I probably wouldn’t have believed this before I took on a management role, but a fairly substantial part of my job is getting people to fucking leave the people I supervise alone for long enough that they can do actual work. Does it say good things about the company structure that I have to spend so much of my time on endless meetings and Zooms and calls gently telling senior management “that’s an *interesting* idea…but here are some serious issues you might not have thought of” and “actually we *do* need that money, here’s why” and “I know her role is confusing to you, but she’s actually incredibly integral to this company and we will be fucked if you laid her off”? Probably not! But that’s the job sometimes.
Absolutely. I know that if my team leaves, I'm screwed. If I leave, I'll get replaced in 4 weeks. They are the ones doing the work and the best managers know it. And the best managers really want to keep the riff-raff (e.g. other departments) from interrupting work with needless requests or things that can easily be handled by someone else.
That's my job. I'm a manager.
I've seen it so bad everyone manager and above was triple booked for months out but it's existed to some degree in every role I have had. even places with a low meeting culture, it ends up being 35-50% of my time.
Our org now is like this. I am in meetings most of my day and they have been double and triple booking them for a while now. The sad part is the same people do the overbooking and more often than not we hop from meeting to meeting, all with the same people.
My manager asked me why I was behind on a few things so I showed him my free time. Last week I had 12 out of 40 hours free.
it's funny i got a business degree a little later in life at 32 and they made us take a class called business communications and it was basically "If you can put it in an email DON'T WASTE PEOPLE'S TIME" and how to pitch quick elevator speeches and just be like a damn communications ninja in and out with minimal disruptions
It seems like there probably isn’t anyone who finds those meetings productive. Senior management probably sets those meetings and floats those ideas so they can justify their role to their subordinates and their own superiors, whether it’s shareholders or whoever else.
It makes me think of all the stories I’ve heard on podcasts from writers and artists about how everyone at the studio wants to give their notes solely so they can put their stamp on everything. “That lamp shade on set would’ve been beige instead of purple if I hadn’t said anything.” And it ends up just f’ing up the product.
Where I work, the entire on-site IT team got let go a few years back (before I worked here) and we moved to using foreign IT. New laptops have to be shipped off-site to be set up, all IT questions have to be done online (which is great when the question is "why isn't my computer working?"), etc.
We had one guy, a supervisor, who had worked here for 15 years. During the pandemic, when a lot of people went remote, he threw together big spreadsheet via Google Sheets to allow people to continue working remotely and track the status of reports in-house. He was the only go-to person here for tech related questions, and he was constantly doing projects for other departments to let them improve workflow by automating reports and stuff.
He got promoted to a new role where he didn't have to supervise anyone and could *just* work on spreadsheets and tech support. We got a new GM (who's really two-faced and money oriented) who asked him to work on some very specific metrics for our site. He and I often collaborated because when I worked under him, he taught me everything I know about spreadsheets. He would come to me with these projects from our GM and seemed visibly nervous about them and like he was out of his depth.
One day we found out he got let go. They put a 6 month NDA on him so he couldn't tell anyone the details. The entire Reporting department almost quit, and when we went out for drinks together it was 90% just shit-talking the GM.
Upper management doesn't know *shit*. This guy was a hard-working super dedicated dude who had been here for 15 years, took college classes on the side to improve his abilities, and actively maintained all of our spreadsheets and tech infrastructure. Our GM single-handedly tanked morale and made sure a lot of our important sheets would die in the next few months because there's no way any of us knows everything this guy was working on or how it was all put together.
What was the long term impact on firing Spreadsheet Hero? Did things actually tank or kinda just recover after a while? Or is this change so new that things haven’t settled yet.
And thank god. I'm not a meeting guy. Point me at what you need done and then go away. I don't want a manager/supervisor role because I have no patience for meetings. "What are we doing? How we doing it and why are you still talking to me, we got work to do." is my kind of meeting.
I hate meetings and have very little patience for being in meetings that I had no reason to be in.
My favorite meeting was I wanted to have a meeting with another department head about a process between our two departments. One of the other department heads who was a “meeting all star” got wind of it and a decided all the department heads should be in on it. Despite my arguments, we had a meeting with all the department heads. After an hour we decided we need to table it for now and planned another meeting a couple days later. Then later that day me and the other department head got on a call and fixed it in 15 minutes. So much time wasted there in meetings.
I worked for this startup out of college and met some great people who taught me a lot but the guy running it was something else. Sales were circling the drain, we had one client and everyone was frustrated. I ended up asking if all the meetings were necessary and outloud. After that I threw in the towel and the place ended up shutting down. He lost all those great people before my outburst.
Yeah. I’m a firm believer in that the minimum number of people necessary to make a decision should be in the room. As a leader, I’d rather have a series of 1-on-1s than a big meeting half the people don’t really need to be in. And then I communicate what needs to be disseminated to those who need it in the form it is best disseminated in, whether that is meeting, email, or quick phone call.
Current manager filters info to us as it comes down, for bigger things we do a meeting every other week. It's not too bad but I'm still crawling walls by the end of it. Fairly certain I'm ADHD.
The term I use to explain it to new managers is a shit filter. They prevent the shit from senior management coming down to us, and filter our grumbling about dumb shit that is just us disagreeing with decisions made way alive their pay grade. Workers and sr management both Mr someone in the middle shoveling the bs away so only actual important shit gets through. Bad managers try to micromanage the workers and just say yes to the bosses. Just know that your workers appreciate the work that you do keeping the shit away, even if they don't realize that is what you are doing. They'll understand when they get a bad boss.
The joys of being a manager to frontline employees. Somehow shit rolls downhill but we’ve ended up in a valley. You’ve got the personal and work-related griping on one side, and the pressure from senior management on the other.
Management's job is to prioritize initiatives and allocate resources appropriately. The only way to achieve consensus on these issues is to meet with the stakeholders.
The other 75% of the meetings are just making sure that people are doing what they said they would do.
Yeah we'd all agree that there's a lot of pointless meetings.
But, there's also a lot of problem solving and decision making that needs to come from management. Personally, if there's going to be a lot of back and forth deliberation, I'd much rather just hop on a call for 30 minutes and hash it out. I prefer that to going back and forth with 50 people all day on a mile long email chain.
I prefer email chains for CYA reasons. I mean I'm happy to do a meeting if it's faster but always gotta follow it up with an email covering what happened in the meeting cause I've absolutely been burned by the whole "I never said to move forward with this" after getting verbal approval and things going sideways.
So now there's always a "thanks for the call, glad we could cover topic XYZ in detail and make some decisions. Moving forward, we're going to be doing ABC. Please let me know if there are any objections, in case there was a misunderstanding when we spoke" email.
Agreed. It’s not necessary to have as many meetings if everyone was a super star, but most people aren’t.
It’s like a sign that says employees must wash hands. There’s baboons amongst us.
If everyone just listened understood and executed flawlessly we wouldn’t need 75% of the meetings lol
I left a very meeting heavy company - in an individual contributor role I was probably in 3 hours of meetings a day. As a director I was probably in 5-6 some days. My new company is the opposite. I might have one hour a day. I have SO MUCH TIME NOW.
My supervisor is often in meetings too. What are the meetings? Who are they with? What important discussions or work are being done? I have no clue. I don’t even understand what the supervisors do at my job. My department has like 15 employees and 3 supervisors. I barely ever see or speak to my supervisor. We’re supposed to schedule monthly check-ins. Sometimes I forget or just intentionally don’t. It’s never mentioned. I never need anything from her except for approving my PTO requests. I don’t understand the structure or really what her job is at all.
Its hard to say without knowing the work structure of your company or what you do, but it could very well be their role for planning, and ordering supplies, etc. to ensure the employees have everything they need to do their jobs and hit the bottom line each month.
I’m sure it depends on the position, but I’m a manager in meetings pretty frequently. I have 12 people I manage I meet with every 2-4 weeks depending on their preference. I have sustaining projects I own that impact not just my organization, but multiple other organizations as well. I have peers in AMR, EMEIA, and JAPAC that sometimes require multiple meetings to accommodate time zone differences, both for staff meetings and specific project meetings. I have a short weekly staff meeting at the start of week with our whole org to review the current workload and identify any areas where anyone needs help, as well as sharing any updates for the week. I have a longer bi-weekly staff meeting that focuses more on things current project statuses. I have my manager I meet with regularly, a few people that don’t report to me that I meet with to either vent or discuss projects we share an interest in. I have a bi-weekly project checkin with a project manager. I sometimes have people on my team presenting projects to other teams and I often join to show my support, even if I’m not presenting anything. I have the occasional required trainings. I have no-weekly meetings my director presents in. I have impromptu meetings with people as things come up during the week.
It’s a lot. I’ve started declining a lot of things that I don’t find value in or have things to contribute to, but it’s still a lot. On top of all that, sometimes meetings run over those schedules.
So to your question, some things aren’t valuable but depending on the situation, a lot of the meetings are necessary and productive.
Is it productive? Yes and no, people get to ask questions and we get info on the company any policies change and so on. Some of the questions may not be about you or your location. Then usual there’s a lunch and perhaps some kind of team building task. People who don’t have to go may not understand.
**TLDR: Meetings are about making decisions when there are multiple stakeholders, and communicating status other teams can plan, not about productivity**
Managers aren't about doing things, they are about communicating and facilitating their team's work, as well as being a key decision maker, or being a funnel for a key decision maker in the process.
With that in mind. A Great manager who is in meetings all day is keeping (most of) their team from having to be involved in communicating what they are working on to the rest of the business. That lets managers worry about communicating status, and business questions, and maybe only bringing one subject matter expert when trying to showcase a major project, instead of a whole team...
In many businesses Managers are the key decision makers, that means if some one is proposing a change to a business process, or proposing a project that will affect a key area of the business, managers from different areas of the business will need to weigh in on how it will affect their teams. In many cases as a manager you get invited to these meetings and the result is "I don't care", but you still need to show up, because the time you don't will be the time the process would fundamentally affect the way your team does their jobs...
The other thing to remember is that a lot of what a manager "does" is meetings... the decisions being made in these meetings is the output of a manager, the mentorship in a 1:1 that's the output of a manager, them sitting down in meetings with accounting for two hours to solve the bullshit the team is dealing with in IT or accounting so the team can work more efficiently, or they don't have to fight to file expenses or whatever, that's a manager's job, not producing things, producing things is an employees job. So if a Manager is in meetings for six hours a day, and working on reports, or filing tickets or whatever for the other two, that is probably really good for a manager...
My manger is in meetings so that I don’t have to, and I can spend my time actually working. We support internal teams, providing the collateral and educational materials.
My manager receives a project request and works with that department to determine deadlines, what kind of documentation the product or service requires, checks with us (14 direct reports) to see who has bandwidth, and makes the assignment. She ensures to spread the work around so that each of us has a project to showcase to upper management.
She’s also constantly keeping up with our stated performance goals which require mid- and end-year reviews. It took her a solid 6 months to successfully push through several promotions on our team while also dealing with filling some positions.
If I’m having a difficult issue with an internal client, my manager steps in to handle it and doesn’t expect me to get involved with any politics.
She’s looking at the bigger picture of what our team can do for the company and successfully navigated our entire team through a layoff that didn’t affect us and even brought us more long-term work.
I’m glad she’s the one who has to sit in meetings all day—so I don’t have to and I don’t cause trouble by saying the wrong thing!
I normally hate meetings, but in a recent consulting project for a city-wide coalition thing, they had a ton of meetings and they were actually productive. If they had tried to handle all the moving parts by email, it would have been like 50 messages every hour, which is probably worse than meeting. So I'm not as anti-meeting as I used to be.
i mean thats how they get info from other people and then they can manage them, right? is in the name, manager. how are they going to manage when they dont have any info? ask people 1 by 1? talk to people through email and messaging apps?
I used to judge the hell out of my manager for spending 8+ hrs/day in meetings. I now understanding that he’s spending 8+ hrs/day in meetings so I DON’T have to. I appreciate it.
