Meeting lengths are changing during coronavirus remote work

https://www.fastcompany.com/90543500/one-thing-that-the-pandemic-could-be-changing-meeting-lengths

by walterbell • 6 years ago

27 25 6 years ago

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

All sorts of little things that would be clarified through casual in our cubicle farm now need formal meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page.

maurys• 6 years ago

I've found that instant messaging works well for that.

Or maintaining a design/decisions page for the project if there are multiple stakeholders.

mjevans• 6 years ago

This is exactly why we should be pushing remote first practices in this time of everyone being remote.

Lammy• 6 years ago

The actual study: https://www.nber.org/papers/w27612

Simulacra• 6 years ago

I work from 10a to 7p generally, but I don’t spend all that time working. The work is sort of integrates with everything that goes in to my day.

stevage• 6 years ago

I think another factor at play here is that with remote meetings, there isn't a sunk cost in people physically travelling to the meeting room. It can feel silly to bring 4 people to a place to meet just for 4 minutes, especially if they're coming from other floors or other buildings. Remotely it feels fine. Blip in, blip out.

martopix• 6 years ago

The opposite for me. I used to be able to turn around on my chair and have a chat with my supervisor who sat just behind me. If other people were needed, we could just be like "Philip, can you come over a second, we have a question". Now we have to ask people if they're busy and setup a zoom meeting.

m0xte• 6 years ago

I just get poked on slack. Question answered. Life carries on.

The advantage there is I can choose when to respond which is never the case in shoulder tapping office environments and meeting schedule negotiations both of which are disruptive.

Email is even better than meetings and disruptions!

yomly• 6 years ago

I understand this inertia, but I have also worked in remote teams where you can just jump on a call instantly without any friction and equally end that conversation in under 30 seconds.

Zoom is a little clunky for that - if you have something like whereby.com you can have a named room for yourself so you don't even have any friction to find a virtual place to talk because it is preestablished which really makes the talk feel serendipidous.

With push notifications on rooms, team members can pile on a team room if they are free and watch to listen in in case it's interesting to them. Equally with push notifications people can come to your room if they're looking for you.

But it's also a lot less intrusive than a phone ringing. If you know the room people are in a call in, you can interrupt them (because sometimes you do need to get hold of people right this second).

It can really feel like the low friction parts of an office with the right mindset and buy in. Obviously there are pros and cons to having that low activation barrier but I find them a net positive overall.

It really can be as simple as "hey can we chat" or "@team - quick call?" and then drop all the formality of a meeting and approach the call like as if you walked up to their desk to say hi.

npunt• 6 years ago

This is why I like Remotion [1], it has the best affordances I've seen that replicate turning around your chair and having a quick chat. You can set your status to Away (can't connect), Available (request to connect), and Open (auto connect). Rather than take up your whole screen, its just a few circles of faces, so you can continue your work or collaborate while chatting.

I think Remotion works best for small teams that have a certain operating rhythm and informality to them. The clunkiness of Zoom et al reflects the formality required of cross-organization collaboration, where things must be scheduled, everyone's expected to give their undivided fullscreen attention, politics dictates relevant parties all have a chance to speak, etc.

[1] https://www.remotion.com

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

All that precious time chitchatting, preparing the presentation, changing seats, now gone forever ..

tluyben2• 6 years ago

People still do that on Zoom, at least in meetings I (have to) attend.

Cthulhu_2• 6 years ago

That kinda indicates preparing meetings and presentations IS their job. I'm sure they'll be made redundant soon enough.

lnsru• 6 years ago

Big Corp I work for has really poor office with 2 small meeting rooms. And this was huge limiting factor for meeting organization. Managers thrive nowadays with no limit for meetings, every nonsense gets discussed for hours. I spend half day in some weird discussions every day. I don’t see how make this stop.

unishark• 6 years ago

Well there's alt-tab.

Cthulhu_2• 6 years ago

Reject meetings without an agenda and fixed time slot; feign unstable internet connection if need be, or indicate you have another meeting (e.g.) half an hour after the start of the one. Also make sure to block your calendar for focus time, lunch and breaks.

thewhitetulip3• 6 years ago

Feign unstable network :P

I've had friends who feign unstable electrical grids altogether!

Easiest way to get out of things you don't want to attend

00deadbeef• 6 years ago

The average workday is over 10 hours?? We still work the same hours. 7.5hrs per day five days per week. No more or less.

thewhitetulip3• 6 years ago

Our managers had set Education KTs daily for 1hr because "you aren't spending travel time to come to office so let's use that time"

adamjb• 6 years ago

What are Education KTs?

chrisandchris• 6 years ago

That‘s the question I asked myself too. How did they measure that?

Average working hours: So Switzerland: 41 hours [1] Germany: only 15% over 45 hours [2] Austria: around 41 hours too [3]

And it seems European average is also around 40 hours [3] .

Edit: Ok, that‘s what i found:

Workday Span- The average daily number of hours in between the first and last email sent or meeting attended by an individual in a 24-hour day block. The 24-hour day block is determined by 12am-11:59pm in the user’s local time zone. This variable is calculated by taking the number of hours in between the first and last meeting or email for each user’s 24-hour block and then calculating the average across users for a given MSA.

So if I write an email at 6am and another at 6pm, I would have worked 12 hours in this statistics, even though I was the rest of the day in the mountains (or otherwise out-of-office). I ahree that it‘s a nice way to measure working hours like that, but I myself sometimes write an email before breakfast and then have a lengthy breakfast.

[1] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/arbeit-erwe... [2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/179887/umfrag... [3] https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000081883735/oesterreich-b...

roland35• 6 years ago

Having started working remotely just before the pandemic hit (good timing I suppose), I was curious how the daily schedule would be different. I am sure that being at a remote-experienced company is better than companies starting it for the first time in general! In general my meetings are shorter but they also help give me a little of the face to face time I need to ask the random question or get to know my colleagues better.

I am seeing this same situation with my kid’s and his friends remote learning for school as well. We planned on our kid going to remote school this fall and it seems pretty well thought out, but some of our friends had the school switch to remote for the first few months at the last minute. It has been a disaster for the most part! So the lesson to me is to NOT treat remote exactly like in-person... there are advantages and disadvantages but if you try to copy in-person to remote it will not be successful.

Meeting lengths are changing during coronavirus remote work

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