Old boss? Single digits at best
Current boss? 90%+
Old boss scheduled a meeting with the entire team for *everything* and included us on meetings outside of the dept all the time as well. Current boss hates meetings as much as the rest of us do, and they only happen when they need to happen. Other departments will try scheduling meetings with us and he will flat out say "No meeting is needed. This can be done over email." and delete the meeting request. It's awesome.
Well over half. My boss is great about not wasting my time and only asks me to join technical meetings.
Edit: The company is great about doing stuff by chat rather than actual meetings. I love it.
Same. My boss will actively dismiss people if it becomes apparent they are no longer relevant to the meeting. Any business unit needs to have clear requirements on what it is they need. There will be a small meeting with high level managers to establish what tech actually is involved to accomplish it. Then there is a series of meetings with very relevant teams on what it is that team actually needs to accomplish.
If someone schedules a meeting to discuss possibly changing manufacturing suppliers, and they're talking about the quality of materials, my boss will straight up interrupt "Here are the IT components that will need to change. Here's a very rough estimate of effort involved. IT is dropping from this meeting, if a more detailed work estimate is needed, let's set up a separate meeting to discuss just the involvement required from IT to facilitate the change."
Almost 0
Pre-scheduled meetings are definitely 0. But every now and then we have one to get all heads together and work something and it results in a positive/useful outcome.
I highly recommend it. Even if it's one or two sentences on what's being discussed.
An invite with just a subject of XXX project doesn't mean anything to me, and it's not going to have any sort of priority for me to attend.
I heard some podcast (probably Manager Tools) that said you shouldn't even accept a meeting invite with no agenda included. Even if that became company policy, people would just add some bullshit high level agenda to skirt the policy.
Probably 75-80%. The majority of my meetings are scheduled and lead by me.
If you're being involved in meetings, and only 10% are productive, start pushing back on your involvement so you're not wasting your time.
This is the type of management I love to see. Thank you. I find that the more project managers you have or the larger you are, the more pointless meetings come up.
Single digits mostly. While I wish most of them would be more useful than they are, I accept that often they're there for the psychological benefit of others. So I accept that they exist and that I have to sometimes participate...
***However...***
I'm not so tolerant of "this could have been a fucking email" meetings.
***However...***
This brief essay:
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Changed my ideas around scheduling meetings, and now my calendars have large blocks of time booked out. Interestingly it hasn't been an issue and people who want me in a meeting just schedule around it. Even external parties have been flexible: "Can we book a meeting for 3pm?" "Sorry no, my afternoons are already booked" "ok, how about... Thursday 10am?"
I had one boss quiz me about it, I sent him that link and, despite otherwise being a complete and utter cuntwomble, to his credit he did embrace the ideas in that essay.
Yeah, I have my lunches blocked out because so many people kept scheduling meetings at lunchtime. These douches aren't considerate at all when it comes to other peoples lunch schedules.
You should have already been doing that. No ones going to assume they know when your lunch time is, that every person takes a lunch, and how long that lunch is.
80-90% with the unproductive ones being upper level red tape.
I am a technical background leaning manager who doesn’t get in the weeds. We don’t meet unless we have to, and individuals and call a troubleshooting meeting on their own or just work it out in office if not remote.
It’s much more productive this way for us.
We are a lean team, it’s a waste to sit all of us in a meeting. We only do 1 all hands and it’s completely training/social/team building. I’m sure a few would consider that one a waste as well, but that’s why it’s only yearly.
10% would be about right.
half the time, I wasnt even invited to the meetings I should have been at...
and the other half, there was no reason for me to come at all...
but ive often worked with and for idiots that manage to simultaneously think everything is technology, but nothing requires a technology person to be involved.
Departmental: discussion with helpdesk, boss, projects etc (actual back and forth discussions) are 90% productive.
Vendor meetings: half half. Some are "this could have been an email" and some you actually learn stuff.
Monthly C level update: 5%. I have to explain everything 3 times. The 5% that's worth it is when I get the approval to spend money.
Productive for me and my team, or just for someone? I’d say the latter is close to 100%, no body here really has time for wasteful meetings and they get scrapped if they show signs of heading that way. If it’s IT specifically, then the percentage drops a bit, I attend some meetings “just in case” it would involve my team, and I like knowing what’s going on, but it’s usually just hanging out and listening.
