Meetings *are* the work
medium.com
medium.com
If we treated meetings like purchases, where you have a certain budget of hours you are allowed to use, and you need approval from a higher level to schedule one, I don't think people would try to schedule as many meetings as they currently do.
In my experience, meetings burn people out because they can see how un-stressed and un-busy their coworkers are, while they all sit in a room and come up with more ways to pile it on.
If you’ve been the one person in a room of 10 people deciding what to do with you next, you know how insane this feels.
Of course depends on corporate culture.
When involvement in the meeting and commitment to the execution of the meeting's outcome are inversely related, stress ensues.
Have you ever had a full day of meetings and you say to yourself “wow, I was so productive today”. But really what work was performed? If you’re an IC probably very little.
There it is. Literally the exact thing the article is talking about:
"The tech industry suffers from a deep association of work with individual productive toil, and that just isn’t what knowledge work is."
...
"And finally please. Pvlease. PLEASE stop saying that meetings aren’t work. That’s toxic productivity culture speaking. That’s the dominant power structure trying to preserve a split between thinkers and doers. It’s a perspective that rejects the dignity of knowledge work and of your colleagues as knowers"
It's kinda fascinating seeing the (current) top comment in this thread demonstrate perfectly the very trope this article is addressing.
That's not to say all meetings are useful and productive, but that, too, is what this article is about: that meetings should be treated as dignified work in and of themselves, and treated with appropriate gravity and respect so they can be as useful as possible, because it's in those meetings where, done well, learning and group knowledge creation occurs.
But if we all run around assuming meetings are inherently not "productive", then who should be surprised if they live down to our expectations?
This is completely backwards. If meeting want to be treated as dignified work, and have "gravity and respect", then they need to act that way. You're not going to get dignity and respect from the "ICs" all the while bullshitting during the meeting.
> it's in those meetings where, done well, learning and group knowledge creation occurs.
It really isn't. Not in the meetings that people complain about when they complain about meetings. I've sat through any number of meetings, watching the bullshit roll by: I'm forced to pick my battles here: I'd be far too squeaky of a wheel if I attempted to correct the whole lot, and managers hate being upstaged. Even where I must (because bad understanding of the problem at hand is cascading towards a bad solution, and JIRA tasks that make 0 sense to anyone who'd have to complete them) — even where I must, often I get talked over, or flat out ignored, even in the most bizarre of ways: I'll get an acknowledgement of "oh, the detail you've pointed out is correct" but … then management will want to go right back to making the same bad decision spawned from the original — and allegedly acknowledged as — incorrect information. No knowledge creation or learning is occurring, here.
None of my meetings have agendas. Slides are not shared, even getting slides shared after the fact is like pulling teeth. Heck, sometimes the invite is sent with mere minutes of notice.
I have far better luck moving the needle with what I've taken to calling "working sessions": often pairing with a singular other person, and walking them directly through tasks towards a goal that we want to accomplish, often with screens shared. But these are not the sorts of things that people rail against, IMO.
The thesis of the article is that we need to fix meeting culture, and that starts with our acknowledging that meetings can and should be productive and meaningful; raising our expectations of what meetings can be; and then engaging in appropriate change.
Yeah, that's really hard.
But if you start from the assumption that meetings aren't work, as is common in the tech community, then nothing will ever change.
Do they? Have you never held a brainstorming session? Or had an open-ended discussion to ideate on strategy?
Again, your comment is reflecting the same bias I always see: that the "real work" happens outside of meetings.
The author is challenging that notion and I think it's worth at least considering their thesis.
Then the output is a brainstorm or strategy doc.
> Again, your comment … “real work” happens outside of meetings.
No I’m not I literally said work can happen in meetings. But I said it doesn't happen without effort and thoughtfulness and that knowledge work is still work at the end of the day. Nobody pays somebody to sit and ideate on strategy all day. If that’s a thing show me the job description. And if it is it’s not your whole team, guaranteed.
> The author
I have considered the hypothesis. I am responding to your naively loose definition of knowledge work. I am not anti meeting or the like. I’m pro knowledge work is work. But I am certain no value was ever created by a team that sat in meetings brainstorming and ideating all day with no tangible output, by definition.
