I don't mean this as a personal attack on any individual people manager, but I think a huge part of the issue is that many (most?) current mid-level people managers are not good at managing people; probably because they never had good people managing them to model on. They've never been trusted to do the job and let the results/output speak for itself, so they have no mechanism for establishing that trust, working within a system that allows for that, and coaching people on how to work in that system. They're repeating the same "look busy, look busy" model they came up in, and that requires a lot more effort (on everyone's part) when you're remote.
It’s absolutely this - people never really taught to manage (or without the space in their work to do it well) then asked to do the even harder job of hybrid managing!! A shit show!!!!
I've been working on a piece about exactly this. Management is not treated like an actual skill or a job, so most managers aren't confident that they are "doing something", largely because they spend all their time in meetings.
I think you're right! They also probably were never taught to manage—it's easy to promote someone because they're good at a job, but managing others who do that job is a different set of skills!
Yeah, there's also an element of pushing people up because there isn't always space for high-level individual contributors. So in order to make money/show progression/growth in your career, managing people is often the only option.
And related to this is the fact that house price growth (mainly) means that you have to continue to ‘progress’ in your career to make what would’ve been a decent living 40 years ago.
Yesssss this is such a trap and I HATE it! I've had several conversations with people lately about remaining an Individual Contributor, IC, and still progressing in our careers... without taking on a team or direct reports. Sigh! Love this conversation :)
Yes, I call this the "Michael Scott" problem. People are rewarded for success at a job with promotion to a role where they are managing people who are doing the job. This can turn out terribly when it turns out they are great at the job they no longer do and terrible at managing.
It’s the Peter Principle - “employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.”
Or worse for people to get promoted to managers because they hate and are terrible at their job so the only way out is to move up. This is how so many terrible teachers become principals.
To support your thought with anecdotal evidence - many of the middle managers at the small nonprofit where I have worked for a decade actually DID get some management training thanks to a past board chair paying for a very good professional coach. Our current senior staff did not take that training (some of them weren't here then), and it's the middle managers who don't understand why the senior staff have set up our hybrid policy (and the CEO has actually said this to me verbatim) "to make sure no one takes advantage" rather than trusting the middle mangers they spent all this money to train to actually manage their own reports schedules.
As someone who runs a business and this is somewhat of a manager, how do you get manager training? I’ve been wondering about this for years and I haven’t really figured out how to do it but I suspect my husband and I would do a lot better job with some outside input.
I am not the person you're replying to, but this whole thread is basically a bat-signal for the Nightingales/Raw Signal Group. AHP had them on the Work Appropriate podcast a handful of times to talk about how managers learn to be better managers, and their company (Raw Signal Group) has trainings a few times a year! I got work to pay for me to take it a year or two ago and it was HANDS DOWN one of the most useful "professional development" events I've ever attended. It's not necessarily cheap but they occasionally have discount codes, and when I was desperate to attend they gave me a special discounted rate for being in academia. They also have a newsletter, which is free to subscribe to and the only thing I always read besides Culture Study!
There are definitely businesses that do training, and if it’s financially feasible working with a good coach can be invaluable. On the more affordable or even free side: reading! There are lots of blogs and books dedicated to the art of management that are worth checking out. (I’m in software engineering, so most of my reading has been on the subject of engineering team management, but Making of a Manager, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and High Output Management are some industry-agnostics ideas that come to mind.)
I’m a HUGE proponent of year-round leadership training regardless of years of experience with people management -- and even for folks who DON’T manage people! I’ve left 3 jobs I otherwise loved because of poor management. Wrote about this recently: https://open.substack.com/pub/allisonstadd/p/the-offbeat-39-making-the-case-for
I can tell you exactly what is at the root of my org’s broken meeting culture: the infiltration/perversion of the “standup” concept into company culture … but completely divorced from anything else in the Agile framework. I would love to talk about the *cultural* influence of tech in workplace vocabulary and concepts, since this isn’t really backed up by any training or intentional strategy. The combo of scrappy-yet-hip-to-the-lingo is lethal - a vague sense of what to do but no real time/staff capacity investment in carrying it out. (To be clear this is not even me evangelizing for any specific framework, just saying that cherry-picking tech-adjacent ideas can be worse than nothing.)
Now, as 2024 approaches, we have leftover “standups” multiple times a week, a poorly-understood square peg shoved into the round hole of “omg pandemic,” and they are really just round-robin “So this week I’m working on …” checkins which sometimes feel like a ceremonial opportunity for me to report, in front of a lot of people, that I’m still not done with anything yet (while taking away from my time to finish those things). This is in addition to multiple standing meetings for different teams/committees/etc, which I guess is fine unless you’re part of multiple teams/committees/etc.
The coda to this of course is a point you’ve made about “blank time.” My whole existence feels like it’s devoted to defending and justifying the need for large amounts of this. Because the truth is I still have quantifiably fewer meetings than so many others in my workplace. But if you scatter 3 hours of meetings across a full workday, leaving random 30-minute orphan chunks of time in between … that’s not “blank time,” that’s a whole work day of reacting and preparing and “checking in” instead of thinking. I’m acquiring a complex from feeling like I have “too many meetings” to be effective when the math alone says that’s not true.
"But if you scatter 3 hours of meetings across a full workday, leaving random 30-minute orphan chunks of time in between … that’s not “blank time,” that’s a whole work day of reacting and preparing and “checking in” instead of thinking." YES oh my YES.
and also essential for certain neurodiverse or introvert folks--I need breaks between things, but also if those breaks aren't long enough to actually get back to work, then so much less work is happening. and if things are scheduled back-to-back-to-back, then I'm so wiped at the of the time frame that nothing else gets done all day. its such a tricky place to be
oh my goodness yes! I think about this tension all the time, and then feel a bit like Goldilocks... I need breaks, but not that big, it has to be juuuuuust right or I will end up staring at the wall just to recover! I have yet to really nail this balance.
YES the infiltration of tech lingo into everything! I work for an IT department now (my actual role is tech-adjacent at best, definitely not a startup), but for the last 13+ years worked as a university librarian. It's like anyone in a knowledge worker role is suddenly supposed to work like a tech bro, but... that model doesn't actually work if your job isn't framed that way?! Like, I don't do anything resembling coding/developing, I don't build apps or websites or whatever, what on earth is a "sprint" for me? How am I supposed to track my job, which is mostly talk to professors about various needs and policies, via a ticketing system? That workflow doesn't actually help my work flow at all, and yet these issues were present in my last role even before I joined an IT department!
I switched from a manager who insisted on stand-ups to one who was fine with checking in each morning on Teams or via email. I think it is helping. I agree that the origins of the "standup" and what they are intended to do (discuss roadblocks and resource needs) get lost in execution.
I feel officially old because I’m about to complain about how so many people do not know how to pick up the phone any longer. They over rely on email when it needs to be a call, or go the other way and do a meeting or video conference when we don’t really need to see each other’s faces
I have become a real proselytizer for knowing what sort of problems require what sort of communication - and standardizing that across the workplace. If you’re at email #5 in a chain, time to get on the phone. If you need a quick response / to free up a road block, messaging is great. Email should just be for spreading what we used to call memos. Meetings are for collaboration, not for reading memos and asking for feedback.
I would say I plead guilty, but no, it's more that I want to mount an affirmative defense. I think phone calls are dangerous for actually working out important decisions. I want everything in writing so we're sure there hasn't been any miscommunication or memories shifting after the fact.
Admittedly I am thinking less of work stuff and more of planning the Christmas menu with my mother-in-law.
