How Terrible Meetings Took Over Corporate America

Space_Time · Sep 21, 2023

I can't resist posting this. Do you go to too many meetings in your job? Best line - 'this meeting could have been an email' :

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9...aken-over-corporate-america-can-it-be-stopped

How Terrible Meetings Took Over Corporate America
Since the pandemic, the sheer number of useless meetings has grown out of control. Some people are starting to fight back.

By Maxwell Strachan

September 19, 2023, 7:00am

In July, the Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify unveiled an internal tool that struck a chord with people online. The way it worked was simple enough: Using a few metrics, like compensation, the number of people involved, and length of time, the tool was able to calculate and display the estimated cost of a proposed meeting by any of its employees.

The point of the tool, called the Shopify Meeting Cost Calculator, was not so much to point out an exact dollar value as to make employees think twice before they asked their co-workers to take a break from their work to come together at the exact same time and talk.

The tool, which was developed during a company hackathon, was part of a broader effort at the company to reduce the amount of time employees spent in meetings. At the start of the year, the company had deleted thousands of meetings (lots of which were recurring) and banned meetings on Wednesdays to help employees reclaim their time and focus on actual work. Shopify had determined that its employees’ “most precious resource” was “uninterrupted time,” said Kaz Nejatian, the company’s chief operating officer. And large numbers of meetings were increasingly getting in the way.
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Chrizton · Sep 21, 2023

My sister has the joy of 2 meetings per day where Six Sigma is the preferred language.

Pieces of Malarkey · Sep 21, 2023

When I was younger and about 5 years in to working at Ford, the chief engineer declared one day that if you found yourself in a meeting that didn't pertain to anything you actually do, you were free to walk out immediately with no explanation.

Greatest excessive meeting killer I've ever witnessed.

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How Terrible Meetings Took Over Corporate America

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How Terrible Meetings Took Over Corporate America

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