Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

One of my employers actively discouraged meetings and phone calls. They wanted everything done through Slack and email.

It felt great at first. Having a wide-open calendar and knowing that random managers can’t pull you into a waste of time meeting seems like a dream come true. However, we quickly learned that removing meetings doesn’t removed the need for communication.

Instead of scheduled meetings, our Slack channels turned into never ending pseudo-meetings. Instead of the well-defined start times of a meeting and the implicit expectation that meeting participants come prepared with an agenda and material to discuss, we had a spontaneous free-for-all in Slack. People could, and would, start important team discussions in Slack at random times all day long. “@here” started to feel no different than a meeting, except it was unpredictable, you couldn’t prepare for it, and it would certainly disrupt your concentration.

The other unintended side effect was that people were still scheduling secret meetings. They just had to be quiet about it because technically we weren’t supposed to do it. The teams with regularly scheduled meetings were more cohesive, less disrupted, and significantly less stressed than those who tried to handle everything in the asynchronous “always on, always connected” style.

So yes, excessive, unnecessary, or poorly-run meetings are bad. But I never thought I’d miss properly run meetings as much as I did when they were removed completely from our communication toolbox. Use the right tool for the right job and enforce good meeting discipline.

There's some truth to this, but holy smokes, another meeting is not the cure.

There is value in "venting" at work. A few years ago I built a software tool that pings people at the end of the week asking how their week went. Some of the quietest people in the company had the most to say when they were behind a screen. In fact, some people literally called it therapeutic. It turns out that writing things down can serve as a form of "therapy" (source: https://positivepsychology.com/writing-therapy/)

If you lead a team, I'd strongly recommend you have a feedback mechanism like this in place, but a meeting is not the right medium. It's just a place for the extroverts to complain.

If you do hold a meeting for this stuff, a 1-1 is probably the best way to surface a similar level of information.

Since this is Swedish study, I just want to point out that Swedish organizational culture is very meeting and consensus oriented.

Nordic cultures may seem very similar, but their organizational cultures are different even within the same company. Others are often frustrated about Swedes and their endless meetings. Finns in the meeting are 'OK. lets do this.' and Swedes reply 'But Jan-Erik has not shared his point of view yet.'

"Yet to suppose that President Hoover was engaged only in organizing further reassurance is to do him a serious injustice. he was also conducting one of the oldest, most important --- and, unhappily, one of the least understood --- rites in American life. This is the rite of the meeting which is called not to do business but to do no business. It is a rite which is still much practiced in our time. It is worth examinging for a moment.

Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides of meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929, pp 138-139.

Wasn't it Microsoft Japan that realized meetings were naturally crunched down to strictly useful ones when they went to a 4 day work week? Then more time was spent doing real, actual work and then workers being able to ACTUALLY relax at home or doing something truly therapeutic... like not being at fucking work. Not this bullshit "you can relax at work" crap. Oh, and their employees felt ACTUALLY better and ACTUALLY less stressed. I feel like this "study" is more a focus-group bullshit attempt to fight off the results of a 4 day work week.

The world is getting silly. Not because of studies like this. But because people actually agree with obvious bullshit like this. I feel like I'm taking damn crazy pills.

Many meetings are extremely important for me as a manager.

Very few of the meetings are about “deciding things”, rather they are about aligning views. As a manager I see my role as setting up meetings so that the most qualified peoples views properly influences the right stake holders. When everyone aligns on what problem to solve and how to solve it there are generally no need to take any decisions, since work gets efficiently done and few issues pops up that are not automatically solved by way of previously achieved alignment.

While using this strategy, what generally drives more meetings are: 1) Managers and other power holders that cares more about their importance and status than the work. 2) The parts of the staff that are dissatisfied and don’t like their work. In many of these cases, they have been obviously neglected/abused by management before and don’t feel trust in the organization.

I thought Wrike had a pretty good infographic on deciding whether or not to have a meeting: https://d3tvpxjako9ywy.cloudfront.net/blog/content/uploads/2...

Basically you should have a meeting if:

* It can't be solved by collaborating outside a meeting

* Everyone is needed to participate

* The group has authority to act

* There is a clear agenda and goals

* Someone can be the facilitator

I have found that if a meeting has all those elements than a lot can get done very quickly, rather than having ideas bounce around email or slack for weeks!

