Employers Are Trying 'Quiet Days' To Dial Back the Time Remote Workers Spend on Meetings (wsj.com) 44
Some employers are giving their Zoomed-out workers a break. From a report: From tech startups to sprawling hospitals, businesses say they are trying to dial back time employees spend in remote meetings after realizing that hours spent on video calls every day have taken a toll. Still, some employees have a hard time breaking the Zoom habit, even with their bosses telling them to stop. Executives making the switch say meeting schedules ballooned in the pandemic's early days, largely due to the perceived ease of video calls and a desire to maintain workday normalcy as much of the country sheltered in place. "Zoom fatigue is real," said Abby Payne, chief people officer at SailPoint Technologies. The Austin, Texas, company has instituted a ban on meetings from 10 a.m. to noon every Tuesday and Thursday. Employee comments about sitting down at their computers at 7 a.m. and not getting up for 12 hours helped prompt the move, Ms. Payne said. "This is really a way for the organization as a whole to address both the fatigue of staring into a computer and also the reality that half of us have little ones," she added. The 1,000-person company enacted the restriction on meetings in August when it realized many employees would be juggling work while also raising children who would be attending school remotely in the fall.
Solve the real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to solve the structural problems which cause the meetings in the first place. My company tried this on Fridays and all it did was fill up the other days with more meetings. And then people held the "really important" last minute meetings on Friday anyway.
You can reduce the need for meetings in an organization, but it takes work. This is just some gimmick thought up by an HR drone.
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"Really important last minute meetings" are a sign of bad project management.
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"Really important last minute meetings" are a sign of bad project management.
Excessive/useless meetings are a sign of bad project management.
One job I had, my time was split between two groups, so I was spending at least 10 hours a week in duplicated meetings with the same information that could have sent in an email.
Between that and the people who couldn't understand simple information causing meetings to go over up to an hour with their repeated questions, I usually brought a laptop, and worked during the meetings.
This is the job where one person spend three months cutting and pa
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I had a project manager once who made sure to have a 8AM meeting every Friday as a status meeting. He called everyone he managed, so it usually ran to 1:30PM. Of course, those he deemed important he'd dismiss when they were done (around 11AM) while everyone else was forced to sit around for their turn.
Of course, that pretty much broke you, and being Friday you were useless the rest of the day. I ended up adding another 25% to my estimates to counteract this
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I had a project manager once who made sure to have a 8AM meeting every Friday as a status meeting. He called everyone he managed, so it usually ran to 1:30PM. Of course, those he deemed important he'd dismiss when they were done (around 11AM) while everyone else was forced to sit around for their turn.
Of course, that pretty much broke you, and being Friday you were useless the rest of the day. I ended up adding another 25% to my estimates to counteract this
I usually worked 9-6 with a 1 hour lunch which I usually worked through.
When I was assigned to a new supervisor he told me I had to be in to work at 8am. I then started leaving at 4pm.
When asked "Why?" I told him if he decided when I arrived, I'd decide when to leave.
2 months after I was transferred to a completely different group ( a lateral move, but way more technically cool, an upper management dick move that apparently he didn't even try to challenge).
He asked me why I was no lo
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"Really important last minute meetings" are a sign of bad project management.
In our specific case it is more of a roadmap and program / product management issue, since our project managers and team leads are forced into a chaotic enough environment where last minute meetings are so frequently necessary. But that illustrates (to me at least) that the real problems causing meetings are usual deeply structural throughout an organization which suffers from this problem, and won't be fixed by simple things like following better project management practices or moving to some flavor of agi
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"Really important last minute meetings" are a sign of bad project management.
> No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy.
or in modern parlance
> No business plan survives first contact with the customer.
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No project plan coming from the project management department survives first contact with any other department.
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No, it is a sign of extrovert going nuts on their own and resorting to meetings on zoom. Corporate response, ignore reality, we save money on office space, bonus time for us and fuck them. Cut off zoom and you will lose them.
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I don't know that you know how sad your comment reads. You should try finding an emotional support outlet outside of work. Like volunteer for a non-profit or something, or find a place of worship you can plug into. Your work shouldn't be your only support outlet because it's going to fail you.
Re:Solve the real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
My company tried this on Fridays and all it did was fill up the other days with more meetings.
Sounds like a win to me.
You see, it's not so much the time spent in the meetings, as it is the time BETWEEN the meetings that is wasted for me. "Aright, I'm out of this meeting, and 30 minutes until the next one. That's not enough time to really do anything big."
Causing meetings to be closer together 4 days of the week, and absent the fifth day, sounds like it would be a vast improvement.
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But this issue now is that there are MORE meetings during the shutdown, when logically one would assume that not being in the office there would be fewer.
You can solve a lot of this with some simple meeting rules, and rules for when to have meetings.
- Have an agenda. No agenda, then no meeting.
- Stick to the agenda, don't let the fact that everyone you want to talk to is there let you change the topic.