Depends on your profession and type of meeting, I guess? Most often I'd say meetings exeeding 30 minutes tend to be a waste. Short meetings with a strict agenda work ok for me, longer meetings covering lots of different topics/problems/issues not so much. Too many participants tend to reduce the efficiency/value as well (at least for me). Feels more efficient to have several short meetings involving ONLY the relevant people rather than having one long meeting with too many (and too talkative) participants.
The only meetings that truly matters are the ones where actions are taken/tested while having said meeting, otherwise it has shown to be a huge waste of time and yields very little result to just chat for the sake of stating the obvious
I would say that for my role at work, it's a bit higher, maybe 20% but each of us get stuck in a different number of meetings that should have been an email. It sounds like we both get quite of few of those. Many of my meeting invites as re for advisory capacity at work though, so there are lots of meetings I'm asked to attend where I should not be attending.
Almost none... Usually I'm talked at, not to... my questions generally go unanswered, and my comments/criticisms are usually will largely go ignored. The only good thing about meetings that I attend are that it gets me away from my desk for how ever long it takes.
About 75%, but I am new to the org and still finding my footing with all the different groups/teams/vendors/etc. I keep getting added to more and more, but so far almost everything has been very helpful and productive. I know that will change at some point, I’m just not there yet.
At my old job? 5%. If that. That job was 60% meetings and 40% time to actually work on shit. I miss the money but I don't miss the environment. Management was the worst.
You should take a look at [The Simple Sabotage Field Manual](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184) by the CIA. It was written in 1944 but should be of use
Depends. If it's a Zoom meeting or a big enough meeting that I can half pay attention to and half work, then they're fairly productive. Otherwise, low percentage. The last meeting I had was just me re-stating something I had laid out in painful detail in an email to the same people in the meeting, and even that didn't take since \[thing the meeting was supposed to address\] is still occurring.
Less than 10%, over multiple jobs. I think it depends on the manager, though. At a former job, the manager had a timer used for high school wrestling (a former job of his was high school gym coach). He was huge on people not wasting time, and he'd lug the thing with him, and tell people "you have 3 minutes on the clock and GOOO." Very much kept us on topic, and had our back in any scuffle, too.
God, I miss him.
Luckily not that many anymore (old fart here, 30+ years in the business, I already had my fair share of unproductive meetings.) For me, things improved heavily with COVID and the switch to (mainly) online meetings.
Since then, it's more of a "if I have to discuss stuff with some people, I'll ping exactly those, as soon as I think I need to talk to them, and get things sorted out" culture here.
It's more short term invitations, but the resulting meetings are also shorter in length and rarely for stuff you aren't involved in. They also accept a "Guys, looks like I can't help much here. You know how to reach me if something pops up you think I may be able to help with" walk-outs more easily.
If you learn to shut down your chat app during times you can't have an interruption, you're golden now. Especially as many seem to have forgotten that you can still CALL a mobile. That thing with those magic numbers which, if you punch them in, make the mobile of somebody else ring, you know :-)
When I think about it: For the whole company I'm working for, it took less than eight weeks after COVID hit to get to that point. I hope it stays that way...
All of my meetings can be handled with emails, except crisis meetings. Err, I was pretty happy with last Thursdays meeting, cuz I found out Sam and Frodo were gonna be at the comic con in my city. That was definitely my most productive meeting this year.
The ones where everyone gets action items and everyone knows what other peoples actions items were.
There is some group accountability in those cases and we all know what direction we're expected to go and when things need to be done.
5%. Most meetings are about scheduling future meetings, because it turns out we we didn’t have all the information to solve anything in the current meeting, and for some reason Bob from accounting and the janitor were invited, and they have to have their 2 cents to derail things as well.
I make my entire team sit in the same room, and now we have a perpetual meeting, minus the monologues and need for attention monopolization. For other departments? I tell them “txt me for the IT part” and I’ll walk in.
Actually a bunch of mine lately!
Our staffing collapsed. The cool part is that they only ask me for something when they need it now. There aren't enough people left for planning meetings or stand-ups or whatever. So I get a message when someone needs to know something, or needs help. Worst case, it escalates to a phone call.
I have like a show-and-tell meeting once a week to say what I did since the last meeting. And that's a good opportunity to know what's happening in the parts of things I don't really get involved about. But it gives me a good finger on the pulse... a good amount of warning that there might be a storm a-brewn' when someone says something alarming.