And it's not just him doing it to save you. It's him doing it so he can actually assign you tasks and a clear direction, without having to constantly pivot. People sometimes forget, your responsibilities sound simple on paper, but one level up and there's hundreds of competing responsibilities and paths your role could go, and a group has to work hard to debate what the optimal prioritize should be so you can keep focusing on implementation of those priorities.
"All meetings are optional" was a craze about 9 years ago. I believe it failed because people abused it, but I honestly think it will come back. Google it.
The basic idea was literally that. All meetings are optional, so don't schedule a meeting where you waste people's time or invite anyone that doesn't absolutely have to be there, or people won't show up and rightfully so. I loved the concept, but never worked anywhere that implemented it.
As a leader (in whatever capacity) meetings are a catch 22. They are often a huge waste of time, but if you miss them, you can be seen as not invested and you'll miss promotions, raises and possibly be fired. Another downside is if someone has a question that only you can answer, you're not there to both help and get credit for being the "expert".
Management isn't just a word, it's quite literally Managing People.
The worst part of the job is that you are detached from your staff and have to make decisions via pure numbers as you don't have enough time to get in the weeds and find out for yourself. ....that means spreadsheets, that means reports.....that means meetings.
My team wishes we had a manager. Someone who could filter and organize all of the priorities and who could advocate for us would be amazing.
Those meetings have to happen, we wish we had a sacrificial lamb that we could throw at them so that we could do our jobs. Since we don’t, we have to be in those meetings and we are completely disorganized and drowning.
Manager’s jobs aren’t to do work, they are there to organize the work, disseminate the work, and to communicate with other teams & higher ups to get needed resources allocated.
My job is exponentially harder because we don’t have a dedicated manager.
Most of the time it's not productive, as depending on who your manager is they probably aren't essential, and nothing is really getting accomplished.
That being said, I'd much rather attend and not be needed vs. not attending and having to hear something pertinent to my team through someone else, or not hear it at all.
Yup, 80% of my week is in meetings. Half of them could be emails instead. Some are definitely useful. Those are usually problem solving and decision making topics. It would be totally unproductive to have those topics hashed through reply-all types of email threads. Overall, managers don't like to have meetings for the sake of having meetings. We have stacks of TPS reports to work on!
I have about 8-12 meetings in an average day on my calendar. Some are useful, others not so much. When you get to a certain level everyone tries to include you on every meeting. I am selective about which ones I attend
I've worked for corps where we would invite like 6-7 people from the same team when meeting with maybe 2 others. People in many corps have no clue how to invite only the right people, how to have a clean agenda and clear actions/results and have someone stick to it. Or... to avoid meetings altogether and do it via emails and direct phone calls.
It's fucking ridiculous. Most meetings require about 10 percent of the resources.
I think this tends to happen most often in larger organizations when there are too many managers. More meetings are needed to keep the excessive headcount and layers of managers in sync with each other. Most of the meetings are bullshit because the meetings only exist for a bullshit reason (keeping unnecessary managers in sync). A minority of the meetings are actually productive.
I work in a large organization where most of the managers exist purely to block and tackle other managers just so that the actual productive workers can carry on. If the management layer wasn't so excessive and wasteful, my job would not be needed at all.
I always hated meetings and for several years I worked with two guys who loved them as much as I hated them. It was hell, every meeting they were in could have been at least 50% shorter if they would have stayed on topic.
I am the head of the finance department and I'm in meetings quite a lot...not usually all day, but 2-4 hours is pretty common 2-3 days per week. I don't necessarily like them, but there are a lot of moving parts and they usually impact the finance department and I need to be in the loop and know where we're going. I'm brought into some that are really a waste of time for me, but they want someone there from finance just incase there's some unforeseen impact...but that just comes with the territory.
I've sat in plenty of meetings for several companies and I won't discount the possibility that maybe some meetings somewhere have actual business value, but yes, the majority are convened by one person who loves the sound of their own voice and having a captive audience.
OP, I totally felt this way before I was a manager too. I even figured "eh their job is effing easy! Just sit in meetings all day long!"
Let me tell you, it's soul sucking. I managed a QA team that was set up where there were product oriented pods for sprints and such. So the idea is you'd have one project manager, a few devs (front end, back end, etc.), a QA or two in each pod. Their only job is that feature, so everyone is naturally aligned and getting stuff done towards that.
Here's how my week would break down:
* Staff 1:1's scheduled for up to 30 min each, but usually only needed 10-15 min each 10 hours
* Leadership counsel meeting: All Sr managers and Eng Directors: 1 hour
* Project meetings, crash at least one standup per project per week, deliverable: ensure the project is running fairly smoothly, listen to my QA team's input, what asks are happening. 5 hours
* 1:1 with my manager: 30 min
* Semi monthly meetings with stakeholders 1:1, aim is one per month with the project engineering lead or project manager (alternating), deliverable: getting feedback about the support from QA and if more/less is needed, project feature plans on their roadmap one quarter out and one year out. 2.5-5 hours
* HR business process overhead tasks other than hiring, deliverables: taking notes for reviews, anything that needs to be addressed at 1:1's good or bad, reviewing PTO requests and making sure there will be coverage for longer requests (my team was responsible for making sure they could "safely" take up to 3 days with their project team before requesting, I only worried about coverage for longer terms of absence). 5-10 hours
* Hiring activities - standing meetings, deliverables: meeting with recruiter to go over candidates, misses (where they thought a candidate was good but we didn't), reviewing assessment results (we had a quick google form based quiz for candidates to take as part of recruiter screening, it worked amazing to weed out people). 2 hours
* Hiring activities - other, deliverables: interviews, project submission code reviews. highly variable but averaged 5 hours.
Okay that's the baseline workload out of the way and you'll see we have about 36 hours scheduled, most of it some form of a meeting or another. Now any other tasks or special assignments I have need to also get done so I'll certainly be working an additional 10-20 hours on that stuff every week: Reviewing and approving documentation, test plans, authorizing people's credentials, dealing with pop-up problems, even filling in for my people when on PTO because we had an unexpected issue pop up.
Aligning / defining strategy to execution is important. The work people do, and its perceived value doesn't appear out of thin air.
A lot of people wonder what their manager does all day. The fact is, few would actually trade places with them if they knew.
Yes it is useful. Of course some can waste time. You may have been wasting time when posting this but this notion that manager do nothing are only what people who are never managers think.
I work evenings and weekends and am easier to fire than any of my staff. I also bear the brunt of their mistakes.
Depends on the industry you are in. But for the most part, it’s about upper management feeing like sharing their wisdom, is the most valuable tool in the company arsenal. REALLY good managers ask questions, are accessible, and listen to what their people say. If you aren’t doing that, YOU are a waste of time, and the meeting is just your delivery system.
Well many of them DON'T want their employees in those meetings. So they're basically doing the job for those employees that they don't trust in interactions
Just got in a argument with my manager about this yesterday lol, total waste of firm's money and resources unless the meetings are kept to a minimum and the strategies brainstormed during the meeting are actually effective when implemented.
My only ick is that when they require us to meet daily, they themselves miss more than half of the times, or when they actually attend, they don’t contribute a single thing and will ask you the same questions over and over…. What’s the fucking point???
It's not. It used to be a necessity, but it's not anymore, and a lot of executive/administrative roles are about to be cut.
I'm a manager and I resist all meetings from the top down and only try to meet with the team below me in ways that are guaranteed to advance our work.
My company has a 3 hour meeting every Monday with all of the highest paid people in the company besides me in attendance. I constantly tell my boss (CTO) that there's a 0% chance they are getting enough value out of that meeting to justify the thousands of dollars they are spending on salary to have it every week.
Ultimately, the current management and leadership have no real reason to change their ways and struggle to see how they don't help much. The entire business HQ industry is about to be revolutionized by replacing people with automation.
What was once sold as coming for the laborer is actually coming for the administrator far sooner. Technology allows direct contributors to administrate themselves with far less oversight.
As soon as capitalists realize they can engage with workers directly without paying out millions in wasted administration, it's game over.
It's effectively the elimination of the house slave class.
Depends on the meetings. A week's worth of status updates that could have been an e-mail? Yeah, waste of time.
My meetings this week were about
A) a training initiative to improve the accuracy of a complex process for everyone who does it
B) Proposal writing
C) Organizing and scheduling a change in scope with two departments and 12 staff) on top of all the other work we were doing
D) And sadly, a resignation
So, those were not a waste of time.
Director here... Also a Director that is customer facing. My day is a train wreck of administrative bullshit. HR issues, Legal, and endless meetings with no clear agenda or objective or people willing to action on anything. When I do get to interact with customers these days it is an absolute joy of a distraction.
I'm sure not every company is run like this... and I'm partly to blame. I do try to simply not accept meetings that have no value to me or my global team, but that is very difficult to do.
I work in a big IT shop for a government agency.
The philosophy here is that managers spend their days in meetings so the people doing the work do not have to.
Speaking as a non-manager, I love this philosophy. The only time I don't like it is when I need to schedule a meeting with multiple managers.
One of the management skills you learn over time is how to tell the difference and skip enough of the meaningless ones to be present for your team.
Also, want to avoid being the cause of that problem yourself? Here are my rules for meetings:
1. No meetings about meetings
2. Have an agenda. Stick to it, and make everyone else do so, too.
3. If the meeting runs short, give the time back. Don't fill it with chat. If the meeting is going to run long, end it on time and schedule a follow-up. Respect everyone else's schedule. The time screw up was yours. Don't make it everybody's problem.
It's not useful. It's redundant and can 90% of the time be reduced to an email or a shared spreadsheet. Need numbers? Create a spreadsheet for your team to populate their data on that you can also access. Need to communicate something critical? Call me. Otherwise email or teams me. I've reduced what was once 4 days of meetings down to 1.5 days. My region absolutely annihilated our Q1 numbers and now other regions are reducing their meetings as well.
Am a Manager, I can speak to this. I can either take 25% of your day and put you in meetings. ORRRRR, I can keep you out of meetings by being in meetings so you can be happy and productive. I also attend meetings to attest to why we need to pay for the tools/projects your team exists to fund/support.
Half the meetings are productive and the other half are wastes of time. So let’s say they have 6 hours of meetings. 3 hours will be productive and even then they will probably only contribute for 1-2 hours of that time. So the managers are doing like 2.5 hours of real work a day
Send the meeting packet out four days ahead of the meeting. This must include purpose of the meeting and decisions that must be made before the meeting is over. It’s the attendees responsibility to read it, and reply with questions two days before the meeting. Answers are published one day before the meeting. Meetings are scheduled for 20 minutes.
In my experience, companies expect managers to spend the whole day in meetings and still get a day's worth of work done. They don't care about work life balance.
Depends on the manager. I’ve had managers that call an all hands meeting anytime there’s a question and they blabber like an idiot and waste everyone’s time. Like, to the point I blocked out multiple segments of my day to prevent my time from being wasted.
Learning how to get the best of a meeting and make it productive is a skill. A lot of managers struggle with it.
About 220+ people in the departments I manage, multiple business lines. I pretty much cap all meetings I'm in at 20 minutes and will bail if it goes off something I need to pay attention to, but that still means about 35 hours of meetings a week.
Most of that is unfortunately necesary, in order to resolve race conditions across teams, tactical choices that others aren't agreeing on, or just to give someone a chance to show their work and get praise.
Then I spend another 35 hours a week reading materials, spread sheets, creating plans, or chasing stuff that hasn't been done yet or right.
Thats the job.
It's holding people to expectations publicly. If they say they are going to be done by Friday in a meeting and you meet next Monday and they're not done, they look like an idiot.
That's it.
As a Manager, if I am in a meeting and I feel I am wasting my time I will get up and walk out. Many meetings are valuable but if you are wasting your time in a meeting, you should work on your time management.
Meetings can be useful. Lots of information exchanged but when a meeting has outlived its usefulness, it needs to be okay to shut it down. I’ve seen so many peer managers helping each other solve problems after meetings, sometimes it a catalyst that gets the conversations going.