It can feel lucky to be matched up in groups and meetings where everyone clicks and they feel productive. Some people and contexts can be like a catalyst, making you feel smarter and more capable of tackling problems. Conversely, some can be suppressive, making you feel like you are in the penalty box waiting while the game clock is running out. The most difficult situation, I think, is the gray area where different participants may be having these completely different experiences of the same meetings. It reminds me a bit of the Chinese Room thought experiment. At a certain point, is the meeting room still "doing knowledge work" when participants are just going through the motions?
I've come to see this as a very general aspect of the human condition. It's a little bit meta. Perhaps an existential angst that leaks out when people start to recognize how much ritual permeates their daily lives, and how much these rituals paper over gaps in awareness, knowledge, communication, and agreement. I don't think this moment of doubt is unique to tech work. But, perhaps the self-selected participants in the field are (statistically) prone to experience it first in their careers?
On the one hand, we have what I think you are describing: people who do the work—people who are, in fact, doing the work—getting together to do that work together. Personally, I'd call this something like a "collaboration session" (because clearly, we need better terminology for more clarity).
On the other, we have the kinds of meetings that I think most of the other people in this thread are talking about: the kind where managers get together with individual contributors for various reasons not directly related to performing the tasks at hand. (These range from getting status updates that they can then pass up the chain, to trying in vain to understand how things are going because they're too technically inept, to straight-up time-filling to attempt to justify their worth, with a wide variety of other flavors besides.) I'd call these "management BS," because I'm not too kindly disposed toward them, but perhaps someone else can come up with a less judgmental term.
There are also some other kinds of meetings—for instance, meetings between individual contributors and various kinds of stakeholders in order to get initial or better specifications for performing the tasks; brief check-in meetings to make sure everything's running smoothly; meetings that were called because someone involved is either conducting themselves poorly or not performing well...etc, etc. These don't fall neatly into either of those two categories, and may be positive, negative, or neutral, but I think they're also mostly less common than the two described above.
Some people's jobs require a lot of collaboration sessions to get the work done. Some do not. This is going to depend very heavily on the specific work environments. Personally, I'm currently in a position where there are no other ICs to collaborate with, so I don't have those.
If you've been lucky enough to avoid management BS, then congratulations. I've seen more than enough of it (both first- and second-hand) to know that it's absolutely real, it's very often caused by management ineptitude and insecurity, and that even when the meeting itself may have some worth to it, far, far too often it's not run well and just ends up wasting everyone's time because of that.
From an individual contribution perspective I’ve written a few hundred lines of code since I started, unless you count me out putting code via some CLI tricks involving some templates (I don’t really, and am trying to teach the other engineers about powershell/bash use cases) but when I do step in it’s either because of some design pattern we want to nail to avoid future tech debt, or I’m fixing a bug that a junior or mid level dev has spent a dozen hours on and couldn’t figure out what went wrong. So the 20% or so of my time I’m actually spending doing IC work is to unblock the team, so it feels really high impact relative to the time I spend on it.
So in short, my role has the added benefit of far fewer meetings for the other developers on the team, while also keeping someone technical in the loop to push back on unrealistic expectations from the business, getting to ask clarifying questions, and working closely with our POs to have everything teed up so the team can just show up to work and get down to the “important stuff”. I think it’s an important role with intangible benefits people can’t really see until they get a before/after comparison where everything else was largely the same.
[1]: Documentation needed by teams in a different continent to be able to communicate and integrate with our service, I must add.
There should be a series of books on how to have meetings. They're not especially hard to have. But if you don't use your brain to organize them, they end up incredibly wasteful and unproductive.
> But what if, hear me out, what if the only* work that matters in a knowledge economy happens when we are together?
If you quote Peter Drucker, you ought to know that he was anti-bad meetings. It is easy to say that 80% or more of meetings are bad ones. They do not follow an Andy Grove "High Output Management" concept, hardly have an agenda, and have no constraints. By definition, they are bad meetings.
Jeff Bezos is a good example in that the culture he pushed was that people read through a 1-page memo before you meet. It helps set the context, gets people to think about the challenge, and contribute in meaningful ways. But with most meetings, people just show up without doing this preparation. What's the point of meeting if nobody prepared?
