Everyone hates meetings. What is there more to say? Isn’t this an exhausting topic that’s been exhausted by now? Clearly not, since meetings still incite anger and frustration. In this blog post, I explore why we find meetings so exasperating and why we don’t act on the many good advice there is out there to make them less sufferable, or, heaven forbid, even meaningful.
What’s wrong with meetings?
What is the purpose of a meeting? I find this is often unclear, especially in meetings where the person calling it is inviting many people. Are we gathering to discuss? To update? To make decisions? To me, this is the biggest issue with meetings; of all the other problems I list below, the lack of a clearly defined purpose grinds my gears the most because it makes it difficult to assess whether I should join in the first place.
No Agenda
Take a look at your recent meetings. How many of them had an agenda in the invitation? How many of them had a detailed agenda, each discussion topic or decision itemized?
I point-blank decline invitations with no agenda. I find it’s a waste of time to send one without; everyone should decline the meeting and use the hated ‘Reply All’ function in this case and request an agenda as a prerequisite for joining; if the person calling the meeting sends an agenda, we will have wasted time in people asking for it and so on. If they refuse to send one, they’ve made a fool of themselves by indicating that either they do not know why they want to meet or they disrespect others enough not to provide the context.
(No Agenda,) No Preparation
If you don’t get an agenda, you cannot prepare for the call. You do not know if you’re expected to present, have an opinion, or to offer any facts. If you’re called for any of these, you won’t make a good impression, or maybe you’ll say something you wish you hadn’t.
However, even meetings with an agenda suffer from no preparation by participants. This is due to many reasons: some simply accept invitations without glancing at the invitation too closely (don’t do this); others really do have back-to-back meetings all day long and truly do not have time to prepare for calls. Many forget any pre-work that may have been required as the accepted invitations disappear from one’s inbox (I do not know whether this is the case for all software, though – let me know!). But I find the biggest reason why you would forget is that it’s so uncommon to have any “pre-work.” This relates closely to lack of purpose.
No Purpose
Think of your recent meetings again. In how many were decisions taken? In how many were things discussed thoroughly, perhaps leading to increased clarity? And in how many were only one or two people talking about something not relevant to you at all, while the other ten or twenty sat idly, trying to look like they were listening while tackling a few emails to get to finish their day a bit earlier, despite the purposeless meetings?
How many different types of meetings are there? The inevitable Google search suggested three, seven, and seventeen. Three is a magical number is human categorization and rhetoric, so I clicked on a Harvard Business Review’s article. According to its author Amy Bonsall, there are transactional, relational, and adaptive gatherings. Bonsall writes that transactional gatherings “are about getting things done” and that examples of these include weekly sales updates. Having attended weekly XYZ updates, I vehemently disagree. I believe that the majority of people hosting these meetings do not intend them as transactional, action-oriented ones. Rather, these are mind-numbingly boring and repetitive gatherings of huge groups of people, most of whom have no daily interaction with each other (and often this is alright – not every single marketer needs to be best friends with every single UI designer), where a few people go through unimaginative slides, reading through everything written on them, without offering any insight, any reason for others to take an interest, and always exceeding their allotted time.
In my opinion, typical workplace meetings (excluding job interviews, board meetings and the like) fall into these three categories: discussion, decision-making, update. A meeting to discuss is about ideation, project planning, understanding constraints and stakeholders. These are very important meetings, and they should only include people who have something to say. These are not ‘keep me in the loop’ calls. These should be active sessions where every stakeholder group is represented by someone who has enough knowledge of the topic to participate fully. They do not need to have executive power; they just need to be able to convey any crucial questions to executives.
Decision-making calls would follow the discussion calls. Once you’ve heard from others who are relevant to the topic or project, and check in with your superiors when needed, you are equipped to make decisions. This is truly action-oriented: you can allocate responsibilities, agree on deliverables, and so on. You can (and should) make decisions in discussion meetings, and you should discuss in decision-making calls, but I find that there’s a temporal differentiator in these two. Discuss, take action points and check whatever needs checking; and with the confirmation, make decisions.
Update meetings are the ones I dislike the most. I just don’t see the point. What weekly sales update call ever made you feel more productive? Somebody reading numbers off a slide, saying that you need to sell more? How does that help? Or worse: you’re in a call, listening to someone explain how they’re building market entry in Thailand when your sales are a hundred percent focused on an established US market. Sure, you might find it interesting. But does that really help you make your next sale? I doubt it.
Bad Timing
Anyone still booking calls for Friday afternoons should suffer an immediate pay cut. Not because ‘everyone works less on a Friday.’ But people might be less able to make decisions and to absorb new information at the end of their five-day work week. Many people enjoy a calmer Friday to tick off all the tasks they didn’t get around to during the week; do some low-intensity stuff that needs doing nonetheless; or to ensure they’re all set for the following Monday and organize their work. All of which are productive things.
Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen
If no purpose to a meeting is the worst offense, then inviting everyone to every call is a close second. Everything of course depends on the size of your company, but if you’ve got a thousand employees and you need an all-hands every Monday to go through whatever nonessential and irrelevant to every employee topic, then you’ve got a problem. Treat your employees and colleagues with respect: don’t waste their time, and don’t invite them to meetings where their input isn’t actually needed.