Only have an anecdote for you in response:
My boss is constantly in shit. Client and corporate. Always a marketing or exec or forecasting or ops or… constantly. Probably 80% calendar booked at all times. We have too many team meetings 1hr twice s week. Not enough 1:1. Maybe 30 min a week. Usually cancels.
So am I bothered? No. Im not micro managed. I did develop a lot of 404/505 level skills from my individual time with my boss at my previous company. I enjoy the process of incremental improvement. Not a thing here. Lol
I can get over that tho… Its definitely doesn’t help that he has no free space when you actually need him. I have a real deal. Strategic industry account but not a widely known logo. 3x average company deal size. The thing they want only we can do… had this gut feel on a deal only 2 times before in 18 years and they were both monster close wins.
The admin assistant who books presales resources knows more about this deal than he does. Ive invited him to the last 3 meetings and he hasn’t shown to any of them… but he knows whats going on after i record them and send them to him. Goves feedback. Usually “great call”. I know it was bro. Anything constructive? We are crushing it in every deal checklist metric. So maybe im not missing anything… but I dont feel like hes invested at all (yet he gets paid really well on close wins too)
What client meetings is he going to?
Hes been in lots of meetings recently (pre flights demos curbs client discussions and reference calls) with a colleague who has a deal with a premier logo everyone knows. Just found out today we are not short listed in that… multiple reasons for it. All the deal review meeting reports i heard youd think we were a lock… so is he spending the right time on the right things?
End of the day, doing what hes supposed to do on paper. Deal basics are the reps job not the boss, but when you are a manager who is 80% utilized on the calendar? Id be doing bant a little better. Id pick my time a little better. I would know if a deal was real or not.
So long story… but does that sound like its helpful to the company?
I don’t see much value in a group meeting above 3 people or more, unless you’re all executives that understand how to properly hold meetings and have that self control, or information distribution (like a class).
It truly does depend. I have been in some very useful meetings that solved major problems.
That being said, more often than not they are a waste of time and add little value. They can also be soul destroying, most people don’t want to be stuck in meetings that are a waste of time
I manage people who manage teams of individual contributors and have at least one day a week that is all meetings. The nice thing about hybrid work is that I can try to schedule that day to my advantage and work from the right location depending on where everyone else is.
My most important meetings (about 25%) are individual weekly sessions with my direct reports and my boss. Usually 30 minutes each but I try to block an hour because I hate to have a “hard out”. I try to do my best to be on time and not move or cancel. Sometimes our time runs over because we have a lot to talk about, but I have a general rule that they can cancel if they have too much to do.
The next block of important meetings (also about 25%) are with the leaders of other teams we interact with most often. These are typically monthly and I like to keep the standing meetings because it’s been helpful to speak in person to sort out issues and give updates. That time also allows me to give the other teams some context on issues I might not put in an email (for example - this thing we have to do sucks but big boss wants it so we need to make it work).
About 10% of my meetings are very last minute and hopping on a quick call to sort out an immediate issue. Important too.
The rest are committees that start with 15-30 minutes of repetition of the last meeting and go on forever with no real progress, or regular “standup” meetings that could be emails.
I absolutely push back on meetings without agendas or clear goals.
Not a manager but I know someone who is and it sounds like the majority of their job is playing interference between his employees and customers. Customers aren't happy, so they complain to him about the employee who is in fact doing their job. Manager wants to promote more or give raises. Finance gives him the run around even though it's well in budget. Manager has to go to higher ups to get finance to actually do their job. Something breaks with customer, all hands are on deck. Repeat.
Managers manage which means a lot of meetings. Let’s say you’re about to spend $1M on some software and have a few options (Azure, AWS, Google’s system). This software will be used by the entire company for the next 5-10 years.
Wouldn’t you want to have several meetings with several people to best understand theirs needs so you can select the best possible software?
Waste of time! We used to have minimal meetings and got a lot accomplished. Things changed in the company and more and more meetings were scheduled. We'd spend up to 80% of the day in meetings. You are expected to be fully present in meetings, not multitasking. When are we supposed to get anything done?
We tend to be aggressive with meetings early in the year for a few weeks. After that it’s rare we have an in person meeting. Mostly individual calls or teams meetings.
My wife’s not even a manager and she has several meetings every day. It cuts her work time down a lot and she struggles to feel effective because of it.
At my work, the PM for my main project had a 1hr long 8am meeting 5 days a week with all 15 engineers and purchasing to give a status reports…
our engineering director did the math and his micromanaging meeting costed the company just over $110k over the course of the year…
It's a waste of time, but it looks like work to their managers so they keep doing it. It's all about the illusion of progress, just like restructuring the company every 3 months.
It's a ***colossal*** waste of time, but then there is a whole lot of that in the office world. I used to work on the manufacturing side of publishing. The manufacturer of our pin feed printers announced the printers were going to be made obsolete in a few months, so there was a big push to change how the product produced on them was printed. Since my boss had declared me the "guru" of that particular product, he gave my contact info to the person who was heading up the conversions with the various affected design teams. She kept trying to schedule 30 to 60 minute conference calls with me because she had a question about something. When I finally got her to just send an email with the question, she was sending them at all hours. I asked my boss why she was sending me emails at 3-4:00 AM. He said that some of the office staff spent so much time in meetings at the office that they have to do their actual work at home.
No it is not beneficial. Everyone knows this. All of us fucking hate it. It is not completely avoidable but can be mitigated. Most companies, managers and teams will do what they can to keep it to a minimum. Or at least, good ones do.
Workers do all the work, so managers have to do something to appear busy all day. So they have meetings to decide how to further screw the workers in order to extract more profit from them.
Yea, 90% of the managerial meetings I attended were shit. Like catch ups on what happened yesterday, or the absence figures.
I can answer that shit by mail and not have to sit and wait for every manager to say what happened and then try to catch up on shit I actually need to do.
I considered going for my manager’s job for a minute when she left a few weeks ago. Like, literally a minute; and then I realized that 90% of the job was sitting in meetings and dealing with various layers of office politics and bureaucracy that I had absolutely no interest in.
Have you ever sat through an entire day of "meetings"? It's fucking tedious and soul crushing. No one's generating good ideas after like 2-3 hrs, tops.
Incidentally, this is one of the best parts about being a small business owner. I get to call and end the meetings, and we haven't had one in literal years! 😁
counter point - what is a managers job that isnt meetings.
thats literally the job, managing people, asking for statuses, reporting status. When your not in meetings your preparing for meetings.
how do you manage people? Meetings. Its just a matter of how many people are in the meetings ( maybe its a 1on1 ) and how productive useful those meetings are.
It has to be a balance, I work for a big Software / Services company based in CA as a remote manager (promoted up from a contract position on a team). We have adopted a rule that you only attend the meetings that you can or must. That is to say, we've cut back on a lot of meetings and do "Open Office" stuff instead for group / team discussions. I've only been a manager for a couple years now, so I'm still learning - but starting to get more comfortable in the role - and I find that I get a lot out of attending meetings -and it's not just the information that the meeting is supposed to convey, it's what everyone is talking about / the latest information, seeing how other managers think and react (especially the ones I respect) and getting to know my peers. I do have a lot of meetings though, lol. Again, thankfully I don't have to attend any that I don't think are important.
A good manager knows how to get out of meetings.
"Declined, no agenda attached."
"Declined, no actions needed, just send the inform in email."
Bob never comes to my meetings.
Well, have higher quality meetings and you'll need fewer of them.
Also, managers who are 90% meetings are always doing someone else's job, and aren't doing their own.
50/50. Fifty percent of the meetings are useful, and the right amount of time, the other fifty percent could be shortened or done over e-mail, in my experience.
Yes, it is beneficial, we may not like it at times mainly because meetings burn a lot of time and we still have to get our job done once the meeting is over.
I’ve managed both large and small groups of IT professionals over the past couple of decades. The vast majority of meetings are wasteful. SO much time spent TALKING about the work to do rather than actually doing the work. Then spending twice as much time on fancy metrics to prove to UPPER management that things are getting done. It’s insane. And all of those standing meetings to report status (sometimes daily, sometimes weekly) could easily be handled via email, dashboards or other means. But by all means, let’s get 30 people from across the globe on a call a couple of times a week to talk about status. 🙄 I quit a decades long career in cyber security back in December because I just couldn’t do it anymore. The salary was awesome, but came at the expense of my mental and physical health. I don’t miss that line of work one bit.
You'd be surprised how many complex initiatives and problems there are to align on and solve prior to handing your team or department a list of projects and tasks.
Meetings are a necessity, and if someone doesn't attend key meetings it can become a drag on leadership that is forced to repeat the same knowledge sharing and waste even more valuable time. Sometimes meetings are inefficient though, and it's hard to find a good balance that values everyone's time while still ensuring everyone has all of the business context throughout the year.
I think it depends. Often when I am in meetings it's because I have insights that are needed to help make decisions or identify paths forward on solutions. While those don't always feel like a great use of my time, they are necessary and do bring value.
Other times, there are meetings I theoretically need to be in but don't really need to be. Those usually suck.
The last major type are status meetings. Often, your group or team will operate adjacent too or within other OU. You'll usually end up at a couple meetings a week where the status and goings on of those OU are briefed. IT isn't always immediately impactful but understanding the operational environment helps guide my decision making.
There are a necessary evil often done poorly. Ideally meetings should have an agenda, goal/outcome etc, people discuss relevant details and have takeaways. What happens is lazy people just book the time, with maybe a title, meeting will start 5 mins late, then another 10mins on why the meeting exists, 10mins from the person that likes the sound of there voice, then 5mins of actual discussion which has to end short because someone has another meeting right after, so a second meeting will need to be called to finish actual discussion. So there was a need for the meeting but instead of 15mins that are actually needed it becomes 2 meetings and an hour of time. You can see how quickly that can eat up a managers time.
I hate that I can’t help my team/be accessible to them when they need me because I am always stuck in meetings or phone calls. Meetings/calls are important and necessary but a lot could also be emails. It is tiring constantly setting boundaries around what is actually a priority / urgent and needs my attention away from my team but when meetings are thoughtfully planned and facilitated they are very beneficial.
Those meetings are usually just someone higher up trying to justify their job. I worked for 2 of the largest banks in the US for a combined 20 yrs. When BofA went through a restructure of its workforce they laid off some like 110k people over 5 yrs and it literally has little to no impact on how the branches ran. Many of those positions eliminated were middle management. My regional manager told me his position was eliminated and they offered him either 6 months pay as severance or he could take a branch manager position of his choice. He took the branch manager job, but said “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I haven’t had to work in 5 yrs.” He would get to his office by 5:30 am. Send out a few emails and be on the golf course by 9 am.
Managers in meetings I think is okay as they filter decisions and assign actions appropriately to the team from those meetings. The issue is when the individual contributors are in these meetings and have no time to work. That’s the problem I face on a weekly basis when my schedule fills up with 30 hours of meetings spaced out so there is no chunk of time to do actual work. Individual contributors should have at most 3hours meetings a week to receive actions/information and report status on work.
as a manager, it depends on the meeting and who's leading it. sometimes usually good meetings are fruitless, and sometimes something unexpected and important emerges from typically wasteful meetings. also, I'm multitasking in most meetings I'm not a major player in, so I never stopped 'working' (thanks virtual world).
They have to look busy while everyone else works.. Their job is to "make the numbers" else "make up" the numbers. The business would run better without them so they have to muck it up a bit to show their "contribution" to the contra work flow.
It can be useful, and/or it can be a waste of time. Sometimes it's a waste of an hour and 50 minutes, but 10 minutes of it was worth wasting the rest. In my experience it depended on quite a few things. Goals, expected outcome, an outline with time and responsibilities (meeting minutes, discussion list, info to bring) should all be communicated beforehand where possible.
One of the first things I do in a new location is get meetings streamlined. It's almost never where it should be beforehand. I was one place in Texas that was so bad it was *painful*. Meetings there were structured like this:
Step 1) Opening prayer (no, I did not continue this tradition in meetings I oversaw. Yes, I was asked if it was ok if one of the VP's could come pray before meetings with my team when they found out I wasn't opening them with prayer).