I agree with the premise that meetings are valuable tools for communication, decision making, and collaboration. But I disagree that we cannot call the current culture of meetings what it is -- a waste of time. Majority are poorly ran and unnecessary. Which is why jokes about "how much does this meeting cost us?" are so relatable. Meetings should be a last resort.
There was yet another gripe thread about daily standup meetings that passed through HN a few days ago. They are another waste of time that you can't afford to mess with with when you're async. We just have a Slack channel where everyone posts a bullet summary of what they completed yesterday, what their plan is today, and their availability. These summaries take less than 10 minutes to write and 30 seconds to read. If you want more info on what someone's doing it's very easy to just DM them and ask. I probably get more positive feedback on that process from new employees than anything else we do.
I hate meetings because I feel like if you have something important to say, and you know the key stakeholders you need feedback from, and you know what exact feedback you need from them then it should just be a written doc and you should just schedule 10 or 15 mins for any follow up comments on the doc that need to be discussed.
I remember reading Obama implemented a similar strategy where he would have people write him a one pager on whatever they need from him and at the bottom there would be three check boxes: yes, no and “lets talk.”
Is there anyone out there arguing in favor of more BS meetings? I assume not. People who advocate for the purpose and value of specific meetings do so because they believe they are good meetings.
Of course they are not all right! There are some teams for which a daily standup would be a BS meeting - for them it would be bad; and there are other teams who find a daily standup is the perfect sync-up and planning corrective they need to maximize productivity - for them, it is a good meeting.
So people who say ‘daily standups can be a helpful kind of meeting for some teams’ are not advocating for the bad meetings the first team would end up having.
Nobody anywhere is making the claim ‘all meetings are good’. But on the other hand I do hear people saying ‘All meetings are bad’. And that seems to me to be trivially disprovable.
I do understand people having a strong prior that a proposed meeting is probably bad. I understand setting a high bar for agreeing to participate in meetings.
But the heuristic of ‘never meet ever’ seems like a poor one.
No. If agenda-less meetings are bad and we know that those they exist, then someone, that dastardly fiend, must not be against bad meetings!
> I do hear people saying ‘All meetings are bad’
They're pushing for change. It works a lot like haggling. If you ask for what you want, some well-meaning person will call for compromise and "meeting in the middle" and you won't get what you want. So ask for more.
>They're pushing for change. It works a lot like haggling
It's also people who have never experienced a good meeting, either because they haven't been in the industry long or because they've been somewhat unlucky.
It's also people who may have had some good meetings, but they are so far outweighed by the bad that even when they end up in a good meeting, the bad ones are coloring their experience so much they're unable to engage productively, and so nowadays all meetings feel like bad meetings.
It's also people who started out by saying "these meetings are bad meetings," and being dismissed, then saying "some meetings are bad meetings" and being ignored, and now are saying "all meetings are bad meetings" because they're just fed up and using hyperbole to try to get their point across to people whose paychecks depend on them not understanding.
Personally, the biggest negative effects I have experienced have been context switching and burnout.
Listening to discussions that are only tangentially related to my work fries my brain. I do not care about some product owner's oral report of the meetings they had yesterday, etc.
My opinion is that people whose work is unrelated should not be forced to communicate synchronously. But I'm just an engineer, what do I know.
I can listen to virtually anything people have to say, but don't expect me to be effective at the actual work that day.
It's one thing if a meeting or presentation is pertinent to the product I'm working on, especially if it involves my team specifically. It's another when it's some broad company thing that, if there was no meeting at all, would have zero measurable impact on what sort of work I'm doing. In that case, combine more of these meetings into a single day of the week where I'm not expected to do any work. Why? Because my work, when distracted, is always worse than when there is no distraction. When work is distracted, there's a time penalty when code is rejected in code review and work needs to be refactored.
I also think it's very telling that whenever a project is at risk for missing deadlines, upper management tries to correct the course by holding more meetings. The extra meetings take a toll on productivity, but they also keep everybody focused, on task, and most importantly, they allow management to quickly allocate resources and people to critical path items.
At this point, I've done the work, documented a fix, written about the problem and the fix in three different places, and then talked in two meetings about the problems and the fix. Why the shit do I have to relive this problem 5 times just to make a manager happy with "staying in sync". I spend more time TALKING about the problem than it took to fix usually. The only thing I should need to tell my manager is when I can't meet the deadline and WHY. Not explaining and repeating my work 5 times.
