing bad is happening to them, then they are right to not read it. If it does, then it’s their fault to not read the email. It doesn’t matter if you waste 30 minutes of their life or 1 minute of their life, they will get or not get the info either way.
Great 25 minutes of very relaxing work…
I’d rather put in my 8 hours get on my shit done and go the hell home.
Wfh is now 8 hours of moderately relaxing work and I don’t even have to have another 2 hours of driving in traffic.