If you multitask, so will your team
davepaola.com
davepaola.com
I remember being in a military course where we were getting very little sleep, and naturally, there were no personal laptops and personal phones were banned. If people started to nod off from the lack of sleep, they were called out and asked to stand up to keep from falling asleep. Does anybody really want to work in that kind of environment where their attention is not invited, but commanded?
Sure, it's important to make sure people are focused in meetings. But the way to do that isn't just by setting a positive example, but by increasing the focus of the meeting: reducing the number of invitees to only those who are really necessary, having a scheduling framework for who is expected to talk about what and for how long, and making sure that everybody in the meeting is focused on producing, together, the documentation (e.g. a record of the decision made) which is the product of that meeting. People are a lot less likely to "slack off" in meetings if they feel like their presence is necessary, appreciated, and productive.
30 minutes seems ok for a meeting. Lower than that, maybe you don't even need a meeting. Just some chat in a slack group.
My employer does this, and it's wonderful.
> Does anybody really want to work in that kind of environment where their attention is not invited, but commanded?
No, but nobody is making that argument.
That is, these are good questions, but are they intended as road blocks? Each one can be easily answered and you can always change your answer.
I don't feel inspired by my manager/team so I'm going to doze off at my desk, and My employees are over-paid lazy sacks of s* are two sides of the same coin.
We do 30~60 minute meetings that are reasonably done well, people are impacted by what is discussed.
But honestly it’s nothing so difficult or riveting that needs everyone to focus like crazy for an hour straight.
Then people talk slowly, have to explain details that half of the room knows but not the other one. People ask questions that you might not care about but the rest of the people do, and you won’t stand up and go away just for a 5 min question.
Then focusing 100% of our intention doesn’t shorten the meeting. We tried, and it wasn’t more efficient in any significant way (who cares for 10min gained for 50 min of full focus?). Instead people would just skip meetings altogether, because the balance between the info to share and one hour of their time was almost always in favor of their time, and dreaded to no end mandatory meetings. ROTI scores were horrible while never improving.
We just had to stop.
I agree it's important for meetings to be concise and focused on issues that are relevant to the attendees. However, I don't think the presenter should have to be flashy. If someone has their phone/laptop out, they might not even give the presenter the initial few minutes of attention it takes to get engaged with the topic.
Also, I'm in favor of banning devices at meetings because IME it leads to improvements in the meeting structure. If there's a long, boring meeting I might be relatively OK with it if I can spend the time doing something else on my laptop. If the only option is to pay attention to the useless meeting, however, then I'm more likely to provide suggestions and pressure to make the meeting better.
Most people are sleep deprived, and if they can't focus for a 30 second meeting then they should head to the nap room.
Banning phones and laptops means that everyone in the meeting is either invested in it or motivated not to get invited to the next one.
I work remote so I attend via a slack call. I just mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up. The on-site folks have to just sit at the conference table.
(20-minute daily "standup" of 10 people following the format you describe, in addition to once-weekly 30-person status meeting. It's absurd.)
I once quit a job and when my boss asked why I was quitting it was the lack of retrospectives. The following week we had a retrospective, and I stuck around for a while longer.
That's how much I believe in it.
Of course, that company went from upstart to dominating its market in 5 years. Who knows if the fact that the whole company started constantly tuning its process helped? I'd like to think it did..
I'm working on the same god-damn thing I was the day before, and the day before that. Everyone knows that, and they can look at Jira if they forget. If they need me to unblock them, they can walk over to me. (It's a fucking open office, so it's not like I can hide.) If they don't know they need me to unblock them, e-mail exists. I don't feel a need to share each trial and success of my past 24h, but maybe some people do?
We're adults. If we can't be trusted to focus on work or take initiative to solve our own problems, management should reconsider their hiring strategy.
It seems like "mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up" is why the meetings seem so pointless, because you aren't listening to other team's challenges and providing input?
Then again, I could be romanticizing these meetings and maybe at your company unsolicited feedback is discouraged, so I don't want to project that onto you, but I always though that was the _idea_ of the daily/weekly standup?
I was thinking more about the case of "here's how we are doing it" and someone you wouldn't have thought to ask saying "oh, we tried to do that at [x] last year and it didn't work because [a], [b], [c]".
Maybe twice a year you can have a big 'all-hands' all day work shop where you go through and discuss major long term issues.