It's beyond inefficient, it's not a matter of allocating resources, it's an asinine waste of time.
This is organizational problem that should be solved so that meetings are avoided as much as possible. The main way I have seen this solved is by engineering teams having clear APIs between. I use the term API loosely. This may be a software API between software teams but it may be a document, hardware interface or other sort of interface.
Without this sort of structure, communication requirements grow quadratically with each additional person, i.e., n*(n-1)/2 where n is the # of people.
Look at this paragraph, what the heck: "Recognize that it takes active resistance for interpretation spaces to thrive in tech orgs. There is such a strong pull in our work systems to decompose work that it’s borderline revolutionary to center integration and meaning instead."
If this author's premise were correct, startups could never succeed if they didn't possess a significant bureaucratic layer from the inception. But it's not correct, and startups succeed (outside of external factors) due to self-organizing and talented people who spend their time building and improving products.
>My own journey through these ideas started with the puzzle: why do groups of smart people often act with such apparently low collective intelligence?
Because they're being corralled into amorphous blobs where any natural structure and interaction is destroyed! That's like asking why a neural network doesn't predict handwritten numbers very well when you restructure the neurons yourself by hand.
All of the sudden, you find yourself in meetings with layers of management. In the worst cases I’ve experienced, a bunch of non-technical people spend hours “brainstorming” how to solve problems that are trivial to resolve, because they do not have the depth to know that these things do not really require any discussion.
In my opinion, meetings with non-technical managers should only be organized for strategic planning. All tactical meetings should be covered between contributors, as needed. If you can’t implement a solution, you really don’t have much to contribute in that discussion, and your presence is counterproductive for the company. And exactly as you say, the people who inject themselves into this part of the process are destroying the natural leadership that would emerge.
I mean, I agree with this in the abstract, but I’m very skeptical of the claim that this process is aided by meetings.
Honestly, my experience after nearly a decade in the industry has led me to believe that the “democratic” approach to management that underpins meeting culture… basically doesn’t work. The idea that the whole team should convene and everyone should give their input and that this process converges on the truth, or the optimal path forward, or whatever… is just not rooted in reality. What we actually need are individual smart leaders who take responsibility for the vision and just tell everyone else what to do. The actual thing that makes a group of people productive is for everyone to know their place/role, and the truth is that the majority of people do not need to be at or contribute to “knowledge-making” meetings.
I also don’t know if I buy that programming is knowledge work in the usual sense. It requires knowledge but the output is not just a report or something, it is the actual product. The only reason it seems more like knowledge work than it is, is that we’ve set up big tech companies in a way where your work is like 40% being an information router, 40% being a politician, and maybe 20% programming. In this context I’m sure it would seem like “meetings are the work.” But maybe we should change that, and not just shove people into more meetings.
Moreover:
- I need time to internalize what I learned from other people. If I go to work too fast, I probably won't have understood what was said and loose even more time. Since I want to get back to work after long meetings, and since my brain is dead, it lead to really poor decisions (nowadays I just scrap the code entirely and start from scratch rather than try to salvage).
- Online meetings feel worse. When too many people are involved, you can't just be a passive listener for 45+ minutes. But if you do other work, you might miss information.
- okay meeting size is four to seven , if you all have a basic knowledge of what will be discussed. Can be pushed if the team is tight and not too much junior.
- best meeting size is two to three.
All other sizes, you'd rather do a presentation with some interactivity and with the support available to everyone at the end.
Getting people to do this things has proven difficult.
I have found that you can replace most meetings, or at least parts if meetings, with asynchronous written communication. The problem is that many of the non-technical people don't seem to want to write things down - maybe they aren't good at writing, or maybe they are more persuasive or better recieved via verbal communication. It's certainly faster to tell someone to do something than write out sensible requirements.
The time to arrive at such consensus should be short for well oiled, established team with high level of technical expertise. Even for less established teams effort should be put to reduce the time to arrive at a consensus.
Sometimes consensus are going to be wrong, but even wrong consensus are arguably better than ones that takes forever to make. Mistake can be corrected, drawn out process where everybody take forever to convince sucks morale and paralyzes work, and is indicative of cultural problems.
