There’s No Time To Do Anything To Meet About!

We had a time when upper-level managers were demanding weekly status updates. Once a week with team leads attending to give the updates was reasonable and quite manageable.

Then, there was a crisis, and they started doing the status updates twice a week. This was worse but still manageable, even when the team leads needed backup from the people actually doing the work.

Over the next few months, they raised the requirement to the entire workgroup going — walking to another building for this pointless meeting for an hour and then walking back! It took about an hour and a half each time… every single effing day!

Then, they wanted the meeting twice a day, because our backlog was getting worse. There was absolutely no recognition of the impact losing 20% of our available work time to this pointless meeting was having on our productivity… and our manager wouldn’t do anything! (That was the worst manager I ever had — worse than the guy most of us didn’t know was a drinker until the day he showed up sober!)

Eventually, one of the team leaders got the point across to an only marginally incompetent manager, who allowed the team leaders to represent the work group and report on any issues they couldn’t answer at the next meeting.

Sometime after that, we got new high-level management, who reduced the meetings to first twice a week and then back to once a week, with the group managers reporting and bringing any people needed for detail reports.

It was the strangest thing, but our productivity rose sharply once we were working on projects instead of spending all of our time explaining why we were so badly behind.