Larger meetings like all-hands are different.. no way you’re getting every attendee to agree on canceling those, that’s more management politics.
Depending on org culture, being direct about opting out of meetings can cast you in a negative light at best, or put your job at risk at worst.
The better the culture is around creating safety to be direct and have agency to do so, the less likely these hacks are needed.
I’m am very blunt with the dozen or so people who report up to me: if you don’t think you need to be in a meeting, say so, and drop me a message if I might have to defend the decision across the org or manage up. But all orgs are different along with their politics and quality of middle management.
And IME the useless meeting problem is pretty common when you have an ineffective manager who likes to “hold court” with as many cross team stakeholders as possible. You probably aren’t close enough to candidly tell them the meeting structure needs to change or just to cancel the recurring meeting, you need to be on their good terms because you work with them relatively often and ask favors of each other, the worst your or their team is doing the more you need the meeting as evidence of crossteam collaboration…
At any company you’re going to end up with this problem, maybe at a startup its easier to communicate frankly and weed out the type of person who would do this, but I think it’s still quite possible for an otherwise good employee to make the mistake of creating inefficient meetings/processes where everyone is too nice or polite to give candid feedback.
I have done what you describe in the last paragraph, and also cancelled team meetings or sent a single representative. I also sent people back to their seats halfway through a meeting if it no longer concerned them. I have no regrets. Nobody complained. My team seemed to appreciate it.
The actual feedback my manager and I would both want to give is “this meeting is in practice just <other team’s manager> giving and getting a status update we don’t need to be present for, then asking us questions for his projects, we’d rather it be more collaborative or less frequent” but that would hurt that other manager’s feelings. And we need their buy in to help us with things sometimes. And probably we dominate meetings sometimes that the pointy haired guy (or members of his team) goes to anyway. It’s kinda aggro to just refuse to let him hold court and it might burn a bridge we need to be maintained…
I’ve seen the same thing happen with a TL or manager who tries to force a really inefficient process like 30-60m 10+ person standup every day. Yes to an extent status updates are necessary but in this other case the manager is even pointier haired and has no idea how to manage, his ICs are actually quite talented, this is just his way to hold court.
With anonymous meeting feedback you can have a better way of surfacing a signal that the meeting isn’t valuable to most attendees. And you avoid foisting the political risk on whoever is bravest enough to speak out. I know you might think all these failure modes I mentioned are just big company politics, but I think they can happen in basically any situation where there is a power imbalance (even a little startup with a ceo insisting on an excess of meetings with the 4 other employees).
I can give you an insight into one way to measure that. (Like every time you measure things with a normative proxy, this gets far more controversial than you’d like or expect very fast.)
Measure the speaking time for everyone.
How is that controversial?
Well, you can ask what the goal of the meeting is, but if the point is “discussion” and the boss talked 94% of the time, we are in “this meeting could have been an email” territory. Because the boss is very much a listener, as he likes to remind people, that isn’t a great look. Or rather, whoever suggested to measure who is speaking isn’t a great fit for the team.