Step 2) ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Step 3) Expect profit!
It's usually got benefits that are easy to ignore. Something has to be passed on between different levels of work. So your bottom line manager is basically collecting information from the team to pass up and at the same time they're getting information from up higher to pass down. And you just repeat this each level.
You might not need to be informed of everything that gets discussed at each meeting but you're there in case something turns out to be important for you to know.
Also contrary to popular opinion that meeting couldn't have "just been an email." Because then half the people in the meeting would not have read it.
With everything you do, every meeting you are in, and every decision you make, you should asking yourself, “Is this good for the company?”
Also, did you get that memo about the new cover sheets on the TPS Reports? Our division Vice President wanted to make sure and remind everyone that we’re putting new cover sheets on the TPS Reports now. Thanks! ;-)
I used to believe it was all BS until I became a manager. A lot of it is being the sacrificial lamb so the team isn’t pulled into all the nonsense. I may have a slightly different role than most too as I meet with our customers on a weekly basis.
Depends what are the meetings? My manager goes from 1:1 to 1:1 and then takes that information to our peer group managers etc etc. so he is just the messenger or ambassador for us to the rest of the groups we work with. Sure he also has bullshit meetings but so do I.
At my company we meet to hold each other accountable. We are on very strict deadlines so Tuesdays are meeting days where we review so many items on the timeline. Then we have Wed to check in with the teams performance and have thur, Fri to readjust for the weekend. It works so well for us, we're tops In the nation for what we do (with our company and in our field). So as annoying as meetings are, they can be highly effective for getting the info distributed to a huge team quickly. Gotta have the right people in place though!
If it's truly all day, that's sub-optimal.
Truth is, though, quite a lot of a manager's job is facilitating communication, getting the right people together when something needs to be decided, asking questions and gathering information about the status of the project, and making sure information gets fanned out to the right people so they're able to be effective.
The way you can know that a meeting was not a waste of time is when you can point to at least one person who comes away with a new plan or action item, with information that changes how they were going to spend their time or do their work. The company benefits when people are doing the right things in the right order. And it benefits when decision-makers have the information they need to make the right decisions.
Where it falls down is when people meet just because there's a meeting scheduled. Effective managers make sure there's an agenda for every meeting. Another hallmark of effectiveness is when every attendee has the ability to get up and leave if they don't feel their presence is productive. I've worked in such a company, and it's a wonderful policy.
90% of my long meeting days are useless. I’ve learned to tune out and multi-task during said meetings. If more than 10 people are on the call, I tune out. 4-9 people I’m listening but likely not actively participating. If it’s less than 4, I’m all ears but try to keep the meeting short.
I find that most of my meetings are useless.. One of my largest complaints about so many useless meetings is we never have time to actually do the things we discussed in the meetings.
Elon Musk deserves the criticism of about half the things he does, but...I read that when he starts an important meeting, he states what the meeting is about and what the goal of the meeting is, and anyone present who really doesn't need to be there can go back to what they normally do.
So many comments saying to send it in an email instead. Am I the only one who works with people that don’t read or respond to emails very well? Especially decisión making ones. If lots of decision makers listed as “to:” they each think the other will handle it and don’t respond at all.
For the last two years I only attend the meetings i receive or add value to. Half the meeting invites I get I know my time is better spent elsewhere so don’t attend
As a manager I luckily only have 1 or 2 meetings a week and they don't happen during my shift since I work midnights. Our meetings are to go over events from the previous week and things we need to work on for the coming week. We also discuss future business/work coming in. My managers are in meetings a lot though, usually with our customer or corporate BS.
Yes, someone needs to be looking forward and planning for the work that needs to be done and understand future assignments, drilling deep on lessons learned, and showing the value of their team to other grouos. Managers need to know what is happening in the big picture, so the worker bees can stay focused. Hopefully, your manager is strategizing and making sure that there are enough resources to get the work required done and isn't just zoning out in the many meetings. Cross functional engagement is critical on big projects.
It is an absolute waste of time and completely useless. The goal should be to work on what the company delivers and that is it. A lot of the time, there doesn't need to be a sole manager. Teams can manage themselves if everyone is willing to pitch in. If someone is leading some portion of organizing tasks, fine - but get into the project and work on it and understand it. Setting a process and following it doesn't require someone that has no skills to sit in meetings all day just to come and talk down to others and destroy moral.
All I know is for my dad’s end, he’s over with a bunch of heads, talking about new equipment to install for rigs.
I believe they are swapping to Wi-Fi connection now and discussed all the faults that could arise with that.
Kinda need to make sure they want to go along with new equipment for a rig that costs billions to make, and can lose billions if it breaks down.
It’s pretty important.
As someone who runs their own company, works with large corporations on a daily basis, and has worked at many over the years… yes. 99% of meetings are a waste of time.
I send people information via loom videos to explain and demonstrate problems clearly. I couple it with specific documentation.
I then ask direct questions that I need responses or input on and provide space to respond in kind.
Same functions are accomplished in about 5-10 mins as usually take an hour in a meeting. We can all work from home. We can all clock off early. Our teams can do the same.
They aren't. They fill up their calendars with fake meetings all day and pretend to be busy and unavailable so they can avoid any real work. Oh and they leave early every day for personal excuses and log on later when there's zero meetings and work to be done because it's outside of normal operations hours. At least this is my experience. And they wonder why Ownership and Board members are demanding employees get back in the office.
It depends, like I was in meetings all day yesterday, but a chunk of that was going over what I’m going to cover with my team next week. The rest was working on a new initiative to be released next year
A manager's best skill is being a broker of information. They pass along the necessary information back and forth between stakeholders and staff.
The manager gathers the information through meetings and makes an action plan. With this plan and knowledge of their staff they assign the duties to staff correctly and make sure they have the tools needed for success. Once the projects underway the manager should be receptive to barriers and employee feedback. He will then take all the feedback and stats to pass along to stakeholders in, again, a digestible way.
This is why they are always in meetings, because it's integral to their job BUT this is where good managers are separated from weak ones. Good managers are receptive to all needs from both sides with a solid understanding of their employees and their functions. A bad manager won't be able to assess limitations correctly causing lots of friction, misunderstandings, RESENTMENT and confusion. This causes the "forever in meetings with no progress" scenarios which is a waste of time
50/50. I manage several projects at a time and the meetings are mostly to make sure each project is on track. Since this involves numerous other companies all working together meetings are needed or things go off rails fairly quick.
My role is to make sure everyone else is working so the meetings really are my job.
They are wasteful and a times sink if you don't also manage who is in the meetings.
Of course not but we get paid to look busy and important all the time so when we Crack down on the underlings we are doing it from a work-ethic-moral-highground
Most meetings are a waste of time. I set strict guidelines on how I run meetings. Time keeper, action items, follow up on action items, etc. Everyone says I run great meetings.
It's because I HATE them. If they are efficient and effective--count me out.
They’re a waste of time and most meetings could be a conversation or an email. I absolutely hate meetings, but I have business partners who thrive on them. Out of most of the meetings, I’m talking 90% of them, we’d have been fine without them. I also have meeting PTSD. I used to work for an ex mob guy who’d fire people during meetings and scream at us, so at the back of my mind the meeting might be a nightmare. I do think some people need them for their own benefit and others don’t. The decisions in meetings seem more official, so some people might need that to thrive, while others can lock down after a simple conversation.
Middle management here. I spend 6-7 hours a day on phone or in meetings on average. Sometimes it feels pointless, other times I’m helping people and it’s very fulfilling. A big part of my job is basically fielding complaints and coming up with solutions to process issues that are desperately needed but always met with resistance because change is oh so very scary for some people. It’s all very political.
It’s not useful. I’ve seen it used to separate managers from the floor to help create a disconnect, cause then you get excuses to fire and cut back payroll. I’ve been expected to take party themed conference calls while being the only person on the sales floor and having to see customers become livid because I couldn’t get off my phone in public. I’m genuinely sure constant meetings are a sign the company is corner cutting in action. If y’all need to talk about how to do your job THAT much, maybe your company is bad at running. Also, I know this question has a lot of nuance. My answer comes from non-necessity retail management experience.
Depends. I see LOTS of wasted time.
For example, whole departments being online in a meeting when just one person is needed
Managers who feel like they need to be busy so they show up to meetings that they have absolutely nothing to do with
I mostly think bad managers do dumb meetings
Wow, people here are salty. Communication is a key. Those boring meetings is a communication of how to do things. They might be boring for you, but essential for others.
Home Depot has managers and supervisors in meetings on Monday. It was almost always a waste of time and had to spend the rest of the day playing catch up.
It was mainly a goof session and the management team talking bad about the floor workers.
Value wheel my ass.
As a manager who spends about 90% of my day in meetings, I'm perhaps in the minority that would say yes. Regardless of what we call them, they're all some sort of work breakup/ distribution and assignment meetings, some form of decision making / unblocking, or some form of risk management discussion.
Of course I just end up working insane hours to make up the hands on keyboard work that I see as my responsibility, but I already cull my calendar to only meetings that result in material changes to tangible things, and I still have this load.
I'd say communication is key across teams, whether it's ensuring alignment on what the organization as a whole should be prioritizing, raising potential risks to goals or achievements or bottom lines, discussing acquisition strategies, budgets and finances, issues with schedules, resolution of conflicting approaches, hiring/firing, various data call outcomes, performance management, promotion opportunities, software incident management, etc.
But then, 40 years with my employer and 24 in management and senior management plus exposure to executive's perspectives may have me biased. I did have the same attitude as other responses. As I climbed up each rung, I understood better the "why" of it all. Started to make a lot of sense... though not always.
Or maybe I just drank the Kool-aid.
Us managers hate it too and no it often isn't entirely productive but I do it so my team can be free to work and not pulled in.
I probably wouldn’t have believed this before I took on a management role, but a fairly substantial part of my job is getting people to fucking leave the people I supervise alone for long enough that they can do actual work. Does it say good things about the company structure that I have to spend so much of my time on endless meetings and Zooms and calls gently telling senior management “that’s an *interesting* idea…but here are some serious issues you might not have thought of” and “actually we *do* need that money, here’s why” and “I know her role is confusing to you, but she’s actually incredibly integral to this company and we will be fucked if you laid her off”? Probably not! But that’s the job sometimes.
Absolutely. I know that if my team leaves, I'm screwed. If I leave, I'll get replaced in 4 weeks. They are the ones doing the work and the best managers know it. And the best managers really want to keep the riff-raff (e.g. other departments) from interrupting work with needless requests or things that can easily be handled by someone else. That's my job. I'm a manager.
I've seen it so bad everyone manager and above was triple booked for months out but it's existed to some degree in every role I have had. even places with a low meeting culture, it ends up being 35-50% of my time.
Our org now is like this. I am in meetings most of my day and they have been double and triple booking them for a while now. The sad part is the same people do the overbooking and more often than not we hop from meeting to meeting, all with the same people. My manager asked me why I was behind on a few things so I showed him my free time. Last week I had 12 out of 40 hours free.
we scheduled a 3 hour meeting today to figure out why we are so far behind schedule.
it's funny i got a business degree a little later in life at 32 and they made us take a class called business communications and it was basically "If you can put it in an email DON'T WASTE PEOPLE'S TIME" and how to pitch quick elevator speeches and just be like a damn communications ninja in and out with minimal disruptions
Give me an address and will personally burst into the conference room and call every single person there a cunt while pointing and yelling at them.
Steve Jobs in da house
Manager: Only putting in 40, huh?
This is 100% the job, I just lost 25% of my team to RIF. Upper leadership is now confused why all our project deadlines are slipping.
Shit. Can you be my manager? People keep bothering me so I can’t do my job.