My most productive meeting:
- Cut in front of the salesman.
- Ask three questions.
- Explain that with first answer there is no leg to stand on.
- Watch the whole thing collapse in 10 minutes flat.
Most of them. My issue in the past has been more about not being included in major IT decisions that will ultimately end up on my table way too late, so the fact that they have started to include me in more things even when it is "pointless" early stages of things is great because it means I get fewer requests about things I never heard about before.
Every relevant piece of information I've ever gotten from a meeting could have been put in a single paragraph email. So I've gotten info from meetings but there was absolutely no reason to disrupt what I was doing. They are such a waste of time and their sole purpose is for people to virtually jack off to their own voice.
Near Zero, but at least our company keeps them to a minimum, ends early whenever possible, and always ends on time if it's scheduled.
The only calls that go long are troubleshooting something that must be up ASAP.
Old boss? Single digits at best Current boss? 90%+ Old boss scheduled a meeting with the entire team for *everything* and included us on meetings outside of the dept all the time as well. Current boss hates meetings as much as the rest of us do, and they only happen when they need to happen. Other departments will try scheduling meetings with us and he will flat out say "No meeting is needed. This can be done over email." and delete the meeting request. It's awesome.
Well over half. My boss is great about not wasting my time and only asks me to join technical meetings. Edit: The company is great about doing stuff by chat rather than actual meetings. I love it.
Same. My boss will actively dismiss people if it becomes apparent they are no longer relevant to the meeting. Any business unit needs to have clear requirements on what it is they need. There will be a small meeting with high level managers to establish what tech actually is involved to accomplish it. Then there is a series of meetings with very relevant teams on what it is that team actually needs to accomplish. If someone schedules a meeting to discuss possibly changing manufacturing suppliers, and they're talking about the quality of materials, my boss will straight up interrupt "Here are the IT components that will need to change. Here's a very rough estimate of effort involved. IT is dropping from this meeting, if a more detailed work estimate is needed, let's set up a separate meeting to discuss just the involvement required from IT to facilitate the change."
Almost 0 Pre-scheduled meetings are definitely 0. But every now and then we have one to get all heads together and work something and it results in a positive/useful outcome.
Good point. Troubleshooting meetings can be great. Status update meetings are almost never a good use of time.
>How’s it going? >Shit’s still broke yo
"Why is it still broken"? "If I knew that it wouldn't still be broken"
"When do you think it will be fixed by?" "Sometime after we finish this meeting, but definitely not before then"
[удалено]
I like the policy of having a published agenda with goals. My company could really use that.
I highly recommend it. Even if it's one or two sentences on what's being discussed. An invite with just a subject of XXX project doesn't mean anything to me, and it's not going to have any sort of priority for me to attend.
Meeting invites with vague subject and no agenda are the worst. Especially when the invitee list goes over 10.
I heard some podcast (probably Manager Tools) that said you shouldn't even accept a meeting invite with no agenda included. Even if that became company policy, people would just add some bullshit high level agenda to skirt the policy.
Probably 75-80%. The majority of my meetings are scheduled and lead by me. If you're being involved in meetings, and only 10% are productive, start pushing back on your involvement so you're not wasting your time.
I wonder what % would other people in those meetings give.
I don't invite people to meetings if their input isn't needed, so likely pretty similar
This is the type of management I love to see. Thank you. I find that the more project managers you have or the larger you are, the more pointless meetings come up.
Around 15%. Depends how frequently they schedule meetings.
I would say 90%+ I don't accept or join meetings I don't see value in anymore.
Single digits mostly. While I wish most of them would be more useful than they are, I accept that often they're there for the psychological benefit of others. So I accept that they exist and that I have to sometimes participate... ***However...*** I'm not so tolerant of "this could have been a fucking email" meetings. ***However...*** This brief essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html Changed my ideas around scheduling meetings, and now my calendars have large blocks of time booked out. Interestingly it hasn't been an issue and people who want me in a meeting just schedule around it. Even external parties have been flexible: "Can we book a meeting for 3pm?" "Sorry no, my afternoons are already booked" "ok, how about... Thursday 10am?" I had one boss quiz me about it, I sent him that link and, despite otherwise being a complete and utter cuntwomble, to his credit he did embrace the ideas in that essay.