This sounds accurate to my now recently-ex company. The number of meetings have soared, to the point where they probably spend 2-3 days per two week "sprint" (it's really more of a hobbled walk) in project meetings. Not just the absurd number of project managers (currently 1 PM to every 2 programmers, I believe), but the whole team. And what's weird is that when you're in the office, it doesn't feel out of place, but if you're actually trying to be productive it's a horror-show. I had a 3 hour meeting a few weeks back, and then another meeting directly after it which was a summary of the previous meeting.

Add to that the fact that 90% of the company are incapable of being on time to those meetings, and you can probably guess as to one of the reasons I'm moving on to another company. The meetings are usually also at short notice and the person who requests it will universally be late to their own meeting.

I see excessive meetings and calls as a failure of written communication skills. The people I see organising the most meetings are also those who are least adept at understanding writing, and the worst at communicating via it themselves. There's definitely an art to being a good written communicator, and maybe there should be more emphasis placed on it when recruiting in tech roles.

True story:

A project I was on earlier in the year was full on Agile, with constant meetings - daily standups, weekly retrospectives, weekly scrum-of-scrums, weekly reviews/demos, bi-weekly product backlog refinements, weekly story refinements, weekly product backlog planning, weekly sprint planning, frequent meetings about git branching strategies and near daily "way of working" meetings. And of course there were some relatively meaningful small meetings closely related to actual development work.

Everyone was losing the will to live, including myself - there simply wasn't enough time to actually work!

I had a word with the project manager, and with a totally casual manner he said: "OK, let's have a meeting with the whole team to discuss it".

This is probably controversial, but I generally disagree with the popular HN sentiment that great progress is accomplished by groups of people working together in teams. My view is that the greatest work is done in isolation by individuals, with the occasional conference to stay up-to-date on new ideas. This isn’t to say that individuals accomplish great feats entirely on their own (which undoubtedly is almost never the case), but merely that almost all productive work is done independently.

If I ran my own company, I would ban almost all meetings and limit the most crucial ones to 15 minutes tops. And while my company might fail due to a misplaced sense of schadenfreude, it’s a risk I’m willing to take to get experimental verification of whether meetings are actually as valuable as everyone claims they are.

I call BS. Meetings make me lose the will to live & drove me to quitting my job multiple times. If you want to make sure I don''t do anything during the day, put in a meeting in the middle of it.

Perhaps it helps people who have pointless jobs that create no value?

I've had times when a pointless meeting with too many participants was a welcome break. Of course, just reducing the work week and having more free time would be a lot better. But I'll take what I can get.

This articles reminds me of Parkinson's Law: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law

Without efficient ways of doing things managers want more people doing things like them. Like the traffic problem doesn't get better with more lanes.

One of the things you realize quickly as you manage is that there is a more bimodal distribution of preferences for socializing among engineers. I don't want to fall into stereotypes, but there are some people that don't like meetings (aggressively) and are pretty outspoken about it.

There are a number of people that kind of enjoy it as a form of socializing. That obviously doesn't apply to overly long, poorly structured meetings that waste time. But a sizeable (mostly) silent group of people appreciate reasonably scheduled and structured meetings in the way described in this article. To each their own.

As unpopular as it might be - I kinda like open offices for this reason. (work type dependent).

Having the 4x mission critical managers sitting in a cluster & overhearing each other's conversations did wonders for keeping everyone on the same wavelength - without meetings.

[offtopic]

Was a bit of an eye opener how powerful that can be. 40 man team, insane yearly sprint-like pressure for 2.5 months solid. Everything continuously on fire basically...but it's fine as long as the center holds. Also had an interesting effect on team morale - they're a lot happier to charge into battle if they're confident leadership is unified.

WTF? Venting might be arguably beneficial in some cases, but in many companies employees don't get to vent in a meeting.

Rather, they have to endure demands, complaints and display of status from management - which is the opposite of therapy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

One of the reasons of pointless meeting is to keep busy and appear busy - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

There's an interesting hatred of meetings by software engineers, and I think it's to far on the hatred spectrum. There's definitely a lot to hate about meetings and they are very poorly run in general. But the argument of "when do you do actual work!" is not a good one. If you run an organization of 200 people, it's a lot more effective for 25 people to spend all of their time making the efficiency of the team, and impact of the team on the business as high as possible, than it is to increase the team size to 225. If those 25 people can, through messy meetings, debates, and emotional outbursts, somehow make 200 ppl twice as effective, that's great!

I think a better framing for meetings is not by looking at the battle, but the war. Individually, yeah it can suck. But the goal is to ensure a large amount of individuals march in the same direction, toward the same goal, and are progressing the business forward. Some amount of work is needed for that.