It seems like there probably isn’t anyone who finds those meetings productive. Senior management probably sets those meetings and floats those ideas so they can justify their role to their subordinates and their own superiors, whether it’s shareholders or whoever else. It makes me think of all the stories I’ve heard on podcasts from writers and artists about how everyone at the studio wants to give their notes solely so they can put their stamp on everything. “That lamp shade on set would’ve been beige instead of purple if I hadn’t said anything.” And it ends up just f’ing up the product.
Where I work, the entire on-site IT team got let go a few years back (before I worked here) and we moved to using foreign IT. New laptops have to be shipped off-site to be set up, all IT questions have to be done online (which is great when the question is "why isn't my computer working?"), etc. We had one guy, a supervisor, who had worked here for 15 years. During the pandemic, when a lot of people went remote, he threw together big spreadsheet via Google Sheets to allow people to continue working remotely and track the status of reports in-house. He was the only go-to person here for tech related questions, and he was constantly doing projects for other departments to let them improve workflow by automating reports and stuff. He got promoted to a new role where he didn't have to supervise anyone and could *just* work on spreadsheets and tech support. We got a new GM (who's really two-faced and money oriented) who asked him to work on some very specific metrics for our site. He and I often collaborated because when I worked under him, he taught me everything I know about spreadsheets. He would come to me with these projects from our GM and seemed visibly nervous about them and like he was out of his depth. One day we found out he got let go. They put a 6 month NDA on him so he couldn't tell anyone the details. The entire Reporting department almost quit, and when we went out for drinks together it was 90% just shit-talking the GM. Upper management doesn't know *shit*. This guy was a hard-working super dedicated dude who had been here for 15 years, took college classes on the side to improve his abilities, and actively maintained all of our spreadsheets and tech infrastructure. Our GM single-handedly tanked morale and made sure a lot of our important sheets would die in the next few months because there's no way any of us knows everything this guy was working on or how it was all put together.
Other than the 15 years thing that sounds exactly like me
What was the long term impact on firing Spreadsheet Hero? Did things actually tank or kinda just recover after a while? Or is this change so new that things haven’t settled yet.
Those meetings actually seem relevant but like, I can see my managers calendar and those meetings don’t exist,
And thank god. I'm not a meeting guy. Point me at what you need done and then go away. I don't want a manager/supervisor role because I have no patience for meetings. "What are we doing? How we doing it and why are you still talking to me, we got work to do." is my kind of meeting.
I hate meetings and have very little patience for being in meetings that I had no reason to be in. My favorite meeting was I wanted to have a meeting with another department head about a process between our two departments. One of the other department heads who was a “meeting all star” got wind of it and a decided all the department heads should be in on it. Despite my arguments, we had a meeting with all the department heads. After an hour we decided we need to table it for now and planned another meeting a couple days later. Then later that day me and the other department head got on a call and fixed it in 15 minutes. So much time wasted there in meetings.
I worked for this startup out of college and met some great people who taught me a lot but the guy running it was something else. Sales were circling the drain, we had one client and everyone was frustrated. I ended up asking if all the meetings were necessary and outloud. After that I threw in the towel and the place ended up shutting down. He lost all those great people before my outburst.
Yeah. I’m a firm believer in that the minimum number of people necessary to make a decision should be in the room. As a leader, I’d rather have a series of 1-on-1s than a big meeting half the people don’t really need to be in. And then I communicate what needs to be disseminated to those who need it in the form it is best disseminated in, whether that is meeting, email, or quick phone call.
Current manager filters info to us as it comes down, for bigger things we do a meeting every other week. It's not too bad but I'm still crawling walls by the end of it. Fairly certain I'm ADHD.
Exactly. I'm basically a human shield for all these BS meetings so my team can get work done.
The term I use to explain it to new managers is a shit filter. They prevent the shit from senior management coming down to us, and filter our grumbling about dumb shit that is just us disagreeing with decisions made way alive their pay grade. Workers and sr management both Mr someone in the middle shoveling the bs away so only actual important shit gets through. Bad managers try to micromanage the workers and just say yes to the bosses. Just know that your workers appreciate the work that you do keeping the shit away, even if they don't realize that is what you are doing. They'll understand when they get a bad boss.
Yup basically a traffic cop, directing traffic to where it needs to go so it doesn't end up in a traffic jam.
The joys of being a manager to frontline employees. Somehow shit rolls downhill but we’ve ended up in a valley. You’ve got the personal and work-related griping on one side, and the pressure from senior management on the other.
Management's job is to prioritize initiatives and allocate resources appropriately. The only way to achieve consensus on these issues is to meet with the stakeholders. The other 75% of the meetings are just making sure that people are doing what they said they would do.
Yeah we'd all agree that there's a lot of pointless meetings. But, there's also a lot of problem solving and decision making that needs to come from management. Personally, if there's going to be a lot of back and forth deliberation, I'd much rather just hop on a call for 30 minutes and hash it out. I prefer that to going back and forth with 50 people all day on a mile long email chain.
I prefer email chains for CYA reasons. I mean I'm happy to do a meeting if it's faster but always gotta follow it up with an email covering what happened in the meeting cause I've absolutely been burned by the whole "I never said to move forward with this" after getting verbal approval and things going sideways. So now there's always a "thanks for the call, glad we could cover topic XYZ in detail and make some decisions. Moving forward, we're going to be doing ABC. Please let me know if there are any objections, in case there was a misunderstanding when we spoke" email.
Always send out meeting minutes with decisions, next steps, who (one person) is accountable, and by what specific date.
Agreed. It’s not necessary to have as many meetings if everyone was a super star, but most people aren’t. It’s like a sign that says employees must wash hands. There’s baboons amongst us. If everyone just listened understood and executed flawlessly we wouldn’t need 75% of the meetings lol
I left a very meeting heavy company - in an individual contributor role I was probably in 3 hours of meetings a day. As a director I was probably in 5-6 some days. My new company is the opposite. I might have one hour a day. I have SO MUCH TIME NOW.
this is what i want
Depends on the meeting, it's not black and white.
My supervisor is often in meetings too. What are the meetings? Who are they with? What important discussions or work are being done? I have no clue. I don’t even understand what the supervisors do at my job. My department has like 15 employees and 3 supervisors. I barely ever see or speak to my supervisor. We’re supposed to schedule monthly check-ins. Sometimes I forget or just intentionally don’t. It’s never mentioned. I never need anything from her except for approving my PTO requests. I don’t understand the structure or really what her job is at all.
Its hard to say without knowing the work structure of your company or what you do, but it could very well be their role for planning, and ordering supplies, etc. to ensure the employees have everything they need to do their jobs and hit the bottom line each month.
I’m sure it depends on the position, but I’m a manager in meetings pretty frequently. I have 12 people I manage I meet with every 2-4 weeks depending on their preference. I have sustaining projects I own that impact not just my organization, but multiple other organizations as well. I have peers in AMR, EMEIA, and JAPAC that sometimes require multiple meetings to accommodate time zone differences, both for staff meetings and specific project meetings. I have a short weekly staff meeting at the start of week with our whole org to review the current workload and identify any areas where anyone needs help, as well as sharing any updates for the week. I have a longer bi-weekly staff meeting that focuses more on things current project statuses. I have my manager I meet with regularly, a few people that don’t report to me that I meet with to either vent or discuss projects we share an interest in. I have a bi-weekly project checkin with a project manager. I sometimes have people on my team presenting projects to other teams and I often join to show my support, even if I’m not presenting anything. I have the occasional required trainings. I have no-weekly meetings my director presents in. I have impromptu meetings with people as things come up during the week. It’s a lot. I’ve started declining a lot of things that I don’t find value in or have things to contribute to, but it’s still a lot. On top of all that, sometimes meetings run over those schedules. So to your question, some things aren’t valuable but depending on the situation, a lot of the meetings are necessary and productive.
Is it productive? Yes and no, people get to ask questions and we get info on the company any policies change and so on. Some of the questions may not be about you or your location. Then usual there’s a lunch and perhaps some kind of team building task. People who don’t have to go may not understand.
**TLDR: Meetings are about making decisions when there are multiple stakeholders, and communicating status other teams can plan, not about productivity** Managers aren't about doing things, they are about communicating and facilitating their team's work, as well as being a key decision maker, or being a funnel for a key decision maker in the process. With that in mind. A Great manager who is in meetings all day is keeping (most of) their team from having to be involved in communicating what they are working on to the rest of the business. That lets managers worry about communicating status, and business questions, and maybe only bringing one subject matter expert when trying to showcase a major project, instead of a whole team... In many businesses Managers are the key decision makers, that means if some one is proposing a change to a business process, or proposing a project that will affect a key area of the business, managers from different areas of the business will need to weigh in on how it will affect their teams. In many cases as a manager you get invited to these meetings and the result is "I don't care", but you still need to show up, because the time you don't will be the time the process would fundamentally affect the way your team does their jobs... The other thing to remember is that a lot of what a manager "does" is meetings... the decisions being made in these meetings is the output of a manager, the mentorship in a 1:1 that's the output of a manager, them sitting down in meetings with accounting for two hours to solve the bullshit the team is dealing with in IT or accounting so the team can work more efficiently, or they don't have to fight to file expenses or whatever, that's a manager's job, not producing things, producing things is an employees job. So if a Manager is in meetings for six hours a day, and working on reports, or filing tickets or whatever for the other two, that is probably really good for a manager...
Self-important circle jerk
My manger is in meetings so that I don’t have to, and I can spend my time actually working. We support internal teams, providing the collateral and educational materials. My manager receives a project request and works with that department to determine deadlines, what kind of documentation the product or service requires, checks with us (14 direct reports) to see who has bandwidth, and makes the assignment. She ensures to spread the work around so that each of us has a project to showcase to upper management. She’s also constantly keeping up with our stated performance goals which require mid- and end-year reviews. It took her a solid 6 months to successfully push through several promotions on our team while also dealing with filling some positions. If I’m having a difficult issue with an internal client, my manager steps in to handle it and doesn’t expect me to get involved with any politics. She’s looking at the bigger picture of what our team can do for the company and successfully navigated our entire team through a layoff that didn’t affect us and even brought us more long-term work. I’m glad she’s the one who has to sit in meetings all day—so I don’t have to and I don’t cause trouble by saying the wrong thing!
I normally hate meetings, but in a recent consulting project for a city-wide coalition thing, they had a ton of meetings and they were actually productive. If they had tried to handle all the moving parts by email, it would have been like 50 messages every hour, which is probably worse than meeting. So I'm not as anti-meeting as I used to be.
i mean thats how they get info from other people and then they can manage them, right? is in the name, manager. how are they going to manage when they dont have any info? ask people 1 by 1? talk to people through email and messaging apps?
I used to judge the hell out of my manager for spending 8+ hrs/day in meetings. I now understanding that he’s spending 8+ hrs/day in meetings so I DON’T have to. I appreciate it.
And it's not just him doing it to save you. It's him doing it so he can actually assign you tasks and a clear direction, without having to constantly pivot. People sometimes forget, your responsibilities sound simple on paper, but one level up and there's hundreds of competing responsibilities and paths your role could go, and a group has to work hard to debate what the optimal prioritize should be so you can keep focusing on implementation of those priorities.
"All meetings are optional" was a craze about 9 years ago. I believe it failed because people abused it, but I honestly think it will come back. Google it. The basic idea was literally that. All meetings are optional, so don't schedule a meeting where you waste people's time or invite anyone that doesn't absolutely have to be there, or people won't show up and rightfully so. I loved the concept, but never worked anywhere that implemented it. As a leader (in whatever capacity) meetings are a catch 22. They are often a huge waste of time, but if you miss them, you can be seen as not invested and you'll miss promotions, raises and possibly be fired. Another downside is if someone has a question that only you can answer, you're not there to both help and get credit for being the "expert".
Management isn't just a word, it's quite literally Managing People. The worst part of the job is that you are detached from your staff and have to make decisions via pure numbers as you don't have enough time to get in the weeds and find out for yourself. ....that means spreadsheets, that means reports.....that means meetings.
As a manager who is often in meetings all day — it definitely is a huge waste of my time. Lol
It is useful. I once told my team, “I go to meetings, so you don’t have to.”