This is why the memo exists, though. Get on the phone, make the desicions and memorialize it in an email "Summarizing and reaffirming our conversation"
(Also, I'm old. I just hated phones even when they were the only viable option. The amount of time my roommates and I spent in college sitting around arguing about who was going to make the call to order pizza...)
I agree with Laura C. that phone calls can be dangerous. I’ve worked in toxic work environments where unplanned phone calls end up being another bullying tactic, so after every 1:1 call I would still spend a chunk of time summarizing the call and sending over actions / next steps via email as CYA (cover your ass) paper trail.
Also, if phone calls aren’t planned and there isn’t a mutual respect for down time / focus time/ personal time/non-meeting time, I find that the threat and/or likelihood of an unplanned phone call makes me feel like I’m chained to my desk. (God forbid they “catch me” not being “productive”)
That said, I completely agree on going no camera vs on video, and prefer phone calls as a format for meetings! Video is exhausting and everyone is just staring at themselves like it’s a mirror anyways, which frankly can’t be great for the psyche either.
The fact that my boss could (and would) pick up the phone at any time to call me during any workday made it totally impossible for me to relax, to focus, or to ever start anything.
God bless the day I convinced her to switch everything to Slack.
Haha yeah. I work for a guy in his 60s and we don’t have too many meetings because he just...calls me to check in on our projects when he has a question. If I want to know how someone is doing on work I assigned them, I check their progress in our database and then just....call to get an update and offer help getting unstuck.
I should say - it’s a team spread across time zones with a strong respect for core working hours so no one is inviting phone calls in at all hours of the day.
This is almost exactly my situation, except that the phone calls and emails I get instead of the meetings become constant interruptions in my day and I still haven't figured out how to communicate that this just doesn't work. I'm constantly anxious and/or aggravated and have a really hard time just focusing on the tasks that really need to get done. At this point, I wish I had a weekly meeting or twice a week meeting to check in on status and ask questions.
I also love picking up the phone or having a quick chat to clarify but do agree that’s built on trust in relationships. I had a great colleague who had a good rule of thumb that had come out of political campaigning - escalate the medium, not the tone (eg if email isn’t working or getting through, text, if that doesn’t work, call… but no moves to ALL CAPS in an email 😂😂)
emphatic YES to this. I get Zoom if you're trying to review the same resource or walk through a screen-based process step by step. But it feels like we're Zooming just because we all learned how to do it during Covid and we don't want all that effort to be for naught
Young millennial here just to dream an affirmative YES to picking up the phone. I used to be very averse to 'bothering' people by calling them but have started doing that more this year and it truly is like a magic portal. My questions get answered faster, things are clarified, its just great. Now most of the time when I sit down to write an email I first ask myself if it should be a phone call.
I manage large teams remotely, and I've done it since before the pandemic. I do some consulting/client work and I've seen inside how a lot of different organizations work. I have many thoughts on this topic:
Take data from Microsoft with a grain of salt. In my experience the orgs that use Microsoft tools for remote collaboration are the worst at remote work. This is because Microsoft tools have inferior functionality and because the orgs that use them tend to be more traditional. Google Office, Slack, Mural, etc. all foster better collaboration that Microsoft tools, and it impacts the org's culture.
The biggest reason why I see remote orgs have too many meetings because they have poor remote work tools and processes. I work on complex software projects where collaboration is critical. I see teams get fed up with the number of meetings they're attending, so they do a meeting audit, block off chunks of "no meeting" time, make rules about meeting agendas, etc., and within a few months all the meetings are back and everyone is overwhelmed again. The reason is that no one can get the info they need to do their jobs without meetings because there are no collaboration tools and processes in place. The remote orgs I see that are the best at keeping meetings in check are good about tracking their work in tools like Jira, documenting decisions, and putting completed work in place where others can view and use it. Being transparent with work and using standardized processes and tools to track work and information massively cuts down on meetings. It takes a tiny bit more time to document things, but it saves an exponential amount of time in meetings. This also helps me, as a manager, know that we're on track without surveilling everyone. Instead of walk past people's desks, I can troll our Jira boards to see what we're working on.
"The reason is that no one can get the info they need to do their jobs without meetings because there are no collaboration tools and processes in place."
This, or because there are tools in place and people choose not to use them because "it's easier* if I just swing by your desk/call a meeting/email you for an update." I used to work in an office where this was the norm, and it blew my mind—we had a project management tool, and many of us used it, but we also had to have meetings where we literally read from it to the people who refused to review it themselves.
For those folks I will just pull up the tool and show them if they insist on meeting. I recently told a member of my team to reply a little more slowly to those messages and then send back a link to the tool. I will be a relentless broken record "It's in Jira, here's the link!" I admit I have more flexibility to do stuff like this because I'm in senior management, though.
Emphatic yes to "In my experience the orgs that use Microsoft tools for remote collaboration are the worst at remote work."
If you look at the tools and features Microsoft has prioritized since the start of the pandemic, they're heavily tied to lack-of-trust and giving managers more (creepy) visibility into what employees are doing (if my husband is away from his work laptop for more than 15 minutes during work hours, a cartoony eye pops up and starts looking around for him).
Haha yeah. I'm not 100% sure what triggers it - probably some combo of lack of screen/keyboard activity - and I don't think it's actually looking at him, but like... it's quite a choice.
I appreciate you articulating this! I see this a ton on my team, with an extra sprinkling of “when we do try to set up a process, the managers don’t hold people accountable to that process.” So we’ve got people creating half-hearted tickets with a one sentence “placeholder description” that is the same as their vague and unhelpful title, and only giving updates on their work verbally in stand-ups or over IM. It drives me up a wall... when I was a manager, if my team hadn’t documented an update, I typed up what they were saying in front of them, and asked them to please document it next time.
At my last job, I had one person on my team with a pretty senior title who spent about 50% of his time making sure tickets were getting filled out and updated and that backlogs were properly prioritized. For that team it really took someone with formal authority to get the system working. When it works, it's self reinforcing. Everyone on the team expects to get info from tickets and complains when it's not there. But it can be so much work to it up and running.
The complete lack of meetings in my work as a freelancer has been so tricky for me to sort through in terms of how I gauge my productivity. I can get the same amount of work done in 2 hours that used to take me 2 days at my previous in-office job (because: meetings!!!!). But that means that I’m constantly wondering if I’m doing enough. If I’ve completed a project by noon (because I didn’t have meetings distracting me from actually doing the work), I feel guilty spending the afternoon on leisure/personal/household stuff. Gah! The productivity trap is hard to escape!
HA SAME!!! I never had a day chocked with meetings because I never managed anyone/made big decisions but I certainly had a lot more scheduled time than I did when went freelance, and it actually helped me see 1) the utility of certain times of meetings 2) how much of work is spinning wheels trying to look like you’re working. Now, when I’m stuck or it’s clear I’m not making progress on a draft or an idea, I go garden, or hang out with the dogs, and don’t feel that compulsion to model “working”
The difference that uninterrupted deep work time can make! I had a similar shift to self-employment five years ago. It's hard to escape the productivity trap, though it has helped me to also view that personal/household stuff as productive (because it is, just for me/my household/my friends). Another thing that has helped is reminding myself that flexibility is a key benefit of this type of work—and I get to enjoy it!
This is SO SPOT ON. It also makes we wonder about how to price my work because should I value it for the time it takes me or the time it would take someone internally.
I love hiring freelancers for exactly that reason. I once had a freelancer that worked 10 hours a week after her kids were in bed, and she was just as productive as team members who were in the office 40 hours a week. The downside was that she could only take on work that had minimal dependencies on what anyone else was doing.
