As a Canadian, the thing that always astonishes me about working with my American counterparts is how many calls you want to have, and how often the topics discussed are the exact same points as the previous calls.
No agenda? No Call.
No agenda? No Call.
No such luck with calls. Everybody wants to have calls and calls bypass documentation...so they want to have more.
I’ve always wanted a BPM system that hooks to my company calendar and automatically requests meeting notes to post from the person who called the meeting...and blocks them from requesting more meetings until those notes have been posted.
Think of it as spam filter for meetings.
Simple truth: technology will not fix your culture problems. The most technology can do is serve as a scapegoat for organizational policy, e.g. "the system won't let me do X" instead of "my boss won't let me do X".
If you want to change your culture, then reward positive behavior, fire sources of unapologetic cultural toxicity, and hire people who believe and profess the cultural change you seek.
s/Business /Sales/
If you put a salesperson in charge of a software team, you are; like the man says "gonna have a bad time".
Maybe culture is a factor. But to me, it's almost as if everyone's experience is completely different from everyone else's and that companies operate differently. None of us have worked at enough companies in enough countries to accurately identify what is what.
It's all anecdotes and none of them matter. Some people are lazy and some people are not. Some people schedule too many meetings and some do not. That's all there is to it.
Everybody says they want to hire someone who can "multi-task" but it totally changes your outlook when you have experience enough to know deep down that it's not necessary and may well lead to lower productivity.
edit: for what it's worth, I use to be Canadian focused in my role, and this was not an issue. Then I became more globally focused and it became instantly a problem, but consistently only in America. Not in Europe, not in Asia, Canada still mostly chill, but America wants to have a call to discuss.
For example: Due to circumstances outside your control, you must work with someone who is ineffective, too busy, or simply can't wrap their head around whatever is going on. So you end up having to baby-sit.
In certain cases that will feel a lot like what you are complaining about, particularly when the opposite party is in denial/don't understand that they are the source of the problems.
Take my original post with a grain of unproductive salt.
Last week I had 35 meetings before my noon.
Later: oh, sorry, I forgot.
tks.