The Mess at Meetup

In IT and a few other fields, a lot of people have come to associate "cultural excellence" with "work is a really fun activity because of perks/getting to do whatever I want/having a very fraternal relationship with all of my colleagues". That's an extreme, and, I think, harmful, spoiled, and incorrect understanding of cultural excellence.

When confronted with that that claim (that the perk/fun-based definition of cultural "goodness" is wrong), however, people tend to argue against it from extremes "Are you saying I shouldn't feel good while at work? That I should just tough it out while being abused/overworked/discriminated against? That it's some weird character-building masochistic activity?!"

No, of course not. Cultural excellence includes professionalism, compassion, making employees feel valued and rewarded, and making sure they don't feel persecuted or attacked in the workplace. But that's a line that's hard to draw, especially when participants in the conversation are entitled ("well, $big_company_x gives me a ball pit and a nap room, so I think you're stodgy!") or truly threatened ("To me as $underrepresented_demographic_x, any cultural statements short of radical inclusivity and protection sound suspiciously like excuses for discrimination and cultural oppression in the workplace!" --a suspicion that is unfortunately justified quite often).

When it comes to product excellence, the nuance and difficulty discussing it comes from the perceived dichotomy between product/cultural values. Valuing cultural quality isn't at odds with product quality unless you do it wrong; a good culture facilitates more ideas, employee growth (an employee who grows makes better contribution to the product), and helps make the structures for acquiring, keeping, and getting rid of employees more fair and productive.

However, discussions about that dichotomy often end up with "well we can either not grow or value radical workaholism/Uber-style cults of personality/whatever, so might as well prioritize the product and forget about the irrelevant soft stuff!" That's false, because you need both to succeed. Different strategies might work better or worse depending on what phase of it's life the business is in, or on other factors, but the strategies shouldn't be split into "cultural" and "product". You can't get by with one or the other; thinking about it as a tradeoff is myopic and harmful.

TL;DR conversations about culture/product excellence are important to have but tricky to conduct in practice because of misperceptions, participants' prior bad experiences, and the tendency to argue from extremes.

> Past: We debate too much without defined decision makers and don't act on decisions

> Starting now: Clear decision makers end the debate, communicate the decision, and act quickly

> Past: We wait too long to take action when someone isn't meeting expectations

> Starting now: We take actions fast and say goodbye when someone isn't meeting expectations

Someone who has been a manager for years should know how poisonous it is if people can't make a decision because they are overly focused on consensus and there is no clear decision-maker; and they should know how poisonous it is if people keeping debating the same decision after it's been made, and don't get on board with implementing it.

Lack of accountability is similarly poisonous, and lack of initiative is problematic. Letting poor performers stick around too long is poisonous (it demoralizes everyone else). These and other principles in the deck are part of the basics of good management. I don't see much to object to in here.

The slide deck makes it seem like this is an organization with a (management) culture that's gotten fairly far off-track from focusing on building a successful, thriving, growing business. Senior leadership is trying to course-correct. This slide deck is a nice way of communicating "we have a serious culture problem and need to fix it".

Managers who are achieving success and have not fallen victim to these anti-patterns probably don't need to change anything because they already understand the lessons embodied in these slides. Hopefully those managers are rejoicing because their ineffectual peers are being steered in the right direction now.

AFAICT: yes.

But they don't really have a choice. "At will" employment, combined with employer-based health insurance, huge debt loads (student loans, mortgages) and no social security puts employees in a pretty weak position. And that apparently weakens management skills considerably, we had an import from the US whose exclusive management skill apart from blaming the team for his obvious and blatant screwups appeared to be ultimatums of the form "if you don't like it, you can leave".

H1Bs are in an even worse situation, because in theory they have to leave the country at the very moment their employment is terminated (in practice there is a small grace period).

I threw up a little at the "binding arbitration clause" mentioned in the article forced onto employees with their contracts. In Germany, for example, arbitration clauses are simply illegal in employment law. More generally, when involving consumers, they must be separate, signed agreements, so cannot be imposed as fine-print or as parts of a different agreement.

I view people who hand out slide decks like this as weak. Instead of doing the difficult work they just talk about it and leave it to others implementing it.

https://meetingstar.io/

If you're looking for another option, it's worth evaluating.

The key factor to me is that the pressure has to be periodic, or cyclical, so everyone knows there will be a point where it eases off a bit. Rhythms like this are built into pretty much all aspects of biological systems, and human constructs which better reflect them are, I think, more likely to be successful.

Someone mentioned a professional sports team vs. 'family' analogy elsewhere here, and while I'm not much of a sports guy the analogy seems like a good one. Pro teams have plenty of down time built into their yearly patterns.

For example in professional team sports you face high pressure constantly, while individuals fail all the time unable to cope with demanding physical and mental nature of the job, teams however can and do usually improve because the retain the ones who can thrive and perform in such environments and "firing" the ones who don't.

I mean WeWork is just a chain of shared offices. Whereas Meetup is unique and used in any major city all over the world. As you said: It is a gem.

This type of culture is fine, there's nothing wrong with it, but we need to acknowledge that for people who joined in the previous setup, this is simply a management bait-and-switch.

Also if an employee chose to take a lower salary to work at a company with a relaxed culture, and that culture becomes just like any company, why wouldn't that employee expect their salary to be upped accordingly?

Top-down mandated culture changes are never going to be popular, but this looks like a particularly big one.

> A point system that gives you points when you actually check-in to a meetup you RSVP to.

For this to be reliable, the organisers would need to do roll call, which would get tedious for meetups with 10+ people.

It makes perfect sense!

As a separate aside/quibble: when you say "blue haired" are you referring to people with dyed hair, or people older than a certain age? Both are derogatory/prejudicial/rude terms in context, but throughout my life I've heard "blue hair" used to refer to the latter (older people), has that changed? Is "blue hair" now a stereotyped signal for political beliefs?