I recently transitioned from academic libraries to self-employment and learning that whoa, my brain and productivity capacity isn’t irreparably broken, it’s just that the constant emergencies, last minute meetings, and frequent interruptions of higher ed are totally counterproductive to getting things done has been a huge revelation.
In my personal experience, most people who become leaders at any level initially get promoted because they’re good at their jobs. This was my situation. I was a good exercise physiologist and suddenly I’m in charge of people. I’ve never worked anywhere where there’s formal training on how to make this transition, which I think leads to a lot of managers not knowing how to manage. Because of course! Many people don’t inherently know how to do strategic planning, annual reviews, performance management, etc. Or how to translate broader company goals into what it means for a particular department and team. (Side note - this issue is exactly why I started my coaching practice after chronic illness forced me out of my previous career) This is terrible for everyone. If companies invested more in truly developing the leadership pipeline, including teaching people how to be effective, empathetic leaders, I don’t think everyone would be as distracted by bullshit, meaningless metrics and by “performing” work.
I’ve been talking about this a lot recently and as big of a fan as I am of remote/hybrid/flexibility, I think it’s rise has enabled this dramatic increase in meetings, not just because of the loss of “drive-by” opportunities (as AHP mentioned) but because people no longer have to account for travel time between meetings. Where I worked before the pandemic, you would have to factor the possibility of a 20min walk to another building before scheduling meetings, and you’d never schedule back-to-back for this reason. It organically limited the amount of time in a day available for meetings.
At my current company, we’re hybrid, and it’s a struggle for those in the office to be on time to anything because they’re juggling the all day meetings life of remote work with the need to physically relocate between meetings.
This is huge where I work - scheduling back to back meetings because you no longer "need" to consider travel time between meeting locations. Pre-pandemic, when I worked in person, I never would have schedule less than a 30 min break between meetings, because I needed time to get from location A to location B, and to go to the bathroom in between. These days, I leave almost every meeting saying "ahh I gotta jump for my next meeting!" because they are almost all back to back. I do my best to give myself a 60 min lunch break each day. But I was truly shocked when AHP suggested 2 hours of meetings should be the max per day...I'm lucky if I'm limited to 4 hours!
The 2 hour stat is what I’ve gleaned from people who talk about ability to focus and time needed to do your actual work - even if you’re a a manager, you shouldn’t have more reports than you can have meetings with (and a meeting with your supervisor). If a manager is in meetings 6 hours a day (which many I know are) then managing should be their ONLY job (and we know that isn’t true)
Working in an organizational culture where meetings are definitely seen as productivity, I will admit that I add "meetings" to my calendar to indicate I'm busy, when in actuality that meeting is for me with myself to actually get something done that requires focus. I know this isn't probably great, but it feels like literally the only way to actually accomplish anything! I know I'm not going to change the org culture, so I feel like my only option is to use its messed up values in my own way.
Nothing wrong with that! It would be great if more leaders did this and set the tone. There is also the need for pre-meeting prep, a simple 15 mins for a bio break even?
I loved this article. I oversee three employees as part of a bigger team, and we work at a place where we all enjoy the work we are doing. I am VERY keen on taking care of oneself. When I first started, one of the meetings I was tasked to lead took place every day. Now it takes place once every other week (because, really. We don't work in a space where that much changes from day to day. Once I saw that the meeting was mostly asking, do any of you have any updates since YESTERDAY? and the answer was always No, I knew it could be reduced.) I also tell me team that as long as their assignments are completed by the deadline we've set, how they spend their time to get there is up to them. I've lost all my family to cancer, including most recently my 50-year-old brother, so I am well aware that time is finite and precious, and should be spent as joyfully and creatively and intentionally as possible.
"I also tell me team that as long as their assignments are completed by the deadline we've set, how they spend their time to get there is up to them." Yessss!!! If only every manager/team could share this approach to work, and knew to articulate it for folks' peace of mind! Kudos to you, and very sorry about the losses that have helped to clarify this for you.
I have been in positions where there are nonstop meetings, and it's terrible, as there's no actual time to do work and follow up on the things that are discussed in meetings.
But I have also come to realize that many times it's less about the quantity of the meetings than it is about the quality of the meetings. Meetings with a specific goal or agenda are great. Meetings that are just about getting a group of people together to ramble on about what they're doing are not so great.
And one of my common complaints about my current workplace is that they include far too many people in meetings, even if the topic is only tangentially connected to their work. I appreciate that they are trying to be inclusive, but having 15 people in a meeting where five people have things to contribute and the other 10 are just listening is a waste. Just send me the minutes.
What is a meeting? I feel like I don’t have too many meetings but I also think that I spend a lot of the day in virtual collaboration with the person who works for me. Those show up as meetings on my calendar but they are different from meetings bringing together a bunch of people that either require a lot of prep, input and/or concentration on absorbing new information. I think my work actually has good meeting culture overall but there are some people who don’t know how to get things done without a meeting either because they are over scheduled as part of their role or because of lack of other supports. I like working meetings with my colleague because they help me as a neurodivergent person and doing 6 hours of work a day on my own is stifling. But I don’t feel like those kinds of meetings are the concern here.
Thanks for offering this experience! I just checked in with a managee I have whom I think might be interested in doing this (in a more limited capacity) in 2024 - he sounds really interested in using this approach to getting work done virtually, together.
From an european perspective we have the same issues, but i feel like it less an issue of productivity as just to feel "busy". Also, arround here, we have a lot more meetings because.... no one takes any decision. So we have to meet again to talk about the same things over and over...
Again, a problem of the manager who don't take their responsabilites. It's floating.
And as they don't do the work (which is to decide which way to take the next 6 months), they keep their options open until someone, above them, starts to put pressure.
Yes, I’ve seen a lot of this too - having the same discussion multiple times because either the decision making authority isn’t clear or the person with that authority doesn’t want to wield it.
"either the decision making authority isn’t clear or the person with that authority doesn’t want to wield it." This is a perfect summary of the problem.
Over the years I've had jobs where: no time for bathroom breaks and legally required lunch breaks let alone meetings, too many meetings but not enough training to do the work, weekly meetings but not enough job definition to be useful, and monthly all staff that isn't useful at all. My current boss would probably relate to this article. Thinking of them, one thing I don't really see here is that no one calls on the phone anymore. They prefer verbal communication over email, which somehow only leaves meetings - and if everyone is always in meetings externally, a meeting is the only way to have a phone call. I don't think it would somehow magically give them the ability to think critically at a larger scale than the project they want to do at that moment in time (something I deem relevant to doing my work well), but it might provide more bandwidth for thinking about their underlings.
At my job, we've historically had no meetings. We've been fully remote forever and it's extremely obvious whether we are or are not producing -- basically everything has immediate results. Only then, following a bunch of changes to our workflow made with zero input from the people whose work was being affected, we pushed for some communication so now we have one one-hour meeting a week, and that has been really productive. I'm kind of looking for a new job, though, and one of my big questions is always going to be about meeting culture, because I would not be able to function in a place with a really intense meeting culture.
It’s shocking to me that managers can do their job without a 1:1 weekly meeting. I realize this essay is about less meetings, while I’m extolling the virtues of one. But if managers dedicate 1 hour to their direct reports to find out “what are the roadblocks that you’re coming up against and how can I help” things move way more smoothly. The need to ve on random team meetings just to fogure out what people are doing decreases rapidly. There used to be a podcast, called Manager Tools which was very useful to me back over a decade ago when I was a baby manager and had zero clue. It was two tech guys in their 50s maybe. Some of it was problematic for a whole bunch of different reasons, and I will grant they could be pedantic at times, but their guidance strictly on the nuts and bolts of 1:1s and meeting management was helpful.