At least in my experience, 90% of the time there aren't any 'useful' challenges being presented. Mostly it's stuff like "Dave was sick last week so we're a bit behind", "ticket #447 was much trickier than we expected, but we've solved it now" or "We're still waiting for the client to send us the updated data files". The actual technical challenges are almost always hashed out in smaller ad hoc meetings among the relevant people. And even when a 'real' challenge does get aired it's often of such a specialized nature that only 2-3 people have anything useful to add and it's much better for them to have a separate meeting. So it's not that feedback is discouraged, it's that there is hardly anything at the meeting to give constructive feedback on, and any feedback I can give has already been given days ago in one those above mentioned ad hoc meetings.
And in the very very rare event that someone has a challenge that is big enough and generic enough that it's reasonable to assume that the whole team will have something productive to add then that is a unique enough event that it's worth scheduling a specific meeting just for that.
Although, "that's the idea but it doesn't work in practice" is a fine answer, too.
The few cases when it's actually a common problem one could reasonably expect others to have, team-wide emails have already been sent and there's no need to cover it again.
Before I moved and started working remotely for my company, I was in one of these meetings where a coworker who took over one of my projects from ~2012 was commenting on what he was doing, and I offered a suggestion in an attempt to help. My immediate supervisor said "That's not important". This is a guy hired all of 4 months before me -- we're #2 and #3 in terms of tenure among developers, and until about 3 years ago both reported directly to the owner of the company.
I then noted that I believed it was important, and I knew that because I had direct experience with the project where my supervisor did not (because I wrote it), and my supervisor asked me "well then why don't fix it instead of [the newer dev working on the project]?" in a dismissive tone. This is a project I hadn't worked on in half a decade and was no longer in my job description.
Thankfully the owner of the company was in the meeting as well, noticed the tension, and talked to both of us separately about it after the meeting (agreeing profusely with me that I was adding a valuable contribution and that my supervisor was out of line to snip at me). The supervisor later apologized to me directly. That was not the first time he directed uninvited hostility toward me, but it was the most public instance of it, and was the last before I started working remotely. Things are much better now, I imagine because the perceived threat of me trying to usurp his managerial role is now 1000 miles away from the office.
So yeah...sometimes these meetings aren't so great, haha.
The tried-and-true method of, "oh, ask so-and-so, they worked in that area" is strictly better, because no matter how many times you're redirected, you're bothering fewer people than at the daily standup.
You don't want to force 50 people to sit around waiting while two engineers discuss a problem for 5 minutes. Instead the meeting organizer should say, Sarah, you know about this area, can you connect with Justin after the meeting and see if you can help. Anyone else who has ideas is welcome to join.
Standups only work when people give a quick status update, their plans for the day, and call out any blockers. If it devolves into discussions of how to solve any problem it's no longer a standup. And anyone who schedules standups with more than a single focused team (preferably no more than a dozen people) just doesn't understand what a standup is for.
In a sense, being in the conference room is asking people to be (ostensibly) 100% on during the whole meeting, which seems like a huge mental drain.
Or situations where ones input is only valuable for a limited period of time or around a certain subject matter.
If it’s an hour long meeting and management or project managers have organised it - chances are I’ll have my laptop with me and I’ll be getting things done.
Of course I don’t turn up with my laptop open, not only would that be rude it would also be presumptuous as to the quality of the meeting.
However, if the content of that meeting turns out to be fluff - I’ll be working on being productive rather than watching slides of information that could have been emailed.
Otherwise, you should politely ask if you are still needed, wait for the "no", and only then leave.
Among others, this avoids awkward situations where you are needed 5 minutes later, and people have to wait for you to come back. In that case, your behaviour would be (rightfully) perceived as passive-aggressive rather than constructive.
Pretty much hit the nail on the head. So much passive aggression, frustration, and abrasiveness injected into the work environment just because people don't have the face to say "Hey guys, if theres nothing else for me/for me to add here im going to drop off the call/go back to my desk."
I do this in about 30% of the meetings im in, probably twice in 5 years someones said they'd actually like me for something they were going to lead onto, and both times it was genuine.
Also, if you run a meeting, and you move onto something that doesnt need all parties, you can just say "So we're going to move onto X, you guys might not be so interested in so feel free to leave, unless of course you want to stay"
Never any hard feelings either way. It just business.