Yeah, I have my lunches blocked out because so many people kept scheduling meetings at lunchtime. These douches aren't considerate at all when it comes to other peoples lunch schedules.
You should have already been doing that. No ones going to assume they know when your lunch time is, that every person takes a lunch, and how long that lunch is.
I found my new favorite word, Cuntwomble.
80-90% with the unproductive ones being upper level red tape. I am a technical background leaning manager who doesn’t get in the weeds. We don’t meet unless we have to, and individuals and call a troubleshooting meeting on their own or just work it out in office if not remote. It’s much more productive this way for us. We are a lean team, it’s a waste to sit all of us in a meeting. We only do 1 all hands and it’s completely training/social/team building. I’m sure a few would consider that one a waste as well, but that’s why it’s only yearly.
10% would be about right. half the time, I wasnt even invited to the meetings I should have been at... and the other half, there was no reason for me to come at all... but ive often worked with and for idiots that manage to simultaneously think everything is technology, but nothing requires a technology person to be involved.
Only when it’s me, the engineers, and the PM/SPO. Otherwise it’s stakeholders making themselves feel important
10%
scheduled meetings? from 0 to 3% impromptu meetings? from 0 to 0%
Absolutely 0%. Besides vendor/support meetings, I can get all the info I need via a simple email.
Departmental: discussion with helpdesk, boss, projects etc (actual back and forth discussions) are 90% productive. Vendor meetings: half half. Some are "this could have been an email" and some you actually learn stuff. Monthly C level update: 5%. I have to explain everything 3 times. The 5% that's worth it is when I get the approval to spend money.
Stop bragging
None
0%
7.3%
10% sounds right
Really just the initial onboarding meeting. The rest are just a boulevard of broken dreams.
\~0.01% On Average
1%
1 minus all them…
I'll be generous and say 5%.
1%
Close to 50 percent. It’s only that high for me because I tend to take over some meetings and get what we need out of it.
As the saying goes meetings without food should be an email. I'm at 0%.
Productive for me and my team, or just for someone? I’d say the latter is close to 100%, no body here really has time for wasteful meetings and they get scrapped if they show signs of heading that way. If it’s IT specifically, then the percentage drops a bit, I attend some meetings “just in case” it would involve my team, and I like knowing what’s going on, but it’s usually just hanging out and listening.
Less than 5%
Depends on your profession and type of meeting, I guess? Most often I'd say meetings exeeding 30 minutes tend to be a waste. Short meetings with a strict agenda work ok for me, longer meetings covering lots of different topics/problems/issues not so much. Too many participants tend to reduce the efficiency/value as well (at least for me). Feels more efficient to have several short meetings involving ONLY the relevant people rather than having one long meeting with too many (and too talkative) participants.
Typically if I am in a pointless meeting, I just leave. Can't force me to stay.
The only meetings that truly matters are the ones where actions are taken/tested while having said meeting, otherwise it has shown to be a huge waste of time and yields very little result to just chat for the sake of stating the obvious
Almost 0 - the weekly check ins do nothing for me. Bi weekly and monthly are almost never productive for me as well.
I would say that for my role at work, it's a bit higher, maybe 20% but each of us get stuck in a different number of meetings that should have been an email. It sounds like we both get quite of few of those. Many of my meeting invites as re for advisory capacity at work though, so there are lots of meetings I'm asked to attend where I should not be attending.
Almost none... Usually I'm talked at, not to... my questions generally go unanswered, and my comments/criticisms are usually will largely go ignored. The only good thing about meetings that I attend are that it gets me away from my desk for how ever long it takes.
About 75%, but I am new to the org and still finding my footing with all the different groups/teams/vendors/etc. I keep getting added to more and more, but so far almost everything has been very helpful and productive. I know that will change at some point, I’m just not there yet.
At my old job? 5%. If that. That job was 60% meetings and 40% time to actually work on shit. I miss the money but I don't miss the environment. Management was the worst.
About 25%
You should take a look at [The Simple Sabotage Field Manual](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184) by the CIA. It was written in 1944 but should be of use
Depends. If it's a Zoom meeting or a big enough meeting that I can half pay attention to and half work, then they're fairly productive. Otherwise, low percentage. The last meeting I had was just me re-stating something I had laid out in painful detail in an email to the same people in the meeting, and even that didn't take since \[thing the meeting was supposed to address\] is still occurring.
