meetings

16 October 2023

Doing your job well does not entail attending more meetings

There’s a lot of swearing in this blog post, but then that’s what makes it both amusing and bang on the money. As ever, there’s a difference between ‘agile’ as in “working with agility” and ‘Agile’ which seems to mean a series of expensive workshops and a semi-dysfunctional organisation.

Just as I captured Jay’s observation that a reward is not more email, so doing your job well does not entail attending more meetings.

Which absolute fucking maniac in this room decided that the most sensible thing to do in a culture where everyone has way too many meetings was schedule recurring meetings every day? Don’t look away. Do you have no idea how terrible the average person is at running a meeting? Do you? How hard is it to just let people know what they should do and then let them do it. Do you really think that, if you hired someone incompetent enough that this isn’t an option, that they will ever be able to handle something as complicated as software engineering?

[…]

No one else finds this meeting useful. Let me repeat that again. No one else finds this meeting useful. We’re either going to do the work or we aren’t going to do the work, and in either case, I am going to pile-drive you from the top rope if you keep scheduling these.

[…]

If your backlog is getting bigger, then work is going into it faster than it is going out. Why is that happening? Fuck if I know, but it is probably totally unrelated to not doing Agile well enough.

[…]

High Output Management was the most highly-recommended management book I could find that wasn’t an outright textbook. Do you know what it says at the beginning? Probably not, because the kind of person that I am forced to choke out over their love of Agile typically can’t read anything that isn’t on LinkedIn. It says work must go out faster than it goes in, and all of these meetings obviously don’t do either of those things.

[…]

The three best managers I’ve ever worked for, with the most productive teams (at large organizations, so don’t even start on the excuses about scale) just let the team work and were there if I needed advice or a discussion, and they afforded me the quiet dignity of not hiring clowns to work alongside me.

Source: I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again | Ludicity

Image: Unsplash

23 January 2023

Async work isn’t just cancelling meetings

I thought this response by Becky Kane to Shopify publicly announcing that it’s cancelling 76,500 hours of meeting was not only a great example of identifying the issues underneath a problem, but also a masterclass in product marketing.

The Async Newsletter is from Twist, which positions itself as a collaborative messaging app for teams that doesn’t distract you. I’ve been meaning to try it for a while, and even more so now that I know how much they think about these things.

Kane’s point is that it’s easy to say ‘no meetings’ but this doesn’t provide another option for people. After all, if people are used to calling a meeting to share information, or because they’re not feeling ‘aligned’ as a team, or because they need to make a decision, how do they now do this?

As employees returned from their holiday break, the company’s leadership fired the first shot in an all-out war on meetings, and boy was it a doozy:

Effective immediately, all recurring meetings with more than 2 people would be automatically removed from company calendars – canceling 76,500 hours of meetings per year in one fell swoop.

This hard-line anti-meeting policy — designed to give people back time for focused work – also included:

A 2-week cooling off period before any meetings are put back on the schedule

Moving all large meetings of 50+ people to the same 6-hour window on Thursdays

Reupping a rule that no meetings at all can be held on Wednesdays

Given the masthead of this newsletter, you’d think I would applaud the move. But I’m skeptical it will have the kind of lasting impact on employee engagement and productivity that Shopify’s leadership team is aiming for.

You may have noticed that Shopify “reupped” No Meeting Wednesdays. A friend of mine who worked there told me that it was an open secret that everyone scheduled meetings on Wednesdays anyway because it was the only time that wasn’t already taken up with meetings.

Without bigger, deeper changes to company culture and operations, there’s no reason to think the same meeting creep won’t simply happen again. Or worse, that communication will be pushed into even more fragmented, distracting, and ultimately unproductive forms.

Source: You can’t just cancel 76,500 hours of meetings | The Async Newsletter

2 June 2021

Meetings as exercises in power

Meetings are one of the major ways in which power is demonstrated and exercised in hierarchical organisations. Trusting people and leaving them alone to get on with stuff is more productive, but work isn’t always about productivity (sadly).

Meeting abstention: Anyone invited to an internal meeting has the power to opt-out. “Send me the summary, please.” If someone abstains, they give up their ability to have a say in the meeting, but most meetings these days don’t actually give people a platform to have a say. And then that person can leave the Zoom room and get back to whatever it is they were doing that was actually productive.

Meeting nullification: If anyone in an internal meeting announces that the meeting is a pointless waste of time, it’s over. The meeting organizer is obligated to send everyone the memo that they probably should have sent in the first place.

Source: Meeting nullification | Seth’s Blog

Tag: meetings

Doing your job well does not entail attending more meetings

Async work isn’t just cancelling meetings

Meetings as exercises in power