Let's optimize for maximizing that impact, not how "good" the process feels.

They aren't therapy for me. It takes me a while to get into the zone if I'm doing anything that I would consider "creative" as far as coding. Incessant meetings break up my day into chunks that aren't useful. I don't mind status meetings but a recent job turned into 3 or 4 meetings a day for half and hour at a time and that destroys my day and creates a lot of stress. I think sending a status to the team once a day is fine. If you want my attention email me and we'll set something up. This public flogging that managers like to pull at meetings really is stress inducing.

I feel fairly alarmed and skeptical at the idea of managers being therapists, not because I think it’s a bad idea — in fact I think it ought to be a good one — but because in my experience, most of the folks asking for your vulnerability in the business world aren’t willing to off any in turn.

I have found that our daily standup calls are fairly therapeutic for those involved. Occasionally, a call will start with a very salty conversation regarding some topic from the prior day or concerns around schedules, but every single time it eventually evolves into a productive call. Sometimes this takes 20 seconds, sometimes this takes 20 minutes. I have a bad habit of trying to pre-empt or quench a salty exchange in progress, which usually escalates the situation further. I've found the best thing someone on the sidelines of a heated or otherwise pointless exchange can do is to come up with a completely different topic, or propose some sort of compromise. But, at the end of the day it can really help some people when you just let them yell it out for a few minutes on the phone. Doing this all the time is obviously not healthy for team dynamics, but there is always some happy medium between extremes.

One other thing that can help a lot is to have structured calls and ways for people to flag things for mandatory discussion. If I am on a call that starts going sideways, having some established process where I can say something like "Hey guys, can we take a look at <some bucket of flagged items>?" can very quickly right the ship. What this does is effectively remind everyone that we are here to do a job with certain degree of professionalism and diligence. Everyone also has a vested interest in getting to the bucket of review items, because these are usually the topics creating the most stress day-to-day, and talking through them with the team is an excellent means to relieve much of that stress.

It's therapy for the worst kinds of people. For productive people, meetings are horrible; akin to sitting there and watching a bunch of monkeys howling and banging on their chests to maximize the amount of bananas that they're going to get at the end of the month.

> Academics from the University of Malmo in Sweden say meetings provide an outlet for people at work to show off their status or to express frustration.

Yup, see this all the time, and it's one of the reasons I try to avoid most of them. Nothing gets done, half the people aren't really prepared, and the usual outcome is the guys with the biggest egos sound off and make themselves feel important and everyone else just has a good old moan.

It may be therapy for them, but I'd rather not be there, thanks!

"Many managers don't know what to do," he says, and when they are "unsure of their role", they respond by generating more meetings.

Another reason that we should have less managers and instead elevate engineers into dual engineer/executive positions.

I once talked to a manager about how meeting seemed like a waste of time, he said he loved meetings because it meant people were working together and getting things done.

That made me think, that meetings were about making people feel that their work was meaningful when it wasn't. Basically, if you do meaningful work, you don't need meetings, but if its the other way around, meetings make total sense.

The problem I experience with meetings is that often times the information presented is only tangentially related to you.

I hate it when I’m in a meeting and it ends up a conversation between two people. It’s stressful if you have an expectation to get something done but also an expectation to sit in a meeting you realize really doesn’t pertain to you.

We have a 1hr weekly with just the SWE's that is definitely therapeutic. We basically just poke fun at whatever stupid things happened during the week, while still keeping our teammates abreast of our progress on tasks. It's 1 hr once per week and I definitely want to take it to my next workplace

"People often feel marginalised. They feel that they have no influence or position. In these cases, the perception is that meetings do not improve anything, but actually cause even more frustration."

Literally the last paragraph hits the nail on the head for, I'd wager, the vast majority of people.

The text kind of reads to me like those meetings are therapeutic mostly for the people that cannot really justify having a job there to begin with... This really reminds me of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" and the solution to that would be a restructuring of society that doesn't require being in an employer/employee situation to be a valuable part of society.

Important context quote: “Instead he says there has been a rise of managerial roles, which are often not very well defined, and where "the hierarchy is not that clear".“

So this article doesn’t apply to tech-focused organizations. For sure, meetings are still relevant there, but should trend to fewer not more

> Prof Hall says as a result, meetings can become "maligned somewhat unnecessarily". But he argues that negativity towards meetings can be because their real purposes are misunderstood... the real purpose of such meetings might be to assert the authority of an organisation, so that employees are reminded that they are part of it. Such meetings are not really about making any decisions, he says.