I think another issue is that task switching can be very difficult. If your work day is split up into 1-1.5hr chunks of work, for some of us (myself at least), it is difficult to get enough momentum to steamroll through a task. I find it much easier to work after everyone has left, the pressure decreases and I find myself calm, and with regained control of my wits.
meetings are still useful for: brainstorms, 1:1 discussions, vote for resolutions, that's about it.
I have mixed feeling about agile's daily stand-up meeting, I think it could be resolved via slack discussion? or just zoom call with fixed time length, e.g. 15 minutes.
I generally only invite people to meetings who I know will have important input or need the context. The meeting should be about determining next steps for N period and provide clarity and direction to take those steps.
Any other meeting I mostly find to be a waste of time. But when you get the right people in the room, once a week, to talk about progress on a new product (for example), it can almost entirely replace documentation and is far more flexible and lightweight.
I love writing a good narrative doc or spec, but it leaves room for interpretation. Other people are also not as skilled at writing, and it leaves them without a vehicle to communicate what they want.
So, yeah, agree that meetings are the work/can be an optimal tool for achieving work, but they need to be done right.
1. Cancelling meetings where a leader is trying to create a crisis where no crisis exists. A lot of new managers and bad managers thing that every time something out of the ordinary comes up it is a five-alarm fire. The meeting often starts with the leader saying something eternally wise like, "Somehthing has happened. It might be bad." Often the solution out of these meetings makes less sense than the Chewbacca defense... Something like, "We had five minutes of downtime, so to prevent that we're replacing Joyburst with Yerbae in the fridge."
2. Replace routine status report meetings with a chatbot. If a manager needs status, just have people send it in. No need to waste two hours every day for 10 people. Meeting takes 2 hours, counting prep, chatbot takes less time than meeting prep.
3. Ensure every meeting starts and ends on time by empowering people to leave if the host is unreasonably late or when time is up without fear of retaliation. If we expect people to get things done, we have to respect that they have time to do work. If you think your meeting will take an hour, it is your responsibility to end it in one hour.
4. Always put problems on trial, not people. Meetings where everyone is attacking or piling on are abusive and leaders who allow them or orchestrate them are abusive, too.
1. No true scotsman fallacy: The author redefines the term “meeting” to “productive meeting”. Any criticism against nonproductive meetings becomes invalid because in the article a meeting is by definition productive.
2. Straw manning: the author then deflects criticism against meetings as invalid by making it sound as if the opposing camp considers all meetings unproductive, even productive ones. This is not the opposing side’s argument. I have yet to meet a dev that considers meetings with a clear agenda and only relevant parties present unproductive.
3. The claim that meetings on their own are valuable is easily disproven, but it’s the core of the entire article. Meetings are only valuable to get something done: find the issue to solve, find a solution together, organize a common strategy to solve a problem, ask for necessary resources to solve a problem, etc. If it’s clear what to do or how then a meeting only costs time and at best provides no benefit while adding the risk that the solution is made worse by people who have no expertise but hold power.
Sometimes it is better to collaborate in an issue because then there is a litigation trail and it gives people more time to think.
Sometimes it is better to just have a quick Slack message to confirm something.
And yes, sometimes it is better to have a meeting where you can whiteboard or brainstorm ideas interactively.
At best they are planning about how to do the work, or what the build with the work.
The work is the stuff that actually generates income.
Of course for a software engineer, it's different.
At some point your meetings have to result in some kind of action taken. The action is the work.
You can have 100 meetings planning an event but if you never actually have the event, have you actually done any work?
The work is actually booking the venue, finding the staff for the event, setting up the decor, inviting the guests, selling the tickets, hiring catering, scheduling the talks or speeches, any of the other stuff.
Work actually materializes something.
Meetings, at best, materialize a plan for how to do the work. Often they don't even do that.
Accounting, HR, Marketing, etc
These are cost centers, they don't generate income.
Accounting having meetings about which tax software to use this year is "not the work, but is planning how to do the work"
HR making job listings and filtering candidates is "the work"
HR having meetings about how to navigate a change to remote hiring is "not the work, but is planning how to do the work"
My point is that if you have the meeting but don't actually execute on anything, you haven't actually done any work.
