White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now – The Meeting-Industrial Complex

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/white-collar-meetings-more-frequent/678941/

by janandonly • 2 years ago

40 17 2 years ago

kelseyfrog2• 2 years ago

Well, yeah, productivity has continued to increase without commensurate decrease in working hours.

That doesn't necessarily imply that all working hours are productive, instead we seem to need to fill them with something, and meetings meet the requirements. Or in other words

The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) - Stafford Beer[1]

Meetings serve to look like you're doing something and they take up a lot of time. They serve the purpose precisely.

Rather than try to decrease meetings and increase productive working hours, we should take the cue, read the room, and match the cure to the diagnosis, and do what Keynes predicted[2]: work 15-hour weeks. It's what we're doing already, we're just afraid to admit it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

2. http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

naveen99• 2 years ago

15 hours at marathon pace (70% effort) per week is probably on upper limits of sustainable effort by humans. If you go at 20-40% effort , you get to 40 hour weeks.

kelseyfrog2• 2 years ago

Can't we find better ways at pacing ourselves than meetings? I think we can.

nine_zeros3• 2 years ago

I can tell you how this meetings nonsense came into being.

It comes from far too many layers of management and empires that constantly need to align themselves, document things, track things etc.

In my experience, every layer of manager adds an order more of red tape, meetings, and complexity.

And when they couldn't do it all, instead of removing managers, they started asking rank and file to do the same meetings and produce enormous status reports so that the layers can read it all.

Everyone is wasting time without asking the root question: Is having so many managers and management pyramids worth wasting so much time of the most productive people of the company - the people actually producing whatever you produce.

Torien• 2 years ago

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/how-to-identify-an-immoral-maz...

nine_zeros3• 2 years ago

This is a very insightful article

paretoer• 2 years ago

Having worked at large corporations and now a small company, I think the reason for this is so no one can be blamed for anything when things go wrong at a large corporation.

The main function is that it insulates upper management from any responsibility of what is going on the ground. They don't even really know. If something goes wrong you can fire some useless cog in the machine 3 links below but they still have an important title so the optics hold.

Without all these layers then upper management has to actually take responsibility for the operation of the company. Instead, they get a nice asymmetrical bet with looking like a genius if things go well but plenty of fall guys if things go bad. It mirrors the pay out of their stock options. If things go well they make a killing, if things go horribly bad they only collect their inflated salary.

The asymmetrical bet is well worth all these useless meetings to them. It is just an operating cost of the rules of this game.

nine_zeros3• 2 years ago

You are absolutely right. The layers are useful for upper management and C-Suite. They are not useful for any actual work, actual workers, or productivity.

In a way, it is an abuse of organizational authority. The company might need more engineers so as to reduce the burden on existing engineers. But the upper management wants to more managers to build their empire to shield themselves from any work. Thus, what gets hired is managers after managers - completely against what the company needs.

remram• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/BOvj1

ein0p• 2 years ago

I have discovered a trick for meetings. Aside from one or two half hour meetings that I consider useful I mostly just say “maybe” to the rest and then hardly ever go to them. That way I have the requisite “brick wall” calendar, so I appear to be “busy”, but I also get to do actual work. Depending on where you work and your seniority this may or may not work for you, but it’s worth a try. I learned this trick some 15 years ago when the only way I could get anything done was by doing it after hours, from home. That gets old pretty quick.

wrapkinsella• 2 years ago

In my experience, meetings come in to being when individuals whose job is to make decisions don't have the requisite skills, experience or confidence to make those decisions. The weight of deciding what to do is then spread over whole teams who must confer, interpret objectives, gather information and try to align, frequently over the course of a series of meetings. Everything must be litigated as a group before some kind of consensus is reached and we can move forward.

It feels like we're working and "being productive", but it's more like meetings are a crutch for layers of management who aren't able to clearly define what the business or technical objectives are.

bravetraveler• 2 years ago

A crutch not just for management, but peers/underlings too. As long as we're all trying, we can't be blamed. Ineffectiveness guised as CoLlAbOrAtIoN~

The more bodies thrown at a thing, the closer we get to creating a 'self-fulfilling'/tire-spinning prophecy. As someone who errs towards antisocial but has to mask to be productive, this is entirely unproductive. An 'XY problem', if you will.

I'm a big fan of 'command by negation', aim to do the thing - be prepared to adjust. There's still ongoing communication with this... it's just pointed/with intent. The article opens with this, emphasis mine:

The meeting-industrial complex has grown to the point that communications has eclipsed creativity as the central skill of modern work.

Dubious, a lot is said... what sticks/is useful? Meetings contain more word salad and posturing than anything. One could argue meetings are more 'creative performance' than 'communication'

rhelz• 2 years ago

One of the main purposes of meetings is to reinforce the hierarchy. If somebody can drag you away from your desk, and make you listen to them talk interminably, and answer their uncomfortable questions for an hour or two, its pretty in-your-face who is the most powerful one in the room.

Come to think of it, that's why CEO's hate remote work so much.

P_I_Staker• 2 years ago

People don't want to here it, but meetings are where "it" happens. You simply must have it. That is that. That is not this, it is it. Simply, it's that.

The truthing the matter relize on meetings to do buisiness. No meeting, no work. Simply, it's that. If you let engineers spend their time, they playing with their tinker toys. Sometimes trains. Simply, it's that.

It's not Christmas times when a nice train would be welcome into the office. For now we do buisiness work accordingly the schedule (which is posted). In the meaning times we have meetings. We still doing the work. Simply, it's that.

jmac01• 2 years ago

AI chat bots are usually more coherent than this

airbreather• 2 years ago

Bored, tired, lonely, fearful of making a decision? Call a meeting.

The meeting type I don't get, which is common, is where some manager or leader calls in a dozen people only to then go around the room one by one getting some data that is irrelevant or already known to anyone else there.

Why don't they go around to those people one by one and not disrupt everyone?

White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now – The Meeting-Industrial Complex

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