We're supposed to feel less negativity towards meetings once we realize that its a way for the organization to assert its power over us? Reading this article only made me feel more negativity toward meetings, not less. What kind of an egotistical blowhard would prefer wasting his team's time and productivity, just to assert his own power and feel better about himself

Can anyone find the original paper? The press release is here: https://mau.se/en/news/work-meetings-have-an-unwarranted-bad...

In other words, more and more people are being employed in pointless jobs.

There isn't enough actual work to go around, but everyone needs to be "employed". And since they subconsciously know that their jobs are pointless, they need to justify their existence through posturing and status and "visibility" and report production (which nobody reads) and endless meetings. Lots of activity, but little actual achievement. Middle management only ever grows @1, because everyone in the middle is in the same boat, and having more people under you makes you more important and less likely to lose your job or have your department cut.

@1: With the exception of the massive job purges the mega-corporations do once a decade or so.

Oh I have no doubt that they're therapy... for certain people who need therapy. I even referred to a certain recurring meeting recently that always tends to be mostly a particular guy talking, as his therapy session. So I feel vindicated now!

We are a manufacturing facility and the amount of meetings to discuss how to best implement LEAN, 6S, and kaizen has become comical. Many of these meetings indeed turn into complaint fests between managers from different groups.

Makes me think of Ray Dalio on transparency and 'meaningful work'. I agree that people want to vent and be heard but as others have noted meetings turn into a way for management to reinscribe control and turn complaints back on the complainant (Learned helplessness,etc)

If we need meetings to define our job then that is pretty unclear management. If you dont see how your role pertains to the overall goals of the org and need meetings to figure this out then there is a general disfunction.

Meaningful work and the ability to give and receive feedback. Less meetings.

I'm not sure meetings in most organizations are the result of people 'asserting authority' or people 'unsure of their role'. Almost no managers are calling meetings to fulfill some hidden agenda or personal gratification. Most are called by people who are legitimately trying to solve a problem.

They're just a product of a lazy/ineffective management style.

The problem is, proper task delegation requires a lot of work:

1. understanding the problem (probably the hardest problem)

2. understanding the organization and resources

3. breaking down the problem

4. assigning tasks appropriately

5. managing time, both of the process, and the delegates of the tasks.

When a manager does this properly, it's not a very 'visible' process, so nobody really knows they've done all this work.

Alternatively, lazy managers can just call everyone into a room and let them figure out everything. It doesn't require any upfront planning or understanding of the problem. And it comes with the bonus of high-visibility.

TL;DR: meetings are the result of lazy management.

The article lacks one important detail: number of companies studied. Because frankly, it sounds a lot like n=1, and generalizing from one (or possibly a few) dysfunctional examples is a fallacy.

And even if there were an overall trend: not addressing other scenarios seems like a substantial omission regardless.

The article makes it sound like the whole world needs status validation and/or a place to vent. I know enough places where stuff like that gets shut down, hard.

If you’re a meeting maker, one thing to consider is that a one hour meeting for eight people is equivalent (maybe at a minimum) to 12 hours work. Ask yourself, if I could achieve what that meeting will achieve by spending 12 hours working alone in a room, would I see that as a good use of my time? Because that’s what you’re doing. Meetings had better be damn important and genuinely require active participation from all attendees.

There’s also the class of pointless meeting where nontechnical managers don’t understand what they’re responsible for so use them to as a way to “manage by feel”. They call them to see what people’s reactions are to fishing questions to judge the situation, and to use them as training sessions. These I find to be the most counterproductive meetings.

People should decline pointless meetings.

The ideas are not knew here, and I am largely sympathetic, but it's really funny to hear what is usually normally presented in David Graeber "you should relate to this and be mad" form here presented presented in dry "studies show..." form.

I don't disagree with the article. Without articulating it, I always thought so--precisely that makes many meetings so infuriating for me personally. I don't have the job title of therapist or actor/background extra.

Original source, in Swedish:

https://mau.se/nyheter/arbetslivets-moten-har-ofortjant-dali...

Isn't this title a contradiction? They aren't pointless meetings if they are therapeutic for the attendees. Now, what about pointless AND non-therapeutic, is that possible?

Sounds like a local maximum at the organisational scale.

This reminds me of open-plan offices. What a nightmare.

If your meetings are non productive blame yourself and start proposing topics thay result in actionable innovations.

Pointless work meetings always fatigue me quickly...

yxIjdy;6;d

It makes sense, since most therapy is about as useful as pointless work meetings.