At my last job, I managed a team of 7. I gave each team member one hour a week of dedicated "boss time" they could use any way they wanted. Some opted for 1hr meetings once a week. Some met for 30min once or twice a week. One liked 90m deep dives every other week. Those meetings were protected time, so I wouldn't schedule over them or cancel unless they asked. Just the simple act of letting them choose their best way to spend time with me went a long way to, building trust.
My personal favorite 1:1 scenario was with a fellow extroverted neurodivergent who liked to schedule "parallel play" sessions. We'd work on related, but different parts of a project over Zoom. Mostly in silence, but he could ask questions and get instant feedback on coding or development issues. Or we'd talk about whatever came into our heads.
I had a similar experience with a colleague for years, both of us neurodivergent as well. He were both freelancers, and I subcontracted for him, so he was technically my boss In advance of a big deliverable, we would schedule a whole afternoon. It would start with lunch and chatting about big ideas, maybe a walk thrown in. Eventually we'd sit down somewhere we could take notes and knock out an entire presentation in about 45 minutes. The unstructured "play" was the relationship building and idea generation that led to extremely fast and frictionless "work"
I just wanted to thank you for this example! I just shared these options with my team and asked them to start thinking about how they'd like to check in with me in 2024, given a set allocation of total time.
I’m remote and have a 1:1 weekly with my manager. Prior to the meeting, I send an email with the top 5 priorities (as I understand them) and a list of activities and status. Anything I want to discuss is highlighted. This way, my manager can re-order priorities, we hit hot-button issues, and there’s record of my work product. I take notes on this during the call, use it as a work list, and update the draft throughout the week. Calls take 15-30 mins and my manager can show anyone what I’m working on and spends time mentoring rather than managing me. I made up this system for more autonomy, and it’s allowed me more “blank time,” because my priorities and deadlines are clear.
Oh gosh I would LOVE to have a 1:1 weekly meeting with my program lead and to have weekly 1:1 meetings with my direct reports. I think this has been discussed elsewhere in CS but I work in an organization where management has been "tacked on" to other job descriptions. So I have my main job duties, and then I have management duties (which include personnel but also financial/facilities management of our office and reporting requirements). I get paid a supplement which comes out to 3.8% of my annual salary, which equates to 18 minutes of an 8-hour workday. (LOL so ridiculous when I type it out.) All this to say that this trend may play a part in why people aren't having more *meaningful* meetings or feeling supported appropriately by their direct supervisor.
I definitely feel this - I have so many jobs and managing people is only one of what feels like about fifty responsibilities I have every day. I try my best, but every day a number of things have to be less of a priority since I can't actually do them all. (I also go weeks at a time sometimes without hearing a peep from my direct supervisor - the workplace culture says, "that means you're doing fine, you can work independently!" but I settle for sending emails with updates so she maybe has some idea of what's happening in my day to day. She also has multiple jobs and an unreasonable amount of responsibilities.) I think that cutbacks have really been bad for relationships between reports!
YES, solidarity!! Thank you for sharing. It is a constant battle to focus on what is important, impactful, and/or fills my bucket.
A visitor to our office commented that I "need to call someone to come take care of these bushes outside the office because they look terrible." Like, really??? In addition to all these other hats, I'm meant to COORDINATE THE LANDSCAPING?? I'm grateful for that one because it was crystal clear that was a task that was not going to get done.
Yeah, my job is pretty unusual in a lot of ways -- it's always entirely obvious what I'm working on, there are basically no long-term projects, and my manager and I and much of our team have been together for more than a decade. I think the shortest length is nearly nine years? My manager's boss periodically gets on her to do 1:1 check-ins and she'll do it for a week or two but it really does not help us function at all.
But in my previous job my regular check-ins with my manager were definitely helpful -- at one of the most memorable ones, he came back from vacation and wanted to catch up on what had been happening and I said we'd had a bunch of really great meetings, and he said something like "that's good, but I'd watch out for the moment when meetings start to replace actually getting the work done."
I also found the Manager Tools podcast very helpful back when I started managing people and was just trying to find my way. Their strong suit seems to be "we will explain this topic in extreme and tactical detail" which can sometimes be overkill and/or problematic, but it had the virtue of not assuming everyone would just understand the unspoken things. (Like me! I grew up in a blue-collar environment! There was so much about white-collar jobs that I just did not know until someone explained it to me with actual words!)
Later, I discovered that the company Manager Tools sells a license to their material for $200/year, which gives you access to "show notes" (essentially a transcript) of every podcast they've ever done, and often is an easy sell to a boss as part of a learning & development budget. It's much faster to just search by topic and read a PDF than listen to two guys discuss in extreme detail for an hour, ha. I still sometimes use it when I need a tactical, humane deep dive on a management topic. (No affiliation, just find it useful.)
I really like this: "it's extremely obvious whether we are or are not producing -- basically everything has immediate results."
In AHP's essay, I kept wondering about the managers who feel like they need to look over people's shoulders to make sure they're working. Like, do those employees not have tasks they need to accomplish? Does the manager have no other way to check whether those tasks are getting done besides meetings? It makes me wonder if role clarity (and lack thereof) contributes to micro-managing via meetings culture.
My mind is exploding that people don't take breaks during the day! Granted, I work from home, but I use a Pomodoro timer with 20-minute focus time/5-minute break intervals, with a couple of longer 15-minute breaks during the day. It helps me tackle personal emails (like reading this newsletter and typing this comment!) as well as remind me to get water, go for a walk, grab lunch, etc. The times I'm buried in work and ignore my timer I definitely feel it by mid-afternoon: my focus is gone and it's harder to keep up the quality of my work.
But you missed the heart of this problem. What is driving all of this is the demand for productivity in the first place, and THAT is tied into an economic system that is supposed to produce exponential return on ALL investments.
Exponential return is doubling return. By definition. Mathematically. Precisely. Unavoidably.
That job you had when you turned 20? Well, to achieve that 2% growth that is supposed to be the sign of a "healthy economy," that 20-year old who comes in 35 years later needs to be producing TWICE AS MUCH as you did at 20.
And by the way, you are supposed to be producing twice as much as whoever held your current job 35 years ago.
Not happening? Well, the economy marches on. Maybe your job isn't that important. Corporations can keep up by doing Enron-ish sorts of things, and who needs employees, anyway?
All we need is a board room and some coke. No, I don't mean the soft drink.
So workers are getting hammered on both ends: their productivity is DECLINING according to a measuring-stick that doubles every 35 years (and even faster in "good" years). And when they fall short, the first reflex (in my experience) is even more meetings to get the project back on track.
I don't mean this as a personal attack on any individual people manager, but I think a huge part of the issue is that many (most?) current mid-level people managers are not good at managing people; probably because they never had good people managing them to model on. They've never been trusted to do the job and let the results/output speak for itself, so they have no mechanism for establishing that trust, working within a system that allows for that, and coaching people on how to work in that system. They're repeating the same "look busy, look busy" model they came up in, and that requires a lot more effort (on everyone's part) when you're remote.
It’s absolutely this - people never really taught to manage (or without the space in their work to do it well) then asked to do the even harder job of hybrid managing!! A shit show!!!!
I've been working on a piece about exactly this. Management is not treated like an actual skill or a job, so most managers aren't confident that they are "doing something", largely because they spend all their time in meetings.
I think you're right! They also probably were never taught to manage—it's easy to promote someone because they're good at a job, but managing others who do that job is a different set of skills!
Yeah, there's also an element of pushing people up because there isn't always space for high-level individual contributors. So in order to make money/show progression/growth in your career, managing people is often the only option.
It’s a total trap and bad for everyone, ughhhh
And related to this is the fact that house price growth (mainly) means that you have to continue to ‘progress’ in your career to make what would’ve been a decent living 40 years ago.
