Meetings, And The Pure, Clean, Unbridled Hatred Thereof
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Photo by Fearless 0004 via Wikimedia Commons
Show me an organization’s meetings and I’ll tell you what kind of leadership they have.
Full disclosure: I hate meetings. I hated them as a worker, I hated them when I was in management, I hated them as a supervisor, I hated them as an employee. Nothing gets done in a meeting, and the failure is force multiplied by the time wasted preparing, being in, and reacting to the meeting. Time that, almost without exception, could be better spent being productive. In the age of email, messaging, and a dozen ways to communicate with your coworkers instantaneously, meetings are even more deserving of all the possible scorn we can pile upon them.
I break out my loathing of meetings because after reading this particular piece from Business Insider written by Hugh Langley and Grace Kay triggered those mostly dormant convictions that an at-home writer and media person rarely has to deal with, thank you Lord for your blessings and favor. The piece is shot through with a theme of my anti-meeting hatelore — meetings for the sake of having a meeting so the bosses can have a meeting about how many meetings they are having.
I’m not joking:
While the pandemic’s boom and bust brought the issue into stark relief, the various types of fake work have been growing within tech companies for years. Many of these issues come down to one fundamental problem: managers trying to get ahead.
At almost all tech companies, current and former employees said, bosses were rewarded for overhiring since it made them look important. Bloated org charts resulted in too many people fighting for work, a poor understanding of what each segment of the company was doing, and a rise in projects spun up merely to help managers get themselves promoted.
“People are often measured not in contribution but in head count.” Moran said.
“The bigger your team you have, the more qualified people you have in your team, the more weight you have in the company,” Graham, the former Amazon employee, said. “It’s what we call empire building. You’re not focused on building a product; you’re focused on building an empire. That leads to fake work and unnecessary bloating.”
The more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization.
To create an empire, managers simply add employees underneath them with little sense of what they should be doing. “Instead of planning in the most efficient way, they just say, ‘I need a head count,'” Anna Tavis, a clinical professor of human-capital management at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, said.The former Meta employee who joined the company in 2022 felt that stuffing teams was a byproduct of middle managers looking for a promotion, leading to employees having less to do. One of his managers hired so many people that within three months, there became four levels between him and the person who was supposed to be managing him. “A lot of the time, my managers had no idea what I was doing,” he said.
In addition to the incentive structure encouraging projects to nowhere, there’s a lack of oversight from the top into how these miniature empires are being run, employees said. And in many cases, executives are oblivious to the value of the work that’s presented to them. Some executives have even admitted that there seems to be little incentive to address company bloat. Former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast that without financial hurdles, managers had every reason to keep hiring.
“The more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization,” he said.
To secure their fiefdoms, managers often pitch projects they created that are sometimes referred to as “vanity projects” or “promo projects.” These may ultimately contribute zero to a company’s top line, but the flashy presentations and demos associated with the projects often lead to a promotion and nice pay bump for the person leading the work. One Google manager who recently left the company said the head-count process at Google “rewards bad behavior” by promoting people based on “having a bigger team and creating decks.” Google had “dozens” of teams, he said, that did “think tank-like strategy work with no real practical way of impacting the business or a customer or user.”
“I do think that process favored the people who were better at bullshitting and storytelling,” he told us.
Companies, like anything else, rise and fall on leadership. If the leadership is out for their own gains, that is going to permeate throughout the organization. There are also a lot of cultural byproducts to the “empire building” leadership style the piece refers to, as you quickly get a two-tiered system of folks working their way up, and the folks who quickly realize they aren’t going anywhere fast.
There has been an arc to the big tech companies over the last 15-odd years of the smart phone era; the tech is so revolutionarily good and so popular that the profits band aided the lack of corporate structure and business culture. Now that the meteoric rise has tapered off and the big tech companies are as institutionalized as the big companies of old, those failures to tighten up the ship need correcting. Thus, massive waves of layoffs, tightening of budgets, rearranging of priorities, and so forth. In short, reality set in and smart businesspeople started to adapt. And as we’ve seen from some of the superstar founders and leaders of those big tech companies, what made them great innovators and disruptors doesn’t always translate to running multi-billion dollar international companies that are no longer the hot new thing fighting the establishment, but are now the establishment.
