5 ms·
Meetings at my company are derailed by having a lot of Ph.Ds who cannot ask a question or make a comment without spending 5 minutes talking, usually repeating t
by karaterobot 3y ago
Meetings at my company are derailed by having a lot of Ph.Ds who cannot ask a question or make a comment without spending 5 minutes talking, usually repeating the same thing over and over in different ways. If I schedule a 25 minute meeting and write an agenda with three topics in it, we'll get through half of one topic in that meeting. So I plan to schedule 2x50 minute meetings on separate days. It's a catastrophic waste of time.
And you can't ask people to submit questions or read documents or watch demo videos in advance, because they just won't do it. They'll say "my schedule is so full of meetings, I couldn't do the prep work". Well, it's full of meetings because we have 2x50 minute meetings to do what we should be able to do in one 25 minute meeting.
- spywaregorilla 3y agoThis comment applies to basically every category of people.
- blitzar 3y agoHang on I thought Ph.Ds were socially awkward people who were passive and silent in meetings only occasionally asking brief questions with no follow up, and seem like they would prefer to just do the whole meeting in 2 or 3 emails. I am not sure which stereotype to believe anymore.
- spywaregorilla 3y agoIf we really want to get specific, phds are generally trained to be comprehensive in their discussions, rather than concise, which is a slightly different flavor of annoyingly verbose from the typical incompetent communicator or individual who was trained to be rewarded for volume of "participation" more than anything (the latter of which tends to creep into org structures anyway)
- blitzar 3y ago> rewarded for volume of "participation" more than anything I can see you are well versed in corporate life.
- tnecniv 3y agoIt turns out that PhD holders are a diverse group of people with many different personality types!
- karaterobot 3y agoNot in my experience. At the last few companies I worked at, meetings were annoying for entirely different reasons, but not because of filibustering. People got in and out as quickly as possible. You occasionally met with someone who wouldn't answer a question straight, or make a statement in less than five paragraphs, but at this company it is the rule rather than the exception. The only difference I can point at to explain it is that I now work with mostly academics and scientists rather than software product people.
- thierrydamiba 3y agoWhy not dedicate half of the meeting to giving people time to read documents or watch demo videos? Then submit questions that can be addressed while the content is fresh in everyone’s mind.
- karaterobot 3y agoYou end up doing that, out of necessity. But it's worse in every way: people have to read and formulate questions under time pressure, rather than when it's comfortable for them. Anyone who did read (or helped write) the documents in question is sitting around wasting their time. And of course it doesn't make the meeting any shorter.
- thierrydamiba 3y agoSounds like you are stuck between a rock and a hard place my friend. Hope things get better for you but it sounds like there is no meeting format that would work for your team. Maybe just cut out meetings entirely and see how that goes.
- jedberg 3y agoAt Amazon we had a policy that each meeting starts with a memo and reading period. Every issue you brought up is true, but also pretty easy to get past. > people have to read and formulate questions under time pressure People who aren't good at that still have the option to read ahead of time. They need to know themselves to figure out which kind of person they are. They also have the option to submit feedback after the fact. > Anyone who did read (or helped write) the documents in question is sitting around wasting their time. Usually if you were an author or already read it, you either did your emails, wrote your next document, or just showed up after reading period. Sometimes you'd use that as your lunchtime if you WFH while you waited for people to read your doc. Or you would read the comments as they were being left on your document in real time so you could respond or do more research. But I always managed to fill the time with something else productive. You adapt pretty quickly. > And of course it doesn't make the meeting any shorter. This is 100% true. It makes them longer and slows down decision making. But it also tends to mean that decisions can be made (and are recorded right in the doc!) in one meeting instead of multiple meetings, since the main thoughts are already written down. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good idea. I found most of the meetings run that way to be a waste, because they indexed on "every meeting starts with a document" even when it wasn't necessary. But it might be helpful to try it for one or two meetings where you are wasting a lot of time talking about things that could have been written down.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoPeople won’t read ahead because they’re already too busy with other stuff. I suspect this is why Amazon has adopted a policy of silent reading time at the start of a meeting. You can’t expect busy people to spend hours prepping.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoWe can't expect people do to their jobs?
- wharvle 3y agoYou can expect whatever you want. Meanwhile, one policy may result in what you want actually happening, and another may not.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoThat's a fair point.
- ashfernandez 3y agoReplied this in a previous comment, but I'm making it such that if someone preps a meeting they HAVE to assign a responsible person for each and every talking point. When they do this, that person gets a notice saying they have something to prepare ahead of time for. SO even if they don't have enough time to look at the whole agenda, they can easily identify what exactly they need to pinpoint-prep for.
- pphysch 3y agoSprinkle on some consultants who are billed by the hour and you have a delicious recipe for getting nothing done.
- ashildr 3y agoI‘m sorry but if you are the owner of these meetings I consider it your responsibility to (have someone) properly moderate them.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoTwo suggestions, one more plausible than another: 1. Dedicate the first X minutes of the meeting to reading the document. It sucks, and you shouldn't have to, but clearly people aren't doing their homework, so you gotta give them time to do it during the meeting. 2. "I couldn't do the prep work" "Ah, I'm sorry to hear that. I'll cancel this meeting right now, since we cannot proceed without that; everyone can use the freed up time to go over the prep work required, and I'll re-schedule this meeting for later in the week." The second option requires you to have both the confidence to say this, and the credit to unilaterally cancel-and-reschedule a meeting and to call people out in such a way. But if the meetings are useless anyway, cancelling and rescheduling one doesn't sound like a big loss.
- maerF0x0 3y agoin my experience the second option is majorly jarring for those who did the homework and derails timelines. Often i've found if something is that low priority that it can be delayed for days to weeks then it's not actually important enough to spend time on.
- vidarh 3y agoWell, it 1) needs to be jarring so that it creates social pressure to address the issue, 2) it needs to implicitly be temporary, to institute a culture shift, or get the people who refuse to adjust to move to other roles. Consider that the alternative in this scenario is not to solve the tasks in the meeting in the allotted time, but to waste time holding a meeting where things don't get resolved because people haven't prepared.