- If you can get it done with email or a one-on-one meeting, then do that, you don't need to invite every
Too Many Attendees (Score:3)
The big problem I have is the meetings with far too many attendees. I have one project where we have three different meetings every week (1 hour each), and they each have 15-30 people attending. We could easily cut that down and have 5-10 people at each meeting, mostly different people at each with a clearly defined different focus. And it could often be much better by rearranging the agenda so that a third of the people drop off in the middle, and a third don't join until the middle.
Meetings are the social version of reply-all in email.
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Totally agree - mind you, this happened / happens in "real life" meetings as well as video calls.
Try making a business case to senior management: 3 meetings at 1 hour times 20 people (as an example) = 60 man hours. If this happens every week you're effectively carrying one and a half full time equivalents just in meetings. Do the meetings generate enough value / save enough costs to cover an extra person and a half on the payroll?
If they are like any meeting I've attended in my working life, I suspect not
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You need to ask "for this meeting, which project time code should I charge my time to?" Make them realize that their nice numbers of 300 man hours working on their poject each weak is really about 10 man hours of actual work. To many people treat meetings as "free" or they don't include meetings in their time planning.
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Yup and I think that is done so that nobody feels "left out", even if those folks have no direct interest in the topic at hand and no decision making authority. For those people a simple email recap of the meeting should suffice.
The other thing that bothers me about these meetings are the people that attend, week after week, and never say a damn thing. If they have nothing to contribute then maybe they shouldn't be there.
Which leads to my third peeve...people that do nothing but attend meetings. Many of the
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Which leads to my third peeve...people that do nothing but attend meetings
https://assets.amuniversal.com/06a719d06d5c01301d80001dd8b71c47 [amuniversal.com]
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Haha...brilliant!
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I've been a slightly ill the last few weeks, so I've been skipping the morning meetings. Normally I attend because occasionally I hear my name (usually while brushing my teeth) and have to respond. So once a week I have to say something, but normally I don't say a damn thing but instead am just listening while getting ready for work (ie, going downstairs). But now with not attending, not much bad has happened. A few fires that I should have started putting out earlier mostly, but the extra sleep has cert
PHB's that want project status updates all the tim (Score:2)
PHB's that want project status updates all the time need to give up that part of it and it's not an online thing.
Managers like to see their fiefdom (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest hindrance I've seen to productivity while remote working is unnecessary meetings. I've seen a lot of "meetings that could have been emails" in the covid-world that seem to be called just because the boss wants to see his minions faces. They just miss being able to walk around and see their little fiefdom of workers.
Four hours without meetings? (Score:3, Insightful)
A team should still have a progress meeting once a week, but that meeting should be less then 1 hour, and should be stripped down and direct. Meetings that extend over a hour, are rarely useful.
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The company they mention in the summary must be a special case of awful if banning meetings from 10am - 12pm on Tue/Thu is meaningful at all. For one, lunch is in there so you have really only blocked off 2-3 hours of potential meeting time each week. The only people who would have their days meaningfully impacted by that are those who are in 7-8 hours of meetings every day.
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12pm-1pm meetings every Tues and Thursday sounds annoying. People at most companies avoid scheduling meetings for lunch, unless there is some excuse to do so. Maybe in your jurisdiction there are protections for the lunch hour, in California (and most of the US) there is no expectation that salary employees get a lunch break without meetings.
Re: Four hours without meetings? (Score:2)
Apparently you live in a land devoid of 'lunch meetings'?
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Lunch meetings can be annoying, but it depends. If lunch is provided - great!
If not, then things get fun. Because it means everyone will prepare for lunch ahead of time to eat during the meeting. Which adds to the fun with people juggling laptops, lunch and drinks. And during the meeting there will be tons of noise from people opening bags and such. Make sure the food is extra crunchy and noisy while eating.
Add in a few choice foods, like garlic, tuna
Re:Four hours without meetings? (Score:4, Interesting)
A team should still have a progress meeting once a week, but that meeting should be less then 1 hour, and should be stripped down and direct.
We adopted an awesome format for (software-development) progress meetings: (1) We have a shared document (OneNote/quip/GoogleDocs) with space for each of the ten team members to write what they did. (2) On Tuesday morning, each person writes what they did that past week. (3) On Tuesday afternoon for the team progress meeting, one designated team member reads through EVERYONE'S updates without interruption. (4) During this, if anyone has questions about someone's work, they stay silent but just highlight the relevant sentence/phrase. (5) At the end of the readthrough, the designated team member goes through those highlights in order for discussion.
This has all the right incentives. People are incentivized not to be too verbose (no one can be bothered to write stuff). No one can waffle about their own work. It avoids the problem of "switch of listening brain because I'm waiting for my turn to speak". It encourages respectful listening. It ensures that everyone gets their work's turn in the spotlight, even if they're shy or don't speak the language well.
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Emphasis/formatting added:
All of these depend on a *live*, *simultaneously-editable*, *shared-document* mechanism. Most people think of that as a gimmick or convenience in a document editor, rather than a make-or-break enabler of the process you describe.
