Wherever You May Work, Meetings are a Pain in the Ass for Just About Everyone

SOME WORKPLACE ISSUES seem to pop up over and over again, and if you stick around long enough you’ll get another round of suggestions on how to handle them.

Last week, I found an article at Chief Executive on a workplace topic I’ve written about a lot over the years, and you may have dealt with this issue too — How to fix your meetings.

There are lots of great online insights about meetings, but my favorite comes from humor columnist Dave Barry who once said:

“Meetings are places where ideas rise from their graves and eat the brains of the living.”

If that is too much, perhaps one from the late Boyd. K. Packer, the president of the LDS (Mormon) Church, is more to your liking. This well-known religious leader once said that:

“It has to be an awfully good meeting to beat having no meeting at all.”

You can be the example others follow

MEETINGS DON”T GET much respect. A lot of people loathe workplace meetings, and that’s probably because most people don’t know how to make meetings useful, brief and effective.

The Chief Executive article is from Dr. Steven G. Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist who holds the title of Chancellor’s Professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, so he certainly has a lot of learned insights into improving the meeting process.

Here’s some of what he has to say:

Why workplace issues never get solved

HERE’S MY TAKE: I’ve written a lot about meetings over the years, and here’s part of something I wrote that’s worth repeating because it is no less true now than when I wrote it years ago:

“I can’t begin to tell you how many brain cells I’ve lost over my career attending senseless, wasteful, mind-numbing meetings. When I left one employer after more than 11 years on the job, I calculated that I had attended in excess of 11,000 meetings during my time there – and those were just the regularly scheduled ones that I could easily count. Add in special or unscheduled meetings and I easily was up around 13,000 meetings in less than 12 years. Some were necessary, but many were futile and wasteful. I’d be surprised if more than 10 percent of them were truly productive.

I have a million stories about all those meetings that I have given so many brain cells for, but the one that sticks out most is when this brutish tyrant of a boss I was working for told me that the daily afternoon scheduling meeting I ran was TOO efficient and made TOO many decisions TOO early in the day. He took over running the meeting, and of course, he failed to make any real decisions about anything, so he procrastinated long into the evening, driving everyone crazy. His sterling decision-making abilities drove the company to ‘encourage’ him to take ‘early retirement’ a few years later.”

Back in 2017, the Harvard Business Review published Stop the Meeting Madness that is just a longer and more in-depth version of what Dr. Rogelberg wrote for Chief Executive.

The HBR article has a lot of good suggestions, but given that it is a few years old, I suspect that HBR will be writing another such article again sometime soon.

That’s because bad meetings continue to exist no matter how much people do to try to fix them. The Chief Executive article offers some great insights into how to do that, but I fear that the very people who need Dr. Rogelberg’s advice the most won’t even read what he’s written.

And THAT’S why so many workplace issues never really ever get solved.

Other trends and insights … 

One more thing … Sometimes, you wonder how some people ever become a CEO

I HAVE LONG MADE THE POINT that there is a huge management crisis in America, particularly in American business.

There was one point years ago when I came up with an annual “Stupidus Maximus” award to honor the “most ignorant, shortsighted and dumb workforce management practice of the year.”

This “award” resonated with a lot of people because just about everyone who works has a story about some really dumb thing that they’ve seen a manager do at some point in their career.

A reason to bring back a bad management award

I’ve had a number of people tell me I should bring back the Stupidus Maximus award, and here’s another good reason for doing that from Los Angeles magazine:

“Internet Brands, the L.A.-based corporation that owns WebMD and dozens of other digital publications and services, went viral this week for all the wrong reasons: releasing a poorly produced, cringeworthy company video essentially demanding employees return to the El Segundo office after years of remote work (emphasis added), initially due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

‘I want to leave you with this: We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point, or informing of how we need to work together going forward,’ says CEO Bob Brisco a minute-and-a-half into a video that tries really hard to make working in a cubicle or conference room look super fun, complete with dancing and even colorful tropical shirts.

‘It’s, again, for the simple reason that great companies are great by great people working together and seeing each other eye to eye in tackling the big tasks,’ Brisco continued. ‘Thank you in advance for this help.’

The heart of the issue

WE CAN ALL DEBATE whether bringing remote workers back into the office makes sense, but this is NOT the way to do that — and WebMD CEO Bob Brisco, of all people. ought to know that.

My friend Laurie Ruettimann, someone who writes a lot about workplace and human resource issues, weighed in on CEO Brisco’s incredible video over on LinkedIn, and she got to the heart of the issue better than I could:

“People have been asking my thoughts on the recent WebMD Internet Brands video demanding that people return to work. Honestly, I haven’t paid much attention to this story because they’ve already convinced us that we all have cancer. Nothing from WebMD is factual or serious, including this attempt at informing employees that it’s time to return to work.

Yes, the video is stupid. But to those who were offended by this and other RTO strategies, I have a question: What did you expect? Who is surprised by this? When companies started playing nicer with the workforce during the pandemic, who was naive enough to think that a softer form of capitalism was the future of work?

Rather than waste time being upset, let’s focus on how we can fundamentally change the future of work. Capitalism is a two-way street, and companies still need both workers and active participants in the economy to generate profits.

Boycott jobs that don’t give you what you need. Boycott companies that don’t treat workers well. Spend less and don’t work for companies that compromise your values.

It’s up to us to create a better future. God knows WebMD isn’t going to do it.”

I CAN’T TOP what Laurie wrote, but if there was ever a good reason to bring back the Stupidus Maximus Award, this might be it.

I’m ALWAYS open to suggestions for terribly bad management practices that need to be exposed. If you find any, feel free to send them here at johnhollon@theskepticalguy.com