And meetings that don't result in anything you can execute on are absolutely outside the realm of work altogether.
none of the above generates income, meetings or otherwise.
However if you granted what I wrote even an ounce of charity, you could probably guess that I didn't mean "literally only the direct actions that generate income for the company are work"
My stance is not that complicated. Work is actions taken to advance the interests of the company. Meetings are talking about actions to take, but are not actions themselves. If the outcome of the meeting does not actions for someone to take, then it probably was not a useful meeting.
There is:
A. An infinite amount of potential work to be done
B. Only some of this work "generates income" as you put it
C. There is a method of determining which work "generates income" and "needs to be performed"
Hope you can figure out the rest.
You sound like you are disparaging what I said as being "semantic games", but then you go on to agree with me with.
> C. There is a method of determining which work "generates income" and "needs to be performed"
To me this reads almost exactly with what I said:
"At best they are planning about how to do the work, or what the build with the work"
It seems we both agree there is a clear distinction between "The method of determining which work [to do]" and the work itself.
Glad we agree!
There's a distinction, but one does not exist without the other. So it was a commentary on other posters in the thread arguing about which is more important.
This entire article reads like another person who is unable to work without significant handholding, or a person who believes productivity == seeing people in an office, and this is just another article by a person who believes that their personal deficiencies trumps all else.
What is that cause? I argue that it's people in positions of seniority, or power in general, just extending their point for too long. Why they do it? Probably a bunch of reasons, but I expect none related to the work.
Meetings don't suck when everyone is "normal" in the sense there is mutual respect for each other's time, and therefore ample preparation. The issue is, that's seldom the case, and half the reason for the meeting in the manager's eyes. Meetings are, sometimes, an admission of managerial failure.
The barrier to entry or cost of booking a meeting is significantly lower than the cost of actually having one. Whenever I see this pattern in a system, poor outcomes are found.
The higher up in the organisation the lower the cost to book it, most of the time you can ignore everyone else's schedule.
The design of time management tools like calendars needs updating.
The default calendar setting is Available is another example. As is, free text area for the request body.
They are pointless in themselves but are necessary communication tool to get the work done
Then I would tell you that either this is not a "knowledge economy," however you're defining that, or you are in error.
No company I know sells meeting amongst themself as a product.
I like to joke with my boss and program managers that when they are in meetings, they are getting work done but when I’m in meetings, I’m not getting work done.
Jokes aside I do agree with the general premise that meetings can be valuable and that sometimes getting everybody together in a room (or on a call) helps a lot more than everybody in a silo for a week and not getting the right things finished. The problem is that by and large people just don’t know how to run meetings effectively.
Case in point is that where I work we have a rule about starting meetings 5 minutes after the hour to give people time between meetings to use the restroom, get coffee, or whatever. It’s a nice thought in theory but in practice it just means meetings now all run 5 or 10 minutes late because everybody is determined to fill that buffer. I often asked why instead of starting meetings 5 or 10 minutes later we couldn’t just end them 5 or 10 minutes earlier and never got a good answer.
But that’s just a symptom of a deeply rooted problem with meeting culture. All too often I’m booked into meetings with no agenda or no real explanation about why it’s worth my time. Meetings that could be scheduled for 30 or 15 minutes get an hour slot. Meetings with an agenda go off the rails and nobody speaks up to put a stop to it. Stand-up meetings turn into design meetings. Too many people, or the wrong people get invited to meetings which causes derails or wastes others time. My “favorite” are “pre-meetings” to talk about upcoming meetings. It becomes self-parody sometimes. People’s calendars get so packed with meetings that the only way to get time with certain people is to attend unstructured “office hours” style meetings. You have people who absolutely refuse to engage in discussions over email or IM so it ends up requiring a 30 or 60 meeting for something that could be solved in 5 minutes over a chat. It’s just ridiculous.
So I’d argue it’s not that meetings don’t have value and aren’t “work”, it’s that people don’t know how to run them effectively and they just waste a bunch of people’s time. Whenever I schedule a meeting I always try to schedule for the least amount of time necessary, describe what it is and why I need people there in the invite, and have an agenda that I mercilessly try to stick to. I really try to be respectful of others time. It’s not really hard but it seems like these simple things are so hard to do.