There is no version of “fake work” or “lazy work” that doesn’t have blame in management and leadership. Tolerating it, or worse designing a system to incentivize it for the optics of that same leadership’s own self-aggrandizement, is a failure of leadership no matter how you look at it. As with many things in the work world, the worker gets the blame, but the management above them did nothing to improve, avoid, or correct the problem.
Everything rises and falls on leadership. Anytime a think piece or op-ed goes after workers, our first reflex should be to question the management and leadership situation that worker is functioning in for proper context. Things don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen in a sequence, and it is rare indeed for a company to have chronic worker problems without there being chronic leadership problems running parallel. It is a fixable problem, if you focus on quality people committed to the goals of being quality employees and supervisors. But the one way you will never fix it? By having a meeting.
Let me tell you, in the non tech world, it’s not necessarily that way. My dept is understaffed and undertrained. There’s lots of good people in my company, except for the tendency to have mass meetings “celebrating” stuff–which seems to come from HR. If I attended every meeting invite they sent out, I’d have 40% less working time. I get meeting invites for that stuff almost every other day for this stuff.Report
I also thought the idea of unchecked hiring to be strange. Maybe it is because I have always worked in smaller, private companies, but managers were not able to add headcount willy nilly. They needed approval from somebody at the VP level at least.Report
I long ago adopted the motto “never let a meeting get in the way of a great email.”
Government is ripe with this stuff, especially as we “reintegrate” post-pandemic. I am lucky enough to have a remote duty station from my “office” so most of may participation is via video. Still we have more meetings then I need much less want. Problem of being an introvert in an extrovert world.Report
A great meeting is superior to a great email. No substitute for a meaningful discussion where questions can be answered in real time and much more quickly.
You’re also assuming people are going to read your email.Report
A great meeting has a point. It’s easier to get away with a pointless meeting than a pointless email.Report
I think the problem is pointless communication. When your inbox is littered with 200 emails a day only 7 are actually worth reading, that’s a problem. When you have an email exchange with someone that takes an hour when a simple phone call would have taken 10 minutes, that’s a problem.
People abuse emails as much as they abuse meeting, imo.Report
It’s all a matter of leadership building the right kind of culture. Bad companies way over bureacratize. All the best companies I’ve worked at put emphasis on effective use of time, all the worst, as a rule, have meetings about the meeting and meetings about the meeting about the meeting. There’s also cultivation to be done with email too but at least a bad e-mail typically only wastes seconds whereas bad meetings can kill entire days.Report
I feel like I’m being put in the dreaded “defending Trump” scenario.
Let me be clear, I hate unnecessary meeting too!Report
Hey man it’s a sensitive subject!Report
Meeting lover! Meeting lover!Report
It is difficult to abuse e-mails as much as meetings.
To abuse e-mails: you need to set up an automatic e-mail script that sends out complaints to the HR department whenever you are “misgendered” (by being referred to as he/she or it).
Meetings — you just call a two hour meeting to discuss everyone’s gender identity. Or have a two hour “let’s all complain about Trump.” Or look up the books that say “for the purposes of improving morale, any uniformed officer of the Navy can demand that servicemen sing a particular sea shanty.” (Yes, actually done. Improved someone’s morale, at least).Report
I wasn’t thinking about the pointless cc’s or “fyi”s. But starting an email chain for no reason, that’s harder to pull off than scheduling a meeting for no reason.Report
QUIT USING THE REPLY ALL BUTTON TO ASK PEOPLE TO TAKE YOU OFF OF THE ALL HANDS EMAIL LISTReport
Ooh. I’m guessing you cut and pasted that from somewhere?Report
A couple of months into the “lockdown”, my work had a Replyallpocalypse.
The “All Hands” email got used and, instead of putting it in the bcc: field, it was put in the To: field. A freakin *TON* of people who got an email about something surely lockdown related and one of the idiots out there replyed all and asked to be taken off of the email list. This resulted in other people realizing that they, too, wanted to be taken off of All Hands.
And people replying with “it’s ‘all hands’ you can’t be taken off of it” and “guys, quit replying all and just reply to the guy” and “please quit replying all” and “please remove me from this email list please” and it wouldn’t stop and one guy made an excel sheet with a pie chart showing the percentage of emails made that were asking to be removed from all hands, the percentage of emails saying quit reply all, and the percentage of emails in “other”.
This, of course, changed nothing in the percentages of people asking to be removed from the list and people replying all saying “QUIT REPLYING ALL”.