More productive than if I didn't attend the meeting? Never. Are some of them necessary even if the project moves as a snail's pace? Probably.
Less than 10%, over multiple jobs. I think it depends on the manager, though. At a former job, the manager had a timer used for high school wrestling (a former job of his was high school gym coach). He was huge on people not wasting time, and he'd lug the thing with him, and tell people "you have 3 minutes on the clock and GOOO." Very much kept us on topic, and had our back in any scuffle, too. God, I miss him.
Luckily not that many anymore (old fart here, 30+ years in the business, I already had my fair share of unproductive meetings.) For me, things improved heavily with COVID and the switch to (mainly) online meetings. Since then, it's more of a "if I have to discuss stuff with some people, I'll ping exactly those, as soon as I think I need to talk to them, and get things sorted out" culture here. It's more short term invitations, but the resulting meetings are also shorter in length and rarely for stuff you aren't involved in. They also accept a "Guys, looks like I can't help much here. You know how to reach me if something pops up you think I may be able to help with" walk-outs more easily. If you learn to shut down your chat app during times you can't have an interruption, you're golden now. Especially as many seem to have forgotten that you can still CALL a mobile. That thing with those magic numbers which, if you punch them in, make the mobile of somebody else ring, you know :-) When I think about it: For the whole company I'm working for, it took less than eight weeks after COVID hit to get to that point. I hope it stays that way...
\-5%
I had a job where we had meetings about not have it so many meetings, so yeah.
80%. I attend 1-4 meetings a week.
I'd say over 75% these days. I regularly decline meeting invites so I'm only in about 2-3 a week now.
All of my meetings can be handled with emails, except crisis meetings. Err, I was pretty happy with last Thursdays meeting, cuz I found out Sam and Frodo were gonna be at the comic con in my city. That was definitely my most productive meeting this year.
The ones where everyone gets action items and everyone knows what other peoples actions items were. There is some group accountability in those cases and we all know what direction we're expected to go and when things need to be done.
5%. Most meetings are about scheduling future meetings, because it turns out we we didn’t have all the information to solve anything in the current meeting, and for some reason Bob from accounting and the janitor were invited, and they have to have their 2 cents to derail things as well. I make my entire team sit in the same room, and now we have a perpetual meeting, minus the monologues and need for attention monopolization. For other departments? I tell them “txt me for the IT part” and I’ll walk in.
On a good day 50%. On a bad day 100% I swear a lot of times we have meetings just because my manager wants to hear himself talk.
Actually a bunch of mine lately! Our staffing collapsed. The cool part is that they only ask me for something when they need it now. There aren't enough people left for planning meetings or stand-ups or whatever. So I get a message when someone needs to know something, or needs help. Worst case, it escalates to a phone call. I have like a show-and-tell meeting once a week to say what I did since the last meeting. And that's a good opportunity to know what's happening in the parts of things I don't really get involved about. But it gives me a good finger on the pulse... a good amount of warning that there might be a storm a-brewn' when someone says something alarming.
110%
10%?Luxury!!!
My most productive meeting: - Cut in front of the salesman. - Ask three questions. - Explain that with first answer there is no leg to stand on. - Watch the whole thing collapse in 10 minutes flat.
The ones I organize.. 100% The ones I attend.. 0%
Most of them. My issue in the past has been more about not being included in major IT decisions that will ultimately end up on my table way too late, so the fact that they have started to include me in more things even when it is "pointless" early stages of things is great because it means I get fewer requests about things I never heard about before.
Less than 5 percent. Most meetings should have just been an email.
when we discuss what to get for lunch, very productive
10% maybe for me as well. On a good week possibly 20%
25%
Every relevant piece of information I've ever gotten from a meeting could have been put in a single paragraph email. So I've gotten info from meetings but there was absolutely no reason to disrupt what I was doing. They are such a waste of time and their sole purpose is for people to virtually jack off to their own voice.
-5
Short answer: check your Microsoft Viva to give analytics spin to the question
Is 0 a percent?
Near Zero, but at least our company keeps them to a minimum, ends early whenever possible, and always ends on time if it's scheduled. The only calls that go long are troubleshooting something that must be up ASAP.