Dec 6, 2023·edited Dec 6, 2023Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
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.
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.
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 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 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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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!
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.