Yesssss this is such a trap and I HATE it! I've had several conversations with people lately about remaining an Individual Contributor, IC, and still progressing in our careers... without taking on a team or direct reports. Sigh! Love this conversation :)
Yes, I call this the "Michael Scott" problem. People are rewarded for success at a job with promotion to a role where they are managing people who are doing the job. This can turn out terribly when it turns out they are great at the job they no longer do and terrible at managing.
It’s the Peter Principle - “employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.”
Or worse for people to get promoted to managers because they hate and are terrible at their job so the only way out is to move up. This is how so many terrible teachers become principals.
I was thinking the same thing 👀
To support your thought with anecdotal evidence - many of the middle managers at the small nonprofit where I have worked for a decade actually DID get some management training thanks to a past board chair paying for a very good professional coach. Our current senior staff did not take that training (some of them weren't here then), and it's the middle managers who don't understand why the senior staff have set up our hybrid policy (and the CEO has actually said this to me verbatim) "to make sure no one takes advantage" rather than trusting the middle mangers they spent all this money to train to actually manage their own reports schedules.
As someone who runs a business and this is somewhat of a manager, how do you get manager training? I’ve been wondering about this for years and I haven’t really figured out how to do it but I suspect my husband and I would do a lot better job with some outside input.
I am not the person you're replying to, but this whole thread is basically a bat-signal for the Nightingales/Raw Signal Group. AHP had them on the Work Appropriate podcast a handful of times to talk about how managers learn to be better managers, and their company (Raw Signal Group) has trainings a few times a year! I got work to pay for me to take it a year or two ago and it was HANDS DOWN one of the most useful "professional development" events I've ever attended. It's not necessarily cheap but they occasionally have discount codes, and when I was desperate to attend they gave me a special discounted rate for being in academia. They also have a newsletter, which is free to subscribe to and the only thing I always read besides Culture Study!
Training: https://www.rawsignal.ca/bpx
Newsletter: http://www.worldsbestnewsletter.com
There are definitely businesses that do training, and if it’s financially feasible working with a good coach can be invaluable. On the more affordable or even free side: reading! There are lots of blogs and books dedicated to the art of management that are worth checking out. (I’m in software engineering, so most of my reading has been on the subject of engineering team management, but Making of a Manager, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and High Output Management are some industry-agnostics ideas that come to mind.)
I couldn't agree more. We don't train managers well, so they just repeat the models they've seen their entire careers and the cycle never breaks.
I’m a HUGE proponent of year-round leadership training regardless of years of experience with people management -- and even for folks who DON’T manage people! I’ve left 3 jobs I otherwise loved because of poor management. Wrote about this recently: https://open.substack.com/pub/allisonstadd/p/the-offbeat-39-making-the-case-for
I can tell you exactly what is at the root of my org’s broken meeting culture: the infiltration/perversion of the “standup” concept into company culture … but completely divorced from anything else in the Agile framework. I would love to talk about the *cultural* influence of tech in workplace vocabulary and concepts, since this isn’t really backed up by any training or intentional strategy. The combo of scrappy-yet-hip-to-the-lingo is lethal - a vague sense of what to do but no real time/staff capacity investment in carrying it out. (To be clear this is not even me evangelizing for any specific framework, just saying that cherry-picking tech-adjacent ideas can be worse than nothing.)
Now, as 2024 approaches, we have leftover “standups” multiple times a week, a poorly-understood square peg shoved into the round hole of “omg pandemic,” and they are really just round-robin “So this week I’m working on …” checkins which sometimes feel like a ceremonial opportunity for me to report, in front of a lot of people, that I’m still not done with anything yet (while taking away from my time to finish those things). This is in addition to multiple standing meetings for different teams/committees/etc, which I guess is fine unless you’re part of multiple teams/committees/etc.
The coda to this of course is a point you’ve made about “blank time.” My whole existence feels like it’s devoted to defending and justifying the need for large amounts of this. Because the truth is I still have quantifiably fewer meetings than so many others in my workplace. But if you scatter 3 hours of meetings across a full workday, leaving random 30-minute orphan chunks of time in between … that’s not “blank time,” that’s a whole work day of reacting and preparing and “checking in” instead of thinking. I’m acquiring a complex from feeling like I have “too many meetings” to be effective when the math alone says that’s not true.
"But if you scatter 3 hours of meetings across a full workday, leaving random 30-minute orphan chunks of time in between … that’s not “blank time,” that’s a whole work day of reacting and preparing and “checking in” instead of thinking." YES oh my YES.
Transitions are mentally costly. Why does no one ever talk about this?
and also essential for certain neurodiverse or introvert folks--I need breaks between things, but also if those breaks aren't long enough to actually get back to work, then so much less work is happening. and if things are scheduled back-to-back-to-back, then I'm so wiped at the of the time frame that nothing else gets done all day. its such a tricky place to be
oh my goodness yes! I think about this tension all the time, and then feel a bit like Goldilocks... I need breaks, but not that big, it has to be juuuuuust right or I will end up staring at the wall just to recover! I have yet to really nail this balance.
this is exactly it for me!
Yes!
YES the infiltration of tech lingo into everything! I work for an IT department now (my actual role is tech-adjacent at best, definitely not a startup), but for the last 13+ years worked as a university librarian. It's like anyone in a knowledge worker role is suddenly supposed to work like a tech bro, but... that model doesn't actually work if your job isn't framed that way?! Like, I don't do anything resembling coding/developing, I don't build apps or websites or whatever, what on earth is a "sprint" for me? How am I supposed to track my job, which is mostly talk to professors about various needs and policies, via a ticketing system? That workflow doesn't actually help my work flow at all, and yet these issues were present in my last role even before I joined an IT department!
I switched from a manager who insisted on stand-ups to one who was fine with checking in each morning on Teams or via email. I think it is helping. I agree that the origins of the "standup" and what they are intended to do (discuss roadblocks and resource needs) get lost in execution.
I feel officially old because I’m about to complain about how so many people do not know how to pick up the phone any longer. They over rely on email when it needs to be a call, or go the other way and do a meeting or video conference when we don’t really need to see each other’s faces
I have become a real proselytizer for knowing what sort of problems require what sort of communication - and standardizing that across the workplace. If you’re at email #5 in a chain, time to get on the phone. If you need a quick response / to free up a road block, messaging is great. Email should just be for spreading what we used to call memos. Meetings are for collaboration, not for reading memos and asking for feedback.
This! And considering the *actual* urgency of a problem when deciding how to communicate or if it's worth escalating quickly.
I would say I plead guilty, but no, it's more that I want to mount an affirmative defense. I think phone calls are dangerous for actually working out important decisions. I want everything in writing so we're sure there hasn't been any miscommunication or memories shifting after the fact.
Admittedly I am thinking less of work stuff and more of planning the Christmas menu with my mother-in-law.
This is why the memo exists, though. Get on the phone, make the desicions and memorialize it in an email "Summarizing and reaffirming our conversation"
Yes, exactly. I totally do this and the people who receive the memos are like . . . ?? But it's so effective.
(Also, I'm old. I just hated phones even when they were the only viable option. The amount of time my roommates and I spent in college sitting around arguing about who was going to make the call to order pizza...)
I agree with Laura C. that phone calls can be dangerous. I’ve worked in toxic work environments where unplanned phone calls end up being another bullying tactic, so after every 1:1 call I would still spend a chunk of time summarizing the call and sending over actions / next steps via email as CYA (cover your ass) paper trail.