As such, I think people tend to discount how an understated improvement in a document editor can drastically improve an undervalued process such as a smooth idea exchange. People are still more familiar with communicating status via a series of tubes rat
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Paywalled (Score:2)
Sigh... another paywalled article.
Alternate source [elmoudjaweb.com]
Another alternate source [livemint.com]
Block out time in your schedule to do real work (Score:2)
And once you get to 4 hours of meetings in a day, block out the rest.
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Set your office hours for 8pm - midnight. Create a 5 day a week reoccurring meeting that sets you OOTO from noon-4pm. Your boss might make you attend a few meetings, but people outside of your group will avoid marking you as a mandatory attendee if you have conflicts.
Same culture as before... (Score:5, Interesting)
If companies find they are having too many virtual meetings, then it is a sure bet that they were having too many physical meetings before Corona.
I've been in organizations like that. My first boss after college would have one-on-one meetings with me almost every day, for 3-4 hours, which involved about 10-15 minutes of useful info and training. and the rest was him telling war stories.
When I was a manager, people were shocked: When I held a formal meeting, which wasn't often, I stuck to the agenda, gave people a chance to get their opinions heard, made a decision, and was done in about half the time of my predecessor. I didn't hold many meetings, though, because many topics only concern 1 or 2 people: so talk to them directly, instead of wasting everyone else's time. The trick is: you have to actually value your subordinates' time, and realize that your job is to grease the wheels and get out of the way of the real work.
I suppose another aspect of this is the old introvert vs. extrovert battle. Introverts are celebrating home-office. They don't have to talk to all the idiots hanging around the coffee machine. Meanwhile, the extroverts feel starved for human contact. If they're managers, they're probably calling more meetings than before, to make up for the loss - and ignoring the agenda while they catch up on gossip.
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> The trick is: you have to actually value your subordinates' time, and realize that your job is to grease the wheels and get out of the way of the real work.
Perhaps this was a cultural thing, but in a previous job, my manager's job was "outsourced" and replaced by a manager imported from India. Meetings skyrocketed. Besides weekly group and team meetings, we had daily individual status meetings, and a hoard of project specific meetings. On top of all that, we were each individually required to formul
Email (Score:3)
I once worked for a major mainframe software company, and in the late 1990s they instituted a mid-day ban on email. From 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM they literally made the email servers unavailable to send emails... The intention was to encourage employees to simply walk down the hall and talk with their peers/reports in-person.
It seemed odd when I first heard it, but once you realized EVERYONE was off email, it didn't seem so bad. You couldn't do it today, but at the time it served its purpose IMHO.
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Or put a little more thought and a couple more revisions into their drafts. Did that happen at all?
Re:Email (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the mid 90s I was chatting to someone older than I who had a jaundiced view on emails -- I suspect his views on social media would be even more cynical.
He said something along the lines of (I can't quote verbatim after a quarter century)
"When we had typists, you could get 5, maybe 6 carbon copies; it was hard to revise without starting again so you thought carefully about what you wrote and to whom you sent it.
Then came the photocopier; it was easy to make a dozen or so copies - even up to 20 if luck was on your side and it didn't jam. People started sending updates to more and more co-workers and copies of copies abounded. It became harder (but not impossible) to ensure you were dealing with originals but there was still some control.
Now we have e-mail; it costs no effort to send to hundreds of people. You spend less thought on who needs to be informed and who would just be distracted. It's easy for them to reply to you and send them their stuff. The volume of messages is going through the roof but the quality of information is going through the floor. "
At the time I didn't entirely agree with him - I had the naive optimism that some discipline would prevail and people would be sensible. Well, it just shows how wrong one can be !!
A parallel argument can be made for meetings -- from the physical when rooms needed to be booked and ravel arranged, through phone conferences on paid dial up lines to today's videoconferences on "free" Internet connections (for some contrived definition of free)
Meetings are obsolete, most just don't know that (Score:1)
Wikis and threaded discussion groups can be far more productive than meetings, but many don't know how to use them effectively, and/or would rather hear themselves yap.
Meetings hinder progress! (Score:2)
The more time you spend in meetings the less time you have to get ACTUAL work done! I will flat out decline meetings if I already have 3 for the day.I have way to much work to do then be tied up in stupid meetings PM's schedule. If they can't get their shit together that is their problem not mine! If a PM thinks their meeting is so important I tell them to convince one of the other PM's to opt me out of their meeting. I get more work done when I'm NOT in frigging meetings! My Asst. VP has backed me up on th
Something to keep in mind (Score:2)
At the end of the year, your review will consist of your accomplishments, which probably won't include how many meetings you attended.
Meetings should facilitate and organize work. To the extent they don't, they should be avoided.
And the reason for so many meetings is? (Score:2)
If you have that many meetings, and you're not upper management, then upper management are at least as stupid as any PHB, if not even more incompetent, and the company's going to either be sold, or go bankrupt.
"The meetings will continue until productivity improves"