Efficient Meetings

People do all sorts of things in meetings, most of the time they don’t participate in the meeting at all, and who can blame them? It’s not like anything particularly important is really being discussed and it definitely isn’t something you couldn’t communicate with an email.

An entire subgenre of corporate communication bullshit has to do with meetings. Adult professionals need other adults to tell them that it is important to be attentive in meetings and you shouldn’t let your hand wander into your pocket to pick up your smartphone in order to get away from all the important discussion going on. Sometimes, though, a pointless meeting overlaps with something that you should actually be doing, in which case, you multitask.

Meeting rooms are often filled with pamphlets about how you too can be an efficient meeting participant. “I’m doing my part!” Sadly, no one has managed to come up with a reason for why anyone would want to be an efficient meeting participant, because regardless of how fast or efficient you are going to be, the entire runtime that was allocated from your Outlook calendar will be used.

One solution I participated in was in a project where the project manager was hell-bent on everyone knowing everything that was going on in the project at any one time. A fine idea, except that there was no one in the project who cared about anything beyond their immediate department. Why would one unit be interested in how another unit would implement this solution? What difference could it possibly make?

This questioning was promptly disregarded and the project manager had an eager intern create a spreadsheet of everyone in the project- a list of several hundred people- in alphabetical order. The idea was that every other day when this project meeting was held, two people, starting from the top of the list were designated to chair the meeting and the other to be secretary, i.e. take notes. In the next meeting, the next two people would be doing this and on it goes. I suppose the idea was to have at least two people out of a few hundred who knew what was happening in the project every other day.

Now, I am a firm believer in people’s ability to economize, and it hardly took a week of this bullshit until people began to have conflicting meetings and other tasks that precluded them from joining the meeting. The amount of people joining the meeting, which was a conference call, began to dwindle. Most people in this alphabetically sorted spreadsheet whose number hadn’t come up yet simply stopped joining. What was initially a meeting of a few hundred people was now a gathering of about a dozen individuals. Worse still, every meeting still began by going down the list, calling out names of people who were not present until they reached someone who was and they were told to chair the meeting. Then they did the same for the secretary. This pointless activity of calling out names from a spreadsheet could take up the majority of the time allocated for this project update meeting. Eventually, the same few people were designated as chair and secretary, until the exodus became too severe and the project manager had to admit defeat and simply run his meeting.

Unfortunately, we never recovered all the people who dropped off in an attempt to avoid knowing obscure details about implementations that had nothing to do with them.