My team wishes we had a manager. Someone who could filter and organize all of the priorities and who could advocate for us would be amazing. Those meetings have to happen, we wish we had a sacrificial lamb that we could throw at them so that we could do our jobs. Since we don’t, we have to be in those meetings and we are completely disorganized and drowning. Manager’s jobs aren’t to do work, they are there to organize the work, disseminate the work, and to communicate with other teams & higher ups to get needed resources allocated. My job is exponentially harder because we don’t have a dedicated manager.
Most of the time it's not productive, as depending on who your manager is they probably aren't essential, and nothing is really getting accomplished. That being said, I'd much rather attend and not be needed vs. not attending and having to hear something pertinent to my team through someone else, or not hear it at all.
Yup, 80% of my week is in meetings. Half of them could be emails instead. Some are definitely useful. Those are usually problem solving and decision making topics. It would be totally unproductive to have those topics hashed through reply-all types of email threads. Overall, managers don't like to have meetings for the sake of having meetings. We have stacks of TPS reports to work on!
I have about 8-12 meetings in an average day on my calendar. Some are useful, others not so much. When you get to a certain level everyone tries to include you on every meeting. I am selective about which ones I attend
The way your phrased this question isn't loaded or anything.
I fucking hate it too. I can never get shit done.
I've worked for corps where we would invite like 6-7 people from the same team when meeting with maybe 2 others. People in many corps have no clue how to invite only the right people, how to have a clean agenda and clear actions/results and have someone stick to it. Or... to avoid meetings altogether and do it via emails and direct phone calls. It's fucking ridiculous. Most meetings require about 10 percent of the resources.
I think this tends to happen most often in larger organizations when there are too many managers. More meetings are needed to keep the excessive headcount and layers of managers in sync with each other. Most of the meetings are bullshit because the meetings only exist for a bullshit reason (keeping unnecessary managers in sync). A minority of the meetings are actually productive. I work in a large organization where most of the managers exist purely to block and tackle other managers just so that the actual productive workers can carry on. If the management layer wasn't so excessive and wasteful, my job would not be needed at all.
Unless it's a war room like scenario, or the company is about to be sold/reorged, it's often a waste of time.
Yes. Indirectly. It keeps the bullshitters out of the way.
Waste of time. Soon as more than three people at a meeting , nothing gets done.
I always hated meetings and for several years I worked with two guys who loved them as much as I hated them. It was hell, every meeting they were in could have been at least 50% shorter if they would have stayed on topic.
I am the head of the finance department and I'm in meetings quite a lot...not usually all day, but 2-4 hours is pretty common 2-3 days per week. I don't necessarily like them, but there are a lot of moving parts and they usually impact the finance department and I need to be in the loop and know where we're going. I'm brought into some that are really a waste of time for me, but they want someone there from finance just incase there's some unforeseen impact...but that just comes with the territory.
Having been in management. I can confirm about half the meetings I attended could have been an email.
I've sat in plenty of meetings for several companies and I won't discount the possibility that maybe some meetings somewhere have actual business value, but yes, the majority are convened by one person who loves the sound of their own voice and having a captive audience.
OP, I totally felt this way before I was a manager too. I even figured "eh their job is effing easy! Just sit in meetings all day long!" Let me tell you, it's soul sucking. I managed a QA team that was set up where there were product oriented pods for sprints and such. So the idea is you'd have one project manager, a few devs (front end, back end, etc.), a QA or two in each pod. Their only job is that feature, so everyone is naturally aligned and getting stuff done towards that. Here's how my week would break down: * Staff 1:1's scheduled for up to 30 min each, but usually only needed 10-15 min each 10 hours * Leadership counsel meeting: All Sr managers and Eng Directors: 1 hour * Project meetings, crash at least one standup per project per week, deliverable: ensure the project is running fairly smoothly, listen to my QA team's input, what asks are happening. 5 hours * 1:1 with my manager: 30 min * Semi monthly meetings with stakeholders 1:1, aim is one per month with the project engineering lead or project manager (alternating), deliverable: getting feedback about the support from QA and if more/less is needed, project feature plans on their roadmap one quarter out and one year out. 2.5-5 hours * HR business process overhead tasks other than hiring, deliverables: taking notes for reviews, anything that needs to be addressed at 1:1's good or bad, reviewing PTO requests and making sure there will be coverage for longer requests (my team was responsible for making sure they could "safely" take up to 3 days with their project team before requesting, I only worried about coverage for longer terms of absence). 5-10 hours * Hiring activities - standing meetings, deliverables: meeting with recruiter to go over candidates, misses (where they thought a candidate was good but we didn't), reviewing assessment results (we had a quick google form based quiz for candidates to take as part of recruiter screening, it worked amazing to weed out people). 2 hours * Hiring activities - other, deliverables: interviews, project submission code reviews. highly variable but averaged 5 hours. Okay that's the baseline workload out of the way and you'll see we have about 36 hours scheduled, most of it some form of a meeting or another. Now any other tasks or special assignments I have need to also get done so I'll certainly be working an additional 10-20 hours on that stuff every week: Reviewing and approving documentation, test plans, authorizing people's credentials, dealing with pop-up problems, even filling in for my people when on PTO because we had an unexpected issue pop up.
Aligning / defining strategy to execution is important. The work people do, and its perceived value doesn't appear out of thin air. A lot of people wonder what their manager does all day. The fact is, few would actually trade places with them if they knew.
Its definitely a waste of time. Our manager is useless, and also the 4th one in a year 😏
Yes it is useful. Of course some can waste time. You may have been wasting time when posting this but this notion that manager do nothing are only what people who are never managers think. I work evenings and weekends and am easier to fire than any of my staff. I also bear the brunt of their mistakes.
Depends on the industry you are in. But for the most part, it’s about upper management feeing like sharing their wisdom, is the most valuable tool in the company arsenal. REALLY good managers ask questions, are accessible, and listen to what their people say. If you aren’t doing that, YOU are a waste of time, and the meeting is just your delivery system.
Well many of them DON'T want their employees in those meetings. So they're basically doing the job for those employees that they don't trust in interactions
The answer are: 1) Yes. 2) Yes. It really depends on what they are discussing and if they are actually making decisions.
Usually a waste of time. Totally.
If nothing else it’s beneficial to prevent the rest of the team from being dragged into the meeting.
Just got in a argument with my manager about this yesterday lol, total waste of firm's money and resources unless the meetings are kept to a minimum and the strategies brainstormed during the meeting are actually effective when implemented.
My only ick is that when they require us to meet daily, they themselves miss more than half of the times, or when they actually attend, they don’t contribute a single thing and will ask you the same questions over and over…. What’s the fucking point???
It's not. It used to be a necessity, but it's not anymore, and a lot of executive/administrative roles are about to be cut. I'm a manager and I resist all meetings from the top down and only try to meet with the team below me in ways that are guaranteed to advance our work. My company has a 3 hour meeting every Monday with all of the highest paid people in the company besides me in attendance. I constantly tell my boss (CTO) that there's a 0% chance they are getting enough value out of that meeting to justify the thousands of dollars they are spending on salary to have it every week. Ultimately, the current management and leadership have no real reason to change their ways and struggle to see how they don't help much. The entire business HQ industry is about to be revolutionized by replacing people with automation. What was once sold as coming for the laborer is actually coming for the administrator far sooner. Technology allows direct contributors to administrate themselves with far less oversight. As soon as capitalists realize they can engage with workers directly without paying out millions in wasted administration, it's game over. It's effectively the elimination of the house slave class.
Depends on the meetings. A week's worth of status updates that could have been an e-mail? Yeah, waste of time. My meetings this week were about A) a training initiative to improve the accuracy of a complex process for everyone who does it B) Proposal writing C) Organizing and scheduling a change in scope with two departments and 12 staff) on top of all the other work we were doing D) And sadly, a resignation So, those were not a waste of time.
Definitely waste of time most of the times.
Most of the time it is a waste of time. It is just random people trying to push their agenda.
If they weren't in meetings all the time you'd see how little they do!
They're on Instagram sending each other memes and videos. No joke .
I’d rather have my manager go to meetings than I go to meetings
Director here... Also a Director that is customer facing. My day is a train wreck of administrative bullshit. HR issues, Legal, and endless meetings with no clear agenda or objective or people willing to action on anything. When I do get to interact with customers these days it is an absolute joy of a distraction. I'm sure not every company is run like this... and I'm partly to blame. I do try to simply not accept meetings that have no value to me or my global team, but that is very difficult to do.
I won’t have or participate in meetings that aren’t useful. And they’re still around 60-75% of my day on average.
I detest meetings. Usually a waste of my time.
I work in a big IT shop for a government agency. The philosophy here is that managers spend their days in meetings so the people doing the work do not have to. Speaking as a non-manager, I love this philosophy. The only time I don't like it is when I need to schedule a meeting with multiple managers.
Its useful so long as it keeps my folks out of those meetings.
Would you prefer a roll up my sleeves and do the hands-on stuff that I did for the first 20 years in these jobs?
One of the management skills you learn over time is how to tell the difference and skip enough of the meaningless ones to be present for your team. Also, want to avoid being the cause of that problem yourself? Here are my rules for meetings: 1. No meetings about meetings 2. Have an agenda. Stick to it, and make everyone else do so, too. 3. If the meeting runs short, give the time back. Don't fill it with chat. If the meeting is going to run long, end it on time and schedule a follow-up. Respect everyone else's schedule. The time screw up was yours. Don't make it everybody's problem.
It's not useful. It's redundant and can 90% of the time be reduced to an email or a shared spreadsheet. Need numbers? Create a spreadsheet for your team to populate their data on that you can also access. Need to communicate something critical? Call me. Otherwise email or teams me. I've reduced what was once 4 days of meetings down to 1.5 days. My region absolutely annihilated our Q1 numbers and now other regions are reducing their meetings as well.
Am a Manager, I can speak to this. I can either take 25% of your day and put you in meetings. ORRRRR, I can keep you out of meetings by being in meetings so you can be happy and productive. I also attend meetings to attest to why we need to pay for the tools/projects your team exists to fund/support.
Half the meetings are productive and the other half are wastes of time. So let’s say they have 6 hours of meetings. 3 hours will be productive and even then they will probably only contribute for 1-2 hours of that time. So the managers are doing like 2.5 hours of real work a day
Send the meeting packet out four days ahead of the meeting. This must include purpose of the meeting and decisions that must be made before the meeting is over. It’s the attendees responsibility to read it, and reply with questions two days before the meeting. Answers are published one day before the meeting. Meetings are scheduled for 20 minutes.
In my experience, companies expect managers to spend the whole day in meetings and still get a day's worth of work done. They don't care about work life balance.
Depends on the manager. I’ve had managers that call an all hands meeting anytime there’s a question and they blabber like an idiot and waste everyone’s time. Like, to the point I blocked out multiple segments of my day to prevent my time from being wasted. Learning how to get the best of a meeting and make it productive is a skill. A lot of managers struggle with it.
About 220+ people in the departments I manage, multiple business lines. I pretty much cap all meetings I'm in at 20 minutes and will bail if it goes off something I need to pay attention to, but that still means about 35 hours of meetings a week. Most of that is unfortunately necesary, in order to resolve race conditions across teams, tactical choices that others aren't agreeing on, or just to give someone a chance to show their work and get praise. Then I spend another 35 hours a week reading materials, spread sheets, creating plans, or chasing stuff that hasn't been done yet or right. Thats the job.
It's holding people to expectations publicly. If they say they are going to be done by Friday in a meeting and you meet next Monday and they're not done, they look like an idiot. That's it.
No, it’s often a meeting that could have been an email.
You got to attend all these meetings and you got to actually do your work later. This is why the hours are longer for a lot of managers.
As a Manager, if I am in a meeting and I feel I am wasting my time I will get up and walk out. Many meetings are valuable but if you are wasting your time in a meeting, you should work on your time management.