Of course, there’s many people who want to be included in as many meetings as possible. It makes them feel important and makes them feel seen. ‘I’m in every call, so people know I matter.’ What a sad way to live your life.
I often wonder about executives and middle management. I’ve spent my fair share of time trying to find thirty-minute slots in the calendars of three people, having to add the “couldn’t find any other time” in the 6pm invitation. I no longer do that, actually; I’ve gained enough confidence and common sense since I was a lowly intern to realize that I don’t have to impede people’s evenings with nonsensical meetings and that if it’s truly important, they’ll make time for it during business hours. But I know that those calendars are fully booked. It makes me sad. And I wonder – is every single one of those meetings crucial for them to attend? I doubt it.
We’re More Or Less There
So, everything sucks about meetings. There’s nothing to be done. I don’t think that is the case, although it’s an issue that people don’t act on the good advice around us. In this part, I suggest reasons to this.
No Agenda – I Know What I’m Doing (And The Rest of Us Just Go With It)
I think the number one reason why people don’t include an agenda is that no one ever calls them out on it. Why make an extra effort if it’s not required? And I believe that these people don’t include an agenda in the first place because they look at it from their point of view alone: they know what they mean, and that’s good enough for them. It’s selfish, but not necessarily evil. It’s thoughtlessness.
Why don’t we ask for an agenda, then? We’re used to it. Perhaps it also shields us from the pre-work it might entail: we can join the call wide-eyed and point to the blank invitation. And then we can make bad decisions or have a new meeting later, with an agenda.
No Preparation – Meh
There are very few meetings I go to where I am required to prepare. There are none that I call and go to without preparation, because I take responsibility over the purposefulness of the meeting. I will not waste my colleagues’ time with zero-outcome interruptions to their day.
As with no agenda, people are used to joining meetings without having really thought about what they should try to achieve during them. With no agenda and requirements, it’s easy to wing it. You can’t be pressed for facts and figures or a comprehensive action plan if you weren’t asked to prepare one. I think people joining meetings often place the responsibility of it on the one organizing it – rightfully so, perhaps, but I fail to see why you’d waste your own time joining a call if you’ve got nothing to contribute. But I’m weird like that.
No Purpose – I Don’t Know What I’m Doing
I very genuinely think that most calls with no purpose happen because the person calling them doesn’t know what they’re supposed to do outside the call. I think of the endless planning and update calls I had with one project – we essentially did every single task on that call that the other participants were supposed to have done since the previous call. No amount of ‘you don’t need me here for this’ helped, they just needed hand holding. Admittedly, that was the worst of these.
Other purposeless meetings include updating trackers. It’s inane to think you need ten people squinting at vanishingly small rows on an Excel sheet when 1) every participant has access to said Excel and 2) is responsible for updating the tracker. If you find the process pointless, take that up. If you don’t know it’s part of your job, check. If you don’t care…be let go?
The common nominator here is watching one person do something. If it’s a matter of doing a quick check, send a message. Send a reminder to fill in this or that.
If you are on top of your work, you know when you need discussion to brainstorm; when you need input from specific people; and when you need decisions made or approved. From there, you can determine if you need a meeting and of which sort.
Bad Timing – My Thing Is the Most Important One
Calls place early morning or late evening, or with only a few hours’ or days’ notice show that you think your thing is more important than anyone else’s. And it shows bad planning. There’s always surprises. Ad hoc is a part of our vocabulary no matter the language because sudden needs arise. But it’s different to call an urgent meeting when you’ve accidentally shipped 10.000 crates of goods to Austria instead of Australia than when you’ve accidentally ordered 10.000 business cards with the wrong logo on them. Both are costly, sure. Only one is likely to take countless hours and dollars to fix. Put a sticker on the logo if it’s that urgent.
Do not assume that your need is greater than that of anyone else’s. By when do you really need the help? And can’t it possibly be a written exchange?
Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen – I Don’t Know Who Calls the Shots
Oh DEAR. Are you often in calls with your boss, and their boss, and their boss, and you’ve got nothing to say? Or maybe you’re the one who’s got everything to say because this is what YOU do, and your boss(es) do not need to be involved? Unclear roles and responsibilities clutter meetings. Bosses have the duty to trust their teams to get their work done and to decline calls where it is expected their team can deal with it.
Even the best of us sometimes succumb to unnecessary curiosity. We get invited to a meeting we know isn’t all that relevant to us. But we kind of want to know what will be said around the topic. Knowledge is power, and it’s even suggested that the simple act of showing your face at the office regularly makes you seem more important – by virtue of being seen everywhere, by everyone. I don’t know what my advice here would be. If you don’t mind a potentially boring meeting, go ahead and join. Worst it’ll do is make you bored or miraculously result in extra work (which might be something you want, how would I know).
I think companies should have a meeting policy. People bow down to workplace customs and ‘it’s the way it’s always been done,’ and often find it easier to push back if they can rely on something codified. Leaders should act accordingly and ask for agendas, never schedule calls for early mornings or late afternoons, and set agendas themselves.
Why do you think we have so many pointless meetings? Why don’t we use the good and often simple advice there is to make meetings better? What kinds of meetings do you find the most frustrating?
Sidetracked 
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