Sometimes the meeting has no clear agenda, and it's unknown whether you will be needed to contribute. Since you're peripherally involved with the project you're invited. The conversation may flow to some topic you need to weigh in on. These are bad meetings of course but they happen.
Sometimes you're simply expected to be present at a meeting even though you have nothing to contribute and there's nothing to take away that won't be in the e-mailed meeting notes. Your silent attendance is what's important, not whether you're engaged. In these cases, if you don't show up or heaven forbid, walk out mid-way, it will be noticed and you might face disciplinary action.
Sometimes you're working for a company where face time is important, so you'll have these meetings with the top brass and everyone tries to get an invitation, yet they just sit there doing work with their laptops open throughout. The goal is that the exec sees you and there's a chance he will know your face/name at some point. It's silly but welcome to corporate politics.
What about asking to leave the meeting (with polite apologize/explanation)? Meetings converge toward useless when people never say openly that they think they are not needed.
Frankly, we talk about how important it is for people to be able to speak rudely or express their political opinions in work, but the whole thing oddly stops when it comes to cold calm organizational "I think I don't need to be here".
Do the managers never pick-up on these subtle clues that, maybe, the people in their meetings are not taking them seriously?
So ban laptops from meetings (aside from the person taking the minutes).
If a meeting requires my undivided attention, my laptop is going to be useless anyway. If it does not require my undivided attention, I shouldn't be in that meeting in the first place.
My solution was to only bring my Ipad to meetings with me. It does a great job of keeping me constrained to Evernote or jira. Using an Apple Pencil helps me to keep my eyes on the presenter and not drift into multi-task land. If I set a good example, hopefully my team will drop some of the bad habits.
The problem is we're primarily aligning with the need of the shareholder, not the customer / user. I can't think of a user who requested 24/7 surveillance of their actions in order to receive more targeted ads.
I've been in countless meetings where it's been unclear why y presence was required.
Simple examples:
In a one-on-one meeting, you're not going to open your laptop. You have to hold up your end.
In a meeting in which you know you will be answering questions, you'll be paying attention.
In a meeting which is about your work and decisions will be made, you pay attention.
Then again, in a meeting which is about work you care about, you pay attention.
Now the antitheses: if the meeting has many attendees, and you don't need to answer questions, and decisions about your work aren't being made... why are you even there? In fact, why are most people there? Is it a group bonding activity? That's a legitimate thing, but it should be fairly infrequent.
Sometimes that one participant crowds out the voices of others so no one bothers to speak up... The leader of the meeting needs to be confident enough to interrupt the person taking more than their fair share of time and then try to get participation from others in the group. Being wholly ready to cut off the aggressive personality that wants to constantly talk or repeat the same thing(s) over and over.
Communications technologies can make good people better, but they can also amplify the incompetence of people who owe their current positions to the Peter principle.
If you can't pay attention to the answer to the question you just asked or the meeting you scheduled ditch the laptop or close Slack and email. The tiny things you do are picked up on by your staff.
If meeting organizer realizes that everyone brought laptops to the meeting, the meeting organizer needs to realize that there was no point in the meeting.
I asked you to the meeting cause I wanted your full metal capacity on the issue at hand. If you don't want to pay attention you're probably at the wrong job.
Or people are overlapping discussions without coming to fruition.
Or the current part of the meeting is well known by the person and they are bored.
There are a myriad of reasons why someone check their phones and laptops at meetings. I don't like it, I don't bring my laptop if not strictly needed (I'm presenting something or need to support the presenter), I don't pick my phone up at any time because I feel that is disrespectful.
With that said, I'm dying of boredom in some meetings where the meeting-holder does not have a clue on how to proceed with one, I constantly have to stop people on the third or fourth level deep of an unrelated discussion.
I agree on you having a rule for "no phones, no laptops" but then you have the burden on carrying those meetings optimally, if not you've failed and have no right on asking others to behave if you haven't provided a good environment for that.
Also: I don't like these kind of extreme measures on petty issues, meeting distractions is a solvable problem without the need to shame people, I'd definitely be on the wrong job if that is your stance.
At programmer rates today, it's more than a $1 a minute. That's not petty.
If that's actually the case then great. Most of the time I'm asked to a meeting because it's easier for the manager to invite the whole department to one big meeting rather than setting up 6 smaller meetings with only the people needed for each item on the agenda.
Do you always circulate a followup after the meeting with all decisions made, and the persons responsible for implementing those decisions?