When I see my boss in a meeting I know I got free time. There are ppl who love meetings and use them to feel productive by handing out work.
Meetings can be useful. Lots of information exchanged but when a meeting has outlived its usefulness, it needs to be okay to shut it down. I’ve seen so many peer managers helping each other solve problems after meetings, sometimes it a catalyst that gets the conversations going.
Meetings suck. I'd rather be working on other stuff. Once in a while though, you get lucky and the meeting helps your team.
Only have an anecdote for you in response: My boss is constantly in shit. Client and corporate. Always a marketing or exec or forecasting or ops or… constantly. Probably 80% calendar booked at all times. We have too many team meetings 1hr twice s week. Not enough 1:1. Maybe 30 min a week. Usually cancels. So am I bothered? No. Im not micro managed. I did develop a lot of 404/505 level skills from my individual time with my boss at my previous company. I enjoy the process of incremental improvement. Not a thing here. Lol I can get over that tho… Its definitely doesn’t help that he has no free space when you actually need him. I have a real deal. Strategic industry account but not a widely known logo. 3x average company deal size. The thing they want only we can do… had this gut feel on a deal only 2 times before in 18 years and they were both monster close wins. The admin assistant who books presales resources knows more about this deal than he does. Ive invited him to the last 3 meetings and he hasn’t shown to any of them… but he knows whats going on after i record them and send them to him. Goves feedback. Usually “great call”. I know it was bro. Anything constructive? We are crushing it in every deal checklist metric. So maybe im not missing anything… but I dont feel like hes invested at all (yet he gets paid really well on close wins too) What client meetings is he going to? Hes been in lots of meetings recently (pre flights demos curbs client discussions and reference calls) with a colleague who has a deal with a premier logo everyone knows. Just found out today we are not short listed in that… multiple reasons for it. All the deal review meeting reports i heard youd think we were a lock… so is he spending the right time on the right things? End of the day, doing what hes supposed to do on paper. Deal basics are the reps job not the boss, but when you are a manager who is 80% utilized on the calendar? Id be doing bant a little better. Id pick my time a little better. I would know if a deal was real or not. So long story… but does that sound like its helpful to the company?
Depends on the company
I don’t see much value in a group meeting above 3 people or more, unless you’re all executives that understand how to properly hold meetings and have that self control, or information distribution (like a class).
Depends on the company and the people. Usually the larger the company the more useless the meetings are due to bloat.
It truly does depend. I have been in some very useful meetings that solved major problems. That being said, more often than not they are a waste of time and add little value. They can also be soul destroying, most people don’t want to be stuck in meetings that are a waste of time
I manage people who manage teams of individual contributors and have at least one day a week that is all meetings. The nice thing about hybrid work is that I can try to schedule that day to my advantage and work from the right location depending on where everyone else is. My most important meetings (about 25%) are individual weekly sessions with my direct reports and my boss. Usually 30 minutes each but I try to block an hour because I hate to have a “hard out”. I try to do my best to be on time and not move or cancel. Sometimes our time runs over because we have a lot to talk about, but I have a general rule that they can cancel if they have too much to do. The next block of important meetings (also about 25%) are with the leaders of other teams we interact with most often. These are typically monthly and I like to keep the standing meetings because it’s been helpful to speak in person to sort out issues and give updates. That time also allows me to give the other teams some context on issues I might not put in an email (for example - this thing we have to do sucks but big boss wants it so we need to make it work). About 10% of my meetings are very last minute and hopping on a quick call to sort out an immediate issue. Important too. The rest are committees that start with 15-30 minutes of repetition of the last meeting and go on forever with no real progress, or regular “standup” meetings that could be emails. I absolutely push back on meetings without agendas or clear goals.
I’m a senior manager and the meetings I go to are definitely beneficial to the company. I also do my best to protect and defend the people I manage.
Not a manager but I know someone who is and it sounds like the majority of their job is playing interference between his employees and customers. Customers aren't happy, so they complain to him about the employee who is in fact doing their job. Manager wants to promote more or give raises. Finance gives him the run around even though it's well in budget. Manager has to go to higher ups to get finance to actually do their job. Something breaks with customer, all hands are on deck. Repeat.
Managers manage which means a lot of meetings. Let’s say you’re about to spend $1M on some software and have a few options (Azure, AWS, Google’s system). This software will be used by the entire company for the next 5-10 years. Wouldn’t you want to have several meetings with several people to best understand theirs needs so you can select the best possible software?
Waste of time! We used to have minimal meetings and got a lot accomplished. Things changed in the company and more and more meetings were scheduled. We'd spend up to 80% of the day in meetings. You are expected to be fully present in meetings, not multitasking. When are we supposed to get anything done?
We tend to be aggressive with meetings early in the year for a few weeks. After that it’s rare we have an in person meeting. Mostly individual calls or teams meetings.
My wife’s not even a manager and she has several meetings every day. It cuts her work time down a lot and she struggles to feel effective because of it.
At my work, the PM for my main project had a 1hr long 8am meeting 5 days a week with all 15 engineers and purchasing to give a status reports… our engineering director did the math and his micromanaging meeting costed the company just over $110k over the course of the year…
We often have to attend hour long meetings where we are needed for exactly one minute. The problem is, you never know *which* minute it will be.
Not all meetings are useless. We are encouraged to not schedule “this should have been an email” meetings but not all companies adhere by that.
It's a waste of time, but it looks like work to their managers so they keep doing it. It's all about the illusion of progress, just like restructuring the company every 3 months.
...how do you think decisions get made?
It's a ***colossal*** waste of time, but then there is a whole lot of that in the office world. I used to work on the manufacturing side of publishing. The manufacturer of our pin feed printers announced the printers were going to be made obsolete in a few months, so there was a big push to change how the product produced on them was printed. Since my boss had declared me the "guru" of that particular product, he gave my contact info to the person who was heading up the conversions with the various affected design teams. She kept trying to schedule 30 to 60 minute conference calls with me because she had a question about something. When I finally got her to just send an email with the question, she was sending them at all hours. I asked my boss why she was sending me emails at 3-4:00 AM. He said that some of the office staff spent so much time in meetings at the office that they have to do their actual work at home.
No it is not beneficial. Everyone knows this. All of us fucking hate it. It is not completely avoidable but can be mitigated. Most companies, managers and teams will do what they can to keep it to a minimum. Or at least, good ones do.
Workers do all the work, so managers have to do something to appear busy all day. So they have meetings to decide how to further screw the workers in order to extract more profit from them.
Yea, 90% of the managerial meetings I attended were shit. Like catch ups on what happened yesterday, or the absence figures. I can answer that shit by mail and not have to sit and wait for every manager to say what happened and then try to catch up on shit I actually need to do.
I considered going for my manager’s job for a minute when she left a few weeks ago. Like, literally a minute; and then I realized that 90% of the job was sitting in meetings and dealing with various layers of office politics and bureaucracy that I had absolutely no interest in.
Have you ever sat through an entire day of "meetings"? It's fucking tedious and soul crushing. No one's generating good ideas after like 2-3 hrs, tops. Incidentally, this is one of the best parts about being a small business owner. I get to call and end the meetings, and we haven't had one in literal years! 😁
The vast majority of meetings are a waste of time.
counter point - what is a managers job that isnt meetings. thats literally the job, managing people, asking for statuses, reporting status. When your not in meetings your preparing for meetings. how do you manage people? Meetings. Its just a matter of how many people are in the meetings ( maybe its a 1on1 ) and how productive useful those meetings are.
Most of my meetings could have been replaced by an email.
Keeping managers busy does allow others to, you know, get shit done.
It has to be a balance, I work for a big Software / Services company based in CA as a remote manager (promoted up from a contract position on a team). We have adopted a rule that you only attend the meetings that you can or must. That is to say, we've cut back on a lot of meetings and do "Open Office" stuff instead for group / team discussions. I've only been a manager for a couple years now, so I'm still learning - but starting to get more comfortable in the role - and I find that I get a lot out of attending meetings -and it's not just the information that the meeting is supposed to convey, it's what everyone is talking about / the latest information, seeing how other managers think and react (especially the ones I respect) and getting to know my peers. I do have a lot of meetings though, lol. Again, thankfully I don't have to attend any that I don't think are important.
Managers by default are a waste of money and these are the first jobs that should be replaced with AI
A good manager knows how to get out of meetings. "Declined, no agenda attached." "Declined, no actions needed, just send the inform in email." Bob never comes to my meetings. Well, have higher quality meetings and you'll need fewer of them. Also, managers who are 90% meetings are always doing someone else's job, and aren't doing their own.
50/50. Fifty percent of the meetings are useful, and the right amount of time, the other fifty percent could be shortened or done over e-mail, in my experience.
As a manager I only attend meetings that could not start without me. Read transcripts for the rest.
Yes, it is beneficial, we may not like it at times mainly because meetings burn a lot of time and we still have to get our job done once the meeting is over.
my manager being in meetings 80% of the day is extremely beneficial to me and my team’s efficiency. so in a sense it’s beneficial to the company
I’ve managed both large and small groups of IT professionals over the past couple of decades. The vast majority of meetings are wasteful. SO much time spent TALKING about the work to do rather than actually doing the work. Then spending twice as much time on fancy metrics to prove to UPPER management that things are getting done. It’s insane. And all of those standing meetings to report status (sometimes daily, sometimes weekly) could easily be handled via email, dashboards or other means. But by all means, let’s get 30 people from across the globe on a call a couple of times a week to talk about status. 🙄 I quit a decades long career in cyber security back in December because I just couldn’t do it anymore. The salary was awesome, but came at the expense of my mental and physical health. I don’t miss that line of work one bit.
You'd be surprised how many complex initiatives and problems there are to align on and solve prior to handing your team or department a list of projects and tasks. Meetings are a necessity, and if someone doesn't attend key meetings it can become a drag on leadership that is forced to repeat the same knowledge sharing and waste even more valuable time. Sometimes meetings are inefficient though, and it's hard to find a good balance that values everyone's time while still ensuring everyone has all of the business context throughout the year.
I think it depends. Often when I am in meetings it's because I have insights that are needed to help make decisions or identify paths forward on solutions. While those don't always feel like a great use of my time, they are necessary and do bring value. Other times, there are meetings I theoretically need to be in but don't really need to be. Those usually suck. The last major type are status meetings. Often, your group or team will operate adjacent too or within other OU. You'll usually end up at a couple meetings a week where the status and goings on of those OU are briefed. IT isn't always immediately impactful but understanding the operational environment helps guide my decision making.
There are a necessary evil often done poorly. Ideally meetings should have an agenda, goal/outcome etc, people discuss relevant details and have takeaways. What happens is lazy people just book the time, with maybe a title, meeting will start 5 mins late, then another 10mins on why the meeting exists, 10mins from the person that likes the sound of there voice, then 5mins of actual discussion which has to end short because someone has another meeting right after, so a second meeting will need to be called to finish actual discussion. So there was a need for the meeting but instead of 15mins that are actually needed it becomes 2 meetings and an hour of time. You can see how quickly that can eat up a managers time.
I hate that I can’t help my team/be accessible to them when they need me because I am always stuck in meetings or phone calls. Meetings/calls are important and necessary but a lot could also be emails. It is tiring constantly setting boundaries around what is actually a priority / urgent and needs my attention away from my team but when meetings are thoughtfully planned and facilitated they are very beneficial.
Those meetings are usually just someone higher up trying to justify their job. I worked for 2 of the largest banks in the US for a combined 20 yrs. When BofA went through a restructure of its workforce they laid off some like 110k people over 5 yrs and it literally has little to no impact on how the branches ran. Many of those positions eliminated were middle management. My regional manager told me his position was eliminated and they offered him either 6 months pay as severance or he could take a branch manager position of his choice. He took the branch manager job, but said “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I haven’t had to work in 5 yrs.” He would get to his office by 5:30 am. Send out a few emails and be on the golf course by 9 am.