But I still remember that email fondly.
Anyway, later on in the afternoon, IT finally plugged the hole and sent all future email responses to that email to /dev/null.Report
That was a good day.Report
On my last day of work, whenever that is, I am going to go back and reply all to that email.
“Hey, I’m just catching up with my email now. Can I be removed from this email list?”
And then leave.Report
Thanks!Report
I’m not sure about that. But even if true, it all counts and it fills up your inbox. My favorite: Reply all “Thanks”
I’m just – barely – old enough to remember a time where workplace comms consisted of just meetings, conference calls, phone calls and memorandums. It took about 2 months of having email to completely eradicate memos. And when it did, written communications became lazy, sloppy and exponentially sprawling. And depending on your workplace culture – a pure CYA medium. (But you were cc’d!!)Report
Have you never wondered if an email fell into a black hole somehow? One of my least favorite things is when I ask a para or someone else to do something and then I never hear back on whether it is done or not until I request a status update. Then for some reason, they get snappy and tell me it was done a while ago. How am I supposed to know if you don’t tell me?Report
Emails can be ignored and are ignored routinely even when they shouldn’t be. Saying that email is a replacement for meetings assumes that they are going to be read and responded to. They aren’t. I’ve sent out many emails trying to get important information in situations where I have to do stuff and bear responsibility and get nothing.Report
Agreed. Given the number of emails I get in a day, and the number of mass meeting invites:
50 emails at least a day. 3-5 Non work related (meetings to talk about new products, explain products, talk about HR stuff, celebrate some company/corporate/international day, I mostly ignore email except from certain people. I have to sort through email every other day, since I’m copied on a while bunch of stuff.
I LITERALLY cannot focus given the number of emails coming in, so I ignore it….look at it first in the morning and a scan topic at the end of the day. Then I sped an hour each week filing it away after reading it.Report
During the lockdown-adjacent period in March-Mayish of 2020, meetings were a good way to allow the WFH people to put “weekly accomplishments” in an email to people who needed bulletpoints for their power point slide that was going to be added to a power point presentation.
There was also a hint of “we’re extroverts and we’re used to being in the office and talking all the time” in many of those meetings and, yeah, it was kinda nice to be on a call and talking to somebody who wasn’t one’s spouse or one’s cat.
After the lockdowns relaxed and certainly after the vaccinations were widely available, some of those meetings stayed.
And if you’re back to a “back-in-the-office” level of productivity and associated deliverables, the meetings are no longer a “might as well” but a “I’m doing this instead of being in the lab”.
And you’d think that someone in upper would notice…Report
Back during the covid, when we were all remote, people would email you to see if you could talk, via skype..vs in the office they’d just stop by. After my third call, when the 30 minute chat was 20 mins of bitching, I realized the amount of time wasted listening, to and bitching, to someone. God the hours lost when I was in the office. Now, at least, if I’m wasting time, it’s only my time and I’m wasting it for what I want to waste it on….Report
I accidentally hit “report” on this. Shouldn’t do stuff like this on the subway.Report
ExactlyReport
Andrew, were you in the Navy or from a Navy family? Something in your writing makes me curious.Report
Air Force. Army and Marine family. Grandfather was NavyReport
Accountability of leaders. I see that thinking among sailors a lot. Always happy to see it anywhere.Report
It’s because the military has a higher incidence of leadership being held accountable than other government or corporate leadership.Report
Meetings might be useless but I’ve sent out emails that never get responded too, so that isn’t great either.Report
I don’t think there is a good solution here. As Lee notes, it is also very possible to send out an email and not get a response. I have certainly had this happen to me.
Meetings can make sure everyone is on the right track or have some brain storming potential.
But there seem to be people whose entire working day is doing nothing but going from meeting to meeting and that always struck me as a bit strange.Report
My very rough understanding is that a lot of tech companies especially bigger ones did do a lot of hiring in 2020 and perhaps did over staff some or many projects. Amazon also has shut down things like Alexa because it realized there was not away to moneitize it easily or at all. I mainly use Alexa as a kind of verbal jukebox “Alexa, play the Kinks.”
Also people are notoriously bad at actually evaluating work product so managers prefer to reward things like long hours in the office even if that person is a Goof and spending most of the day writing comments to blogs.Report
SungWon gives his take:
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I have long suspected that most serial killers get their initial motivation from mandatory early-morning staff meetings.Report