Also, if phone calls aren’t planned and there isn’t a mutual respect for down time / focus time/ personal time/non-meeting time, I find that the threat and/or likelihood of an unplanned phone call makes me feel like I’m chained to my desk. (God forbid they “catch me” not being “productive”)
That said, I completely agree on going no camera vs on video, and prefer phone calls as a format for meetings! Video is exhausting and everyone is just staring at themselves like it’s a mirror anyways, which frankly can’t be great for the psyche either.
The fact that my boss could (and would) pick up the phone at any time to call me during any workday made it totally impossible for me to relax, to focus, or to ever start anything.
God bless the day I convinced her to switch everything to Slack.
Haha yeah. I work for a guy in his 60s and we don’t have too many meetings because he just...calls me to check in on our projects when he has a question. If I want to know how someone is doing on work I assigned them, I check their progress in our database and then just....call to get an update and offer help getting unstuck.
This is healthy meeting culture if it works for you!
I should say - it’s a team spread across time zones with a strong respect for core working hours so no one is inviting phone calls in at all hours of the day.
This is almost exactly my situation, except that the phone calls and emails I get instead of the meetings become constant interruptions in my day and I still haven't figured out how to communicate that this just doesn't work. I'm constantly anxious and/or aggravated and have a really hard time just focusing on the tasks that really need to get done. At this point, I wish I had a weekly meeting or twice a week meeting to check in on status and ask questions.
I also love picking up the phone or having a quick chat to clarify but do agree that’s built on trust in relationships. I had a great colleague who had a good rule of thumb that had come out of political campaigning - escalate the medium, not the tone (eg if email isn’t working or getting through, text, if that doesn’t work, call… but no moves to ALL CAPS in an email 😂😂)
I’m going to put this on a post-it!
That's a really great rule of thumb!
emphatic YES to this. I get Zoom if you're trying to review the same resource or walk through a screen-based process step by step. But it feels like we're Zooming just because we all learned how to do it during Covid and we don't want all that effort to be for naught
I dislike phone calls (the direct consequence of call center work and NO breaks during the day) and completely agree with you.
Young millennial here just to dream an affirmative YES to picking up the phone. I used to be very averse to 'bothering' people by calling them but have started doing that more this year and it truly is like a magic portal. My questions get answered faster, things are clarified, its just great. Now most of the time when I sit down to write an email I first ask myself if it should be a phone call.
I’m newly obsessed with phone calls. All about it!!
I manage large teams remotely, and I've done it since before the pandemic. I do some consulting/client work and I've seen inside how a lot of different organizations work. I have many thoughts on this topic:
Take data from Microsoft with a grain of salt. In my experience the orgs that use Microsoft tools for remote collaboration are the worst at remote work. This is because Microsoft tools have inferior functionality and because the orgs that use them tend to be more traditional. Google Office, Slack, Mural, etc. all foster better collaboration that Microsoft tools, and it impacts the org's culture.
The biggest reason why I see remote orgs have too many meetings because they have poor remote work tools and processes. I work on complex software projects where collaboration is critical. I see teams get fed up with the number of meetings they're attending, so they do a meeting audit, block off chunks of "no meeting" time, make rules about meeting agendas, etc., and within a few months all the meetings are back and everyone is overwhelmed again. The reason is that no one can get the info they need to do their jobs without meetings because there are no collaboration tools and processes in place. The remote orgs I see that are the best at keeping meetings in check are good about tracking their work in tools like Jira, documenting decisions, and putting completed work in place where others can view and use it. Being transparent with work and using standardized processes and tools to track work and information massively cuts down on meetings. It takes a tiny bit more time to document things, but it saves an exponential amount of time in meetings. This also helps me, as a manager, know that we're on track without surveilling everyone. Instead of walk past people's desks, I can troll our Jira boards to see what we're working on.
"The reason is that no one can get the info they need to do their jobs without meetings because there are no collaboration tools and processes in place."
This, or because there are tools in place and people choose not to use them because "it's easier* if I just swing by your desk/call a meeting/email you for an update." I used to work in an office where this was the norm, and it blew my mind—we had a project management tool, and many of us used it, but we also had to have meetings where we literally read from it to the people who refused to review it themselves.
*for WHOM?!
For those folks I will just pull up the tool and show them if they insist on meeting. I recently told a member of my team to reply a little more slowly to those messages and then send back a link to the tool. I will be a relentless broken record "It's in Jira, here's the link!" I admit I have more flexibility to do stuff like this because I'm in senior management, though.
Emphatic yes to "In my experience the orgs that use Microsoft tools for remote collaboration are the worst at remote work."
If you look at the tools and features Microsoft has prioritized since the start of the pandemic, they're heavily tied to lack-of-trust and giving managers more (creepy) visibility into what employees are doing (if my husband is away from his work laptop for more than 15 minutes during work hours, a cartoony eye pops up and starts looking around for him).
Wait WHAT? The eye thing. That's real??? What a comically awful feature.
Haha yeah. I'm not 100% sure what triggers it - probably some combo of lack of screen/keyboard activity - and I don't think it's actually looking at him, but like... it's quite a choice.
Yikes! I have never seen that one, but that is super creepy.
GASP
Seriously misguided. I’m sorry for your husband.
OMG the eye?!! What?
I appreciate you articulating this! I see this a ton on my team, with an extra sprinkling of “when we do try to set up a process, the managers don’t hold people accountable to that process.” So we’ve got people creating half-hearted tickets with a one sentence “placeholder description” that is the same as their vague and unhelpful title, and only giving updates on their work verbally in stand-ups or over IM. It drives me up a wall... when I was a manager, if my team hadn’t documented an update, I typed up what they were saying in front of them, and asked them to please document it next time.
At my last job, I had one person on my team with a pretty senior title who spent about 50% of his time making sure tickets were getting filled out and updated and that backlogs were properly prioritized. For that team it really took someone with formal authority to get the system working. When it works, it's self reinforcing. Everyone on the team expects to get info from tickets and complains when it's not there. But it can be so much work to it up and running.
One thousand percent this! PREACH!
The complete lack of meetings in my work as a freelancer has been so tricky for me to sort through in terms of how I gauge my productivity. I can get the same amount of work done in 2 hours that used to take me 2 days at my previous in-office job (because: meetings!!!!). But that means that I’m constantly wondering if I’m doing enough. If I’ve completed a project by noon (because I didn’t have meetings distracting me from actually doing the work), I feel guilty spending the afternoon on leisure/personal/household stuff. Gah! The productivity trap is hard to escape!
HA SAME!!! I never had a day chocked with meetings because I never managed anyone/made big decisions but I certainly had a lot more scheduled time than I did when went freelance, and it actually helped me see 1) the utility of certain times of meetings 2) how much of work is spinning wheels trying to look like you’re working. Now, when I’m stuck or it’s clear I’m not making progress on a draft or an idea, I go garden, or hang out with the dogs, and don’t feel that compulsion to model “working”
The difference that uninterrupted deep work time can make! I had a similar shift to self-employment five years ago. It's hard to escape the productivity trap, though it has helped me to also view that personal/household stuff as productive (because it is, just for me/my household/my friends). Another thing that has helped is reminding myself that flexibility is a key benefit of this type of work—and I get to enjoy it!
This is SO SPOT ON. It also makes we wonder about how to price my work because should I value it for the time it takes me or the time it would take someone internally.
Here to EVANGELIZE pricing by the project. I hate tracking time, and I feel like billing hourly penalizes me for being efficient.
100%, I almost never bill by the hour!
Yes, I think project based pricing is fairer for reflecting value rather than time but very hard to convince most orgs to pay!
YESSSSSS—I wonder this too, Danielle!