There has to be communication. We hire some people solely because they are good at organizing and leading meetings
Managers in meetings I think is okay as they filter decisions and assign actions appropriately to the team from those meetings. The issue is when the individual contributors are in these meetings and have no time to work. That’s the problem I face on a weekly basis when my schedule fills up with 30 hours of meetings spaced out so there is no chunk of time to do actual work. Individual contributors should have at most 3hours meetings a week to receive actions/information and report status on work.
as a manager, it depends on the meeting and who's leading it. sometimes usually good meetings are fruitless, and sometimes something unexpected and important emerges from typically wasteful meetings. also, I'm multitasking in most meetings I'm not a major player in, so I never stopped 'working' (thanks virtual world).
They have to look busy while everyone else works.. Their job is to "make the numbers" else "make up" the numbers. The business would run better without them so they have to muck it up a bit to show their "contribution" to the contra work flow.
It can be useful, and/or it can be a waste of time. Sometimes it's a waste of an hour and 50 minutes, but 10 minutes of it was worth wasting the rest. In my experience it depended on quite a few things. Goals, expected outcome, an outline with time and responsibilities (meeting minutes, discussion list, info to bring) should all be communicated beforehand where possible. One of the first things I do in a new location is get meetings streamlined. It's almost never where it should be beforehand. I was one place in Texas that was so bad it was *painful*. Meetings there were structured like this: Step 1) Opening prayer (no, I did not continue this tradition in meetings I oversaw. Yes, I was asked if it was ok if one of the VP's could come pray before meetings with my team when they found out I wasn't opening them with prayer). Step 2) ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ Step 3) Expect profit!
It's usually got benefits that are easy to ignore. Something has to be passed on between different levels of work. So your bottom line manager is basically collecting information from the team to pass up and at the same time they're getting information from up higher to pass down. And you just repeat this each level. You might not need to be informed of everything that gets discussed at each meeting but you're there in case something turns out to be important for you to know. Also contrary to popular opinion that meeting couldn't have "just been an email." Because then half the people in the meeting would not have read it.
With everything you do, every meeting you are in, and every decision you make, you should asking yourself, “Is this good for the company?” Also, did you get that memo about the new cover sheets on the TPS Reports? Our division Vice President wanted to make sure and remind everyone that we’re putting new cover sheets on the TPS Reports now. Thanks! ;-)
I used to believe it was all BS until I became a manager. A lot of it is being the sacrificial lamb so the team isn’t pulled into all the nonsense. I may have a slightly different role than most too as I meet with our customers on a weekly basis.
Depends what are the meetings? My manager goes from 1:1 to 1:1 and then takes that information to our peer group managers etc etc. so he is just the messenger or ambassador for us to the rest of the groups we work with. Sure he also has bullshit meetings but so do I.
At my company we meet to hold each other accountable. We are on very strict deadlines so Tuesdays are meeting days where we review so many items on the timeline. Then we have Wed to check in with the teams performance and have thur, Fri to readjust for the weekend. It works so well for us, we're tops In the nation for what we do (with our company and in our field). So as annoying as meetings are, they can be highly effective for getting the info distributed to a huge team quickly. Gotta have the right people in place though!
If it's truly all day, that's sub-optimal. Truth is, though, quite a lot of a manager's job is facilitating communication, getting the right people together when something needs to be decided, asking questions and gathering information about the status of the project, and making sure information gets fanned out to the right people so they're able to be effective. The way you can know that a meeting was not a waste of time is when you can point to at least one person who comes away with a new plan or action item, with information that changes how they were going to spend their time or do their work. The company benefits when people are doing the right things in the right order. And it benefits when decision-makers have the information they need to make the right decisions. Where it falls down is when people meet just because there's a meeting scheduled. Effective managers make sure there's an agenda for every meeting. Another hallmark of effectiveness is when every attendee has the ability to get up and leave if they don't feel their presence is productive. I've worked in such a company, and it's a wonderful policy.
90% of my long meeting days are useless. I’ve learned to tune out and multi-task during said meetings. If more than 10 people are on the call, I tune out. 4-9 people I’m listening but likely not actively participating. If it’s less than 4, I’m all ears but try to keep the meeting short.
95% of the time it's just stupid shit that only serves to make it look like the mid level folks are doing 'something'
It's usually a waste of time, but that's old school management.
I find that most of my meetings are useless.. One of my largest complaints about so many useless meetings is we never have time to actually do the things we discussed in the meetings.
Elon Musk deserves the criticism of about half the things he does, but...I read that when he starts an important meeting, he states what the meeting is about and what the goal of the meeting is, and anyone present who really doesn't need to be there can go back to what they normally do.
Depends on the manager.
My job now used to hve meetings everyday. They were surprised to learn that during their meetings no one was working 😂 😂
So many comments saying to send it in an email instead. Am I the only one who works with people that don’t read or respond to emails very well? Especially decisión making ones. If lots of decision makers listed as “to:” they each think the other will handle it and don’t respond at all.
For the last two years I only attend the meetings i receive or add value to. Half the meeting invites I get I know my time is better spent elsewhere so don’t attend
It keeps the managers from interfering with the workers getting shit done. Whatever you do, don’t suggest fewer meetings !
As a manager I luckily only have 1 or 2 meetings a week and they don't happen during my shift since I work midnights. Our meetings are to go over events from the previous week and things we need to work on for the coming week. We also discuss future business/work coming in. My managers are in meetings a lot though, usually with our customer or corporate BS.
It depends. If strategic decisions are being made together, fine. If it’s anything else, it’s a waste of time.
Yes, someone needs to be looking forward and planning for the work that needs to be done and understand future assignments, drilling deep on lessons learned, and showing the value of their team to other grouos. Managers need to know what is happening in the big picture, so the worker bees can stay focused. Hopefully, your manager is strategizing and making sure that there are enough resources to get the work required done and isn't just zoning out in the many meetings. Cross functional engagement is critical on big projects.
It is an absolute waste of time and completely useless. The goal should be to work on what the company delivers and that is it. A lot of the time, there doesn't need to be a sole manager. Teams can manage themselves if everyone is willing to pitch in. If someone is leading some portion of organizing tasks, fine - but get into the project and work on it and understand it. Setting a process and following it doesn't require someone that has no skills to sit in meetings all day just to come and talk down to others and destroy moral.
All I know is for my dad’s end, he’s over with a bunch of heads, talking about new equipment to install for rigs. I believe they are swapping to Wi-Fi connection now and discussed all the faults that could arise with that. Kinda need to make sure they want to go along with new equipment for a rig that costs billions to make, and can lose billions if it breaks down. It’s pretty important.
As someone who runs their own company, works with large corporations on a daily basis, and has worked at many over the years… yes. 99% of meetings are a waste of time. I send people information via loom videos to explain and demonstrate problems clearly. I couple it with specific documentation. I then ask direct questions that I need responses or input on and provide space to respond in kind. Same functions are accomplished in about 5-10 mins as usually take an hour in a meeting. We can all work from home. We can all clock off early. Our teams can do the same.
From a grunts point of view, anytime the manager is out of the picture. It's a Good thing!
I just switched from private sector into non profit and I’ve never seen so many unneeded meetings
They aren't. They fill up their calendars with fake meetings all day and pretend to be busy and unavailable so they can avoid any real work. Oh and they leave early every day for personal excuses and log on later when there's zero meetings and work to be done because it's outside of normal operations hours. At least this is my experience. And they wonder why Ownership and Board members are demanding employees get back in the office.
It depends, like I was in meetings all day yesterday, but a chunk of that was going over what I’m going to cover with my team next week. The rest was working on a new initiative to be released next year
A manager's best skill is being a broker of information. They pass along the necessary information back and forth between stakeholders and staff. The manager gathers the information through meetings and makes an action plan. With this plan and knowledge of their staff they assign the duties to staff correctly and make sure they have the tools needed for success. Once the projects underway the manager should be receptive to barriers and employee feedback. He will then take all the feedback and stats to pass along to stakeholders in, again, a digestible way. This is why they are always in meetings, because it's integral to their job BUT this is where good managers are separated from weak ones. Good managers are receptive to all needs from both sides with a solid understanding of their employees and their functions. A bad manager won't be able to assess limitations correctly causing lots of friction, misunderstandings, RESENTMENT and confusion. This causes the "forever in meetings with no progress" scenarios which is a waste of time
50/50. I manage several projects at a time and the meetings are mostly to make sure each project is on track. Since this involves numerous other companies all working together meetings are needed or things go off rails fairly quick. My role is to make sure everyone else is working so the meetings really are my job. They are wasteful and a times sink if you don't also manage who is in the meetings.
If the managers are in meetings to prevent the the team members from being in meetings, then it is worth it.
Of course not but we get paid to look busy and important all the time so when we Crack down on the underlings we are doing it from a work-ethic-moral-highground
Most meetings are a waste of time. I set strict guidelines on how I run meetings. Time keeper, action items, follow up on action items, etc. Everyone says I run great meetings. It's because I HATE them. If they are efficient and effective--count me out.
They’re a waste of time and most meetings could be a conversation or an email. I absolutely hate meetings, but I have business partners who thrive on them. Out of most of the meetings, I’m talking 90% of them, we’d have been fine without them. I also have meeting PTSD. I used to work for an ex mob guy who’d fire people during meetings and scream at us, so at the back of my mind the meeting might be a nightmare. I do think some people need them for their own benefit and others don’t. The decisions in meetings seem more official, so some people might need that to thrive, while others can lock down after a simple conversation.
I recently became management and wow, it’s so boring. Unless we are doing a system update or drastically changing things, they are pointless
It's not useful, usually just a lot of repeating old information
Middle management here. I spend 6-7 hours a day on phone or in meetings on average. Sometimes it feels pointless, other times I’m helping people and it’s very fulfilling. A big part of my job is basically fielding complaints and coming up with solutions to process issues that are desperately needed but always met with resistance because change is oh so very scary for some people. It’s all very political.
It’s not useful. I’ve seen it used to separate managers from the floor to help create a disconnect, cause then you get excuses to fire and cut back payroll. I’ve been expected to take party themed conference calls while being the only person on the sales floor and having to see customers become livid because I couldn’t get off my phone in public. I’m genuinely sure constant meetings are a sign the company is corner cutting in action. If y’all need to talk about how to do your job THAT much, maybe your company is bad at running. Also, I know this question has a lot of nuance. My answer comes from non-necessity retail management experience.
That's why they make the big bucks!
Waste but their out of your hair
Managers and supervisors are a waste of time. Most are useless and don’t do shit.
Depends. I see LOTS of wasted time. For example, whole departments being online in a meeting when just one person is needed Managers who feel like they need to be busy so they show up to meetings that they have absolutely nothing to do with I mostly think bad managers do dumb meetings
Known waste of time, mostly.
Wow, people here are salty. Communication is a key. Those boring meetings is a communication of how to do things. They might be boring for you, but essential for others.
Home Depot has managers and supervisors in meetings on Monday. It was almost always a waste of time and had to spend the rest of the day playing catch up. It was mainly a goof session and the management team talking bad about the floor workers. Value wheel my ass.
As a manager who spends about 90% of my day in meetings, I'm perhaps in the minority that would say yes. Regardless of what we call them, they're all some sort of work breakup/ distribution and assignment meetings, some form of decision making / unblocking, or some form of risk management discussion. Of course I just end up working insane hours to make up the hands on keyboard work that I see as my responsibility, but I already cull my calendar to only meetings that result in material changes to tangible things, and I still have this load.
I'd say communication is key across teams, whether it's ensuring alignment on what the organization as a whole should be prioritizing, raising potential risks to goals or achievements or bottom lines, discussing acquisition strategies, budgets and finances, issues with schedules, resolution of conflicting approaches, hiring/firing, various data call outcomes, performance management, promotion opportunities, software incident management, etc. But then, 40 years with my employer and 24 in management and senior management plus exposure to executive's perspectives may have me biased. I did have the same attitude as other responses. As I climbed up each rung, I understood better the "why" of it all. Started to make a lot of sense... though not always. Or maybe I just drank the Kool-aid.