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Not only do those things make meetings more productive, they increase the overhead to calling a meeting. We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, b
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Not only do those things make meetings more productive, they increase the overhead to calling a meeting.
We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, but adding friction to something that's happening too often can help bring it back into balance. That's especially true for things with large "multipliers". An unscripted meeting might take one hour for the person calling it, but eat 10 hours of other people's time (plus interrupt them). Adding an hour of prep and summary for the caller lowers that ratio a bit so everyone has a more similar view of the meeting.
That's rarely grounds to make things harder with no benefit, but meeting prep has very solid benefits. Even in terms of time wasted, a clear agenda keeps meetings from dragging on, and routing minutes/summary after the fact avoids repeating discussions or inviting people who only need to listen.
- papito 7y agoAdding a barrier of entry to something generally improves the quality of whatever it is.
- Bartweiss 7y agoAt the cost of quantity, but agreed. (There have been some really interesting displays of this, like Robot 9k avoiding chat spam, or Kingdom of Loathing's 3-question "test" for joining global chat.) Print fiction stories are higher average quality than web-published or fan-fiction, because they costs money to produce. Nobody prints and binds 500 words of unfinished, unedited rambling, but they certainly put it on AO3. But it turns out there's a lot of stuff that's interesting and valuable, yet too niche or awkwardly sized to justify printing. So I guess there are two questions. First, does the barrier to entry improve the overall quality of the thing, or just weed out the weakest examples? Charging anyone who calls a meeting $10 would avoid some stupid meetings, but requiring an agenda can also improve worthwhile meetings. Second, are the marginal examples worth having? For a short story in a database, sure. For a five person meeting? Definitely not.
- caro_douglos 7y agomight charging a ‘call to meeting’ fee based on the attendees salary/hourly rate be an alternative?
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoI would be very concerned about that killing productivity by making it so that nobody is willing to schedule them at all.
- triceratops 7y agoNot sure how many people would want to pay to do their own jobs.
- eitland 7y agoI'm not certain it is a good idea to to that but let me try to come up with a more constructive way to do it: Of course people shouldn't pay to do their work, so this must be taken from their allocated budget. If they don't have a budget they cannot invite anyone without the permission of someone who has a budget and think the meeting is a good idea.
- memling 7y agoin contracting this is not uncommon. one employer I worked for bid on a contract that was later revised down by 75 percent. meetings were curtailed to save money precisely because of the cost to the customer. budget sensitivity is a valuable tool to fight time wastagement.
- dredmorbius 7y agoAllocating and drawing down a meeting budget pool might assist with this. As a positive incentive, a countering "attending" pool, also budgetable. Meetings with strong appeal would be compensated from that. Not sure what to do with the Imaginary Meeting Points at the end of the year, though possibly use it as the basis of some sort of merit award or bonus.
- naravara 7y ago>We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, but adding friction to something that's happening too often can help bring it back into balance. Sometimes friction creates abrasion and waste. Sometimes it creates the traction necessary to actually move forward without sliding all over the place like a hot mess.
- jimktrains2 7y agoI can't believe I've never thought of it in physical terms before! This is perfect! I'm working on some of our internal screens at work and part of this is me really trying to get things right and easy for everyone. However, yeah, there _are_ things that should be hard to impossible to do because they shouldn't be doing them and we've entered the realm of needing to coordinate with people and raise flags that something errored along the way. At first people thought of it in terms of the needless waist friction that had become so prevelant, but soon came to realize that it was a good friction telling them they were off the beaten path, allowing them to hand stuff over to their managers and get problems taken care of before causing problems for customers, wasting customer services time as well as causing us to expend more resources to correct the mistake. Like you said, friction in just the right places allows good things to happen.
- larrik 7y agoI see it as putting more of the cost of the meeting onto the caller, rather than spreading it amongst the participants via wasted time and energy (or the dreaded re-convene since no one was ready).
- labawi 7y agoIt's not just shifting costs. Maybe you trade say 1-3 units of time of caller for say 9x 1 units of time of attendees, for a 9/3 = 3x or more savings. Callers tend to have higher salary, but usually way less than the people count multiplier.