Right now I'm supposed to be in a meeting but I skipped it so I can sit here and bitch about how many meetings I have to endure lately!
When my boss was canned back in Nov, his boss asked all of us to write down any areas of improvement we wanted to see. I could not say the bald truth or I would've been fired, but the one thing I dared ventured forth with: I said I spend half my day in meetings that don't pertain to me. What she was looking for was something more along the lines of, we want more training or we want to order materials or we want to do some more team huddles, perhaps design more matrixes, etc.
Instead, I said I want less of this bullsh*t (but I put it more diplomatically). She said in her professionally condescending response, as she folded her puffy hands and wiggled her acrylic nails on the glossy desk, that the entire blame for any of our problems lay at the feet of my boss, who she fired, and she promised FEWER meetings. She said the reason we had so many meetings was that my boss micromanaged and we would not be required to be at very many meetings.
Well, folks, here is regular list of meetings, NONE last less than 1 hour except the first one:
- Daily AGILE at 10:30
- Monday's staff from 9:15 to 10:30
- Wednesday "Communication" meetings, usually 2-3pm, that says "we're doing great" financially but they have to cut our benefits because we're in the hole
- New Database SANT meeting 2:30
- E-synergy Portal Document Process
- Process Flow Development meeting (so far 4 in the past 10 days--see photo above)
- Expense Form Changes
- Bi-Weekly Product Demos that last 90 minutes
- Lessons Learned meetings (these are obviously QUITE long)
- All Dept meeting for Training and Doc (in which nothing is accomplished)
- New Functionality Code meeting
- And today: a 2 hour training session on how to install our software and hardware--this one is what is causing my soap box rant since I am the one who wrote the instructions on how to do this and have performed these tasks out in the field but I have to sit there for 2 hours hearing someone else regurgitate it back to me just because I'm "part of the team" not because it'll actually help with my job. Ya know?
- Oh, and brown bag lunches on how to avoid stress.
2 comments:
I think people have so many meetings a) to feel important, b)to feel like they are "accomplishing" something and c) when people are all in a group meeting, the bosses are not singled out as the screw up when the company tanks.
I agree with your sister big time! Most meetings are a big waste of companies time!
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