I love hiring freelancers for exactly that reason. I once had a freelancer that worked 10 hours a week after her kids were in bed, and she was just as productive as team members who were in the office 40 hours a week. The downside was that she could only take on work that had minimal dependencies on what anyone else was doing.
I recently transitioned from academic libraries to self-employment and learning that whoa, my brain and productivity capacity isn’t irreparably broken, it’s just that the constant emergencies, last minute meetings, and frequent interruptions of higher ed are totally counterproductive to getting things done has been a huge revelation.
In my personal experience, most people who become leaders at any level initially get promoted because they’re good at their jobs. This was my situation. I was a good exercise physiologist and suddenly I’m in charge of people. I’ve never worked anywhere where there’s formal training on how to make this transition, which I think leads to a lot of managers not knowing how to manage. Because of course! Many people don’t inherently know how to do strategic planning, annual reviews, performance management, etc. Or how to translate broader company goals into what it means for a particular department and team. (Side note - this issue is exactly why I started my coaching practice after chronic illness forced me out of my previous career) This is terrible for everyone. If companies invested more in truly developing the leadership pipeline, including teaching people how to be effective, empathetic leaders, I don’t think everyone would be as distracted by bullshit, meaningless metrics and by “performing” work.
I’ve been talking about this a lot recently and as big of a fan as I am of remote/hybrid/flexibility, I think it’s rise has enabled this dramatic increase in meetings, not just because of the loss of “drive-by” opportunities (as AHP mentioned) but because people no longer have to account for travel time between meetings. Where I worked before the pandemic, you would have to factor the possibility of a 20min walk to another building before scheduling meetings, and you’d never schedule back-to-back for this reason. It organically limited the amount of time in a day available for meetings.
At my current company, we’re hybrid, and it’s a struggle for those in the office to be on time to anything because they’re juggling the all day meetings life of remote work with the need to physically relocate between meetings.
All this to say, it’s fraught! And frustrating!
This is huge where I work - scheduling back to back meetings because you no longer "need" to consider travel time between meeting locations. Pre-pandemic, when I worked in person, I never would have schedule less than a 30 min break between meetings, because I needed time to get from location A to location B, and to go to the bathroom in between. These days, I leave almost every meeting saying "ahh I gotta jump for my next meeting!" because they are almost all back to back. I do my best to give myself a 60 min lunch break each day. But I was truly shocked when AHP suggested 2 hours of meetings should be the max per day...I'm lucky if I'm limited to 4 hours!
The 2 hour stat is what I’ve gleaned from people who talk about ability to focus and time needed to do your actual work - even if you’re a a manager, you shouldn’t have more reports than you can have meetings with (and a meeting with your supervisor). If a manager is in meetings 6 hours a day (which many I know are) then managing should be their ONLY job (and we know that isn’t true)
Working in an organizational culture where meetings are definitely seen as productivity, I will admit that I add "meetings" to my calendar to indicate I'm busy, when in actuality that meeting is for me with myself to actually get something done that requires focus. I know this isn't probably great, but it feels like literally the only way to actually accomplish anything! I know I'm not going to change the org culture, so I feel like my only option is to use its messed up values in my own way.
Yup! I have 3 "standing meetings" on my calendar every week that are actually yoga classes :)
this is great!
With you! For a couple years during the pandemic I had 3 "standing meetings" a week that were actually me going for a run, lol.
Nothing wrong with that! It would be great if more leaders did this and set the tone. There is also the need for pre-meeting prep, a simple 15 mins for a bio break even?
I loved this article. I oversee three employees as part of a bigger team, and we work at a place where we all enjoy the work we are doing. I am VERY keen on taking care of oneself. When I first started, one of the meetings I was tasked to lead took place every day. Now it takes place once every other week (because, really. We don't work in a space where that much changes from day to day. Once I saw that the meeting was mostly asking, do any of you have any updates since YESTERDAY? and the answer was always No, I knew it could be reduced.) I also tell me team that as long as their assignments are completed by the deadline we've set, how they spend their time to get there is up to them. I've lost all my family to cancer, including most recently my 50-year-old brother, so I am well aware that time is finite and precious, and should be spent as joyfully and creatively and intentionally as possible.
"I also tell me team that as long as their assignments are completed by the deadline we've set, how they spend their time to get there is up to them." Yessss!!! If only every manager/team could share this approach to work, and knew to articulate it for folks' peace of mind! Kudos to you, and very sorry about the losses that have helped to clarify this for you.
I'm so sorry for your losses. Prioritizing your joy and creativity sounds like a beautiful way to honour the memories of your loved ones 💚
I have been in positions where there are nonstop meetings, and it's terrible, as there's no actual time to do work and follow up on the things that are discussed in meetings.
But I have also come to realize that many times it's less about the quantity of the meetings than it is about the quality of the meetings. Meetings with a specific goal or agenda are great. Meetings that are just about getting a group of people together to ramble on about what they're doing are not so great.
And one of my common complaints about my current workplace is that they include far too many people in meetings, even if the topic is only tangentially connected to their work. I appreciate that they are trying to be inclusive, but having 15 people in a meeting where five people have things to contribute and the other 10 are just listening is a waste. Just send me the minutes.
Yes! Anyone and everyone can join a call - we’re no longer limited to the number of chairs in the conference room!
What is a meeting? I feel like I don’t have too many meetings but I also think that I spend a lot of the day in virtual collaboration with the person who works for me. Those show up as meetings on my calendar but they are different from meetings bringing together a bunch of people that either require a lot of prep, input and/or concentration on absorbing new information. I think my work actually has good meeting culture overall but there are some people who don’t know how to get things done without a meeting either because they are over scheduled as part of their role or because of lack of other supports. I like working meetings with my colleague because they help me as a neurodivergent person and doing 6 hours of work a day on my own is stifling. But I don’t feel like those kinds of meetings are the concern here.
This sounds like a great use of meetings tbh
Thanks for offering this experience! I just checked in with a managee I have whom I think might be interested in doing this (in a more limited capacity) in 2024 - he sounds really interested in using this approach to getting work done virtually, together.
From an european perspective we have the same issues, but i feel like it less an issue of productivity as just to feel "busy". Also, arround here, we have a lot more meetings because.... no one takes any decision. So we have to meet again to talk about the same things over and over...
Again, a problem of the manager who don't take their responsabilites. It's floating.
And as they don't do the work (which is to decide which way to take the next 6 months), they keep their options open until someone, above them, starts to put pressure.
Yes, I’ve seen a lot of this too - having the same discussion multiple times because either the decision making authority isn’t clear or the person with that authority doesn’t want to wield it.
"either the decision making authority isn’t clear or the person with that authority doesn’t want to wield it." This is a perfect summary of the problem.
Over the years I've had jobs where: no time for bathroom breaks and legally required lunch breaks let alone meetings, too many meetings but not enough training to do the work, weekly meetings but not enough job definition to be useful, and monthly all staff that isn't useful at all. My current boss would probably relate to this article. Thinking of them, one thing I don't really see here is that no one calls on the phone anymore. They prefer verbal communication over email, which somehow only leaves meetings - and if everyone is always in meetings externally, a meeting is the only way to have a phone call. I don't think it would somehow magically give them the ability to think critically at a larger scale than the project they want to do at that moment in time (something I deem relevant to doing my work well), but it might provide more bandwidth for thinking about their underlings.
The unending torture of the all-staff meeting. WHYYYYYY.
At my job, we've historically had no meetings. We've been fully remote forever and it's extremely obvious whether we are or are not producing -- basically everything has immediate results. Only then, following a bunch of changes to our workflow made with zero input from the people whose work was being affected, we pushed for some communication so now we have one one-hour meeting a week, and that has been really productive. I'm kind of looking for a new job, though, and one of my big questions is always going to be about meeting culture, because I would not be able to function in a place with a really intense meeting culture.
It’s shocking to me that managers can do their job without a 1:1 weekly meeting. I realize this essay is about less meetings, while I’m extolling the virtues of one. But if managers dedicate 1 hour to their direct reports to find out “what are the roadblocks that you’re coming up against and how can I help” things move way more smoothly. The need to ve on random team meetings just to fogure out what people are doing decreases rapidly. There used to be a podcast, called Manager Tools which was very useful to me back over a decade ago when I was a baby manager and had zero clue. It was two tech guys in their 50s maybe. Some of it was problematic for a whole bunch of different reasons, and I will grant they could be pedantic at times, but their guidance strictly on the nuts and bolts of 1:1s and meeting management was helpful.
At my last job, I managed a team of 7. I gave each team member one hour a week of dedicated "boss time" they could use any way they wanted. Some opted for 1hr meetings once a week. Some met for 30min once or twice a week. One liked 90m deep dives every other week. Those meetings were protected time, so I wouldn't schedule over them or cancel unless they asked. Just the simple act of letting them choose their best way to spend time with me went a long way to, building trust.
My personal favorite 1:1 scenario was with a fellow extroverted neurodivergent who liked to schedule "parallel play" sessions. We'd work on related, but different parts of a project over Zoom. Mostly in silence, but he could ask questions and get instant feedback on coding or development issues. Or we'd talk about whatever came into our heads.
I had a similar experience with a colleague for years, both of us neurodivergent as well. He were both freelancers, and I subcontracted for him, so he was technically my boss In advance of a big deliverable, we would schedule a whole afternoon. It would start with lunch and chatting about big ideas, maybe a walk thrown in. Eventually we'd sit down somewhere we could take notes and knock out an entire presentation in about 45 minutes. The unstructured "play" was the relationship building and idea generation that led to extremely fast and frictionless "work"
This is great management!!
I just wanted to thank you for this example! I just shared these options with my team and asked them to start thinking about how they'd like to check in with me in 2024, given a set allocation of total time.
Really appreciate this example as I head into team building in 2024
I’m remote and have a 1:1 weekly with my manager. Prior to the meeting, I send an email with the top 5 priorities (as I understand them) and a list of activities and status. Anything I want to discuss is highlighted. This way, my manager can re-order priorities, we hit hot-button issues, and there’s record of my work product. I take notes on this during the call, use it as a work list, and update the draft throughout the week. Calls take 15-30 mins and my manager can show anyone what I’m working on and spends time mentoring rather than managing me. I made up this system for more autonomy, and it’s allowed me more “blank time,” because my priorities and deadlines are clear.
Healthy meeting culture!!!
This is so great!
Oh gosh I would LOVE to have a 1:1 weekly meeting with my program lead and to have weekly 1:1 meetings with my direct reports. I think this has been discussed elsewhere in CS but I work in an organization where management has been "tacked on" to other job descriptions. So I have my main job duties, and then I have management duties (which include personnel but also financial/facilities management of our office and reporting requirements). I get paid a supplement which comes out to 3.8% of my annual salary, which equates to 18 minutes of an 8-hour workday. (LOL so ridiculous when I type it out.) All this to say that this trend may play a part in why people aren't having more *meaningful* meetings or feeling supported appropriately by their direct supervisor.
I definitely feel this - I have so many jobs and managing people is only one of what feels like about fifty responsibilities I have every day. I try my best, but every day a number of things have to be less of a priority since I can't actually do them all. (I also go weeks at a time sometimes without hearing a peep from my direct supervisor - the workplace culture says, "that means you're doing fine, you can work independently!" but I settle for sending emails with updates so she maybe has some idea of what's happening in my day to day. She also has multiple jobs and an unreasonable amount of responsibilities.) I think that cutbacks have really been bad for relationships between reports!
YES, solidarity!! Thank you for sharing. It is a constant battle to focus on what is important, impactful, and/or fills my bucket.
A visitor to our office commented that I "need to call someone to come take care of these bushes outside the office because they look terrible." Like, really??? In addition to all these other hats, I'm meant to COORDINATE THE LANDSCAPING?? I'm grateful for that one because it was crystal clear that was a task that was not going to get done.
Yeah, my job is pretty unusual in a lot of ways -- it's always entirely obvious what I'm working on, there are basically no long-term projects, and my manager and I and much of our team have been together for more than a decade. I think the shortest length is nearly nine years? My manager's boss periodically gets on her to do 1:1 check-ins and she'll do it for a week or two but it really does not help us function at all.
But in my previous job my regular check-ins with my manager were definitely helpful -- at one of the most memorable ones, he came back from vacation and wanted to catch up on what had been happening and I said we'd had a bunch of really great meetings, and he said something like "that's good, but I'd watch out for the moment when meetings start to replace actually getting the work done."
I also found the Manager Tools podcast very helpful back when I started managing people and was just trying to find my way. Their strong suit seems to be "we will explain this topic in extreme and tactical detail" which can sometimes be overkill and/or problematic, but it had the virtue of not assuming everyone would just understand the unspoken things. (Like me! I grew up in a blue-collar environment! There was so much about white-collar jobs that I just did not know until someone explained it to me with actual words!)
Later, I discovered that the company Manager Tools sells a license to their material for $200/year, which gives you access to "show notes" (essentially a transcript) of every podcast they've ever done, and often is an easy sell to a boss as part of a learning & development budget. It's much faster to just search by topic and read a PDF than listen to two guys discuss in extreme detail for an hour, ha. I still sometimes use it when I need a tactical, humane deep dive on a management topic. (No affiliation, just find it useful.)
I really like this: "it's extremely obvious whether we are or are not producing -- basically everything has immediate results."
In AHP's essay, I kept wondering about the managers who feel like they need to look over people's shoulders to make sure they're working. Like, do those employees not have tasks they need to accomplish? Does the manager have no other way to check whether those tasks are getting done besides meetings? It makes me wonder if role clarity (and lack thereof) contributes to micro-managing via meetings culture.
Also, broken link to the podcast episode?
OH BLAST FIXING NOW!
My mind is exploding that people don't take breaks during the day! Granted, I work from home, but I use a Pomodoro timer with 20-minute focus time/5-minute break intervals, with a couple of longer 15-minute breaks during the day. It helps me tackle personal emails (like reading this newsletter and typing this comment!) as well as remind me to get water, go for a walk, grab lunch, etc. The times I'm buried in work and ignore my timer I definitely feel it by mid-afternoon: my focus is gone and it's harder to keep up the quality of my work.
Truer words, etc.
But you missed the heart of this problem. What is driving all of this is the demand for productivity in the first place, and THAT is tied into an economic system that is supposed to produce exponential return on ALL investments.
Exponential return is doubling return. By definition. Mathematically. Precisely. Unavoidably.
That job you had when you turned 20? Well, to achieve that 2% growth that is supposed to be the sign of a "healthy economy," that 20-year old who comes in 35 years later needs to be producing TWICE AS MUCH as you did at 20.
And by the way, you are supposed to be producing twice as much as whoever held your current job 35 years ago.
Not happening? Well, the economy marches on. Maybe your job isn't that important. Corporations can keep up by doing Enron-ish sorts of things, and who needs employees, anyway?
All we need is a board room and some coke. No, I don't mean the soft drink.
So workers are getting hammered on both ends: their productivity is DECLINING according to a measuring-stick that doubles every 35 years (and even faster in "good" years). And when they fall short, the first reflex (in my experience) is even more meetings to get the project back on track.
It's nuts.