What bugs the heck out of you at work but doesn't seem to bother your coworkers?

You're viewing a single thread.

191 comments

"We'll wait a few more minutes for person X to join, then get the meeting started," like the other ten people who made the effort to show up on time deserve to be punished with extra meeting time for being responsible. Bonus points if this causes the meeting to run a few minutes long.
- I talk to the C suite and lab staff regularly, sometimes, you can't duck out of front the muckity mucks, sometimes you can't leave a conversation with researchers and partners. But, I'm frequently the one who say, we're 5 minutes from close, 2 minutes from the end of our time, ok, we're going to have to drop off. With either.
- Yeah, I'm totally cool with being late sometimes, but I know various folks where it'd be an exception, if they're not late, because they have meetings back-to-back all day long.
  Always makes me feel like the official meeting start should be 5 minutes after or something, but I know that those folks aren't late for the fun of it. They'd definitely overrun those 5 minutes, if they knew they had them.
  
  My frustration is less with the people who are late and more with the meeting host making the rest of the attendees sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the late person. Unless the late person's presence is the point of the meeting, just get started and let them catch up.
  
  Have to agree with that, as I'm either hosting or presenting.
  
  They tried to fix this at my work by changing the default values for an hour- or half-hour meeting. Half an hour would automatically become 25 minutes and an hour would turn into 50 minutes in the calendar.
  The idea seemed to work at first, but people quickly adjusted and used those extra minutes to extend the meeting regardless.
- My place of business has this dysfunction with meetings—Zoom being the biggest offender—where people just keep talking through the end of a meeting. 30-minute meetings become 35-40. 60-minute meetings becomes 65-70. And, with meetings frequently being back-to-back-to-back, invariably one or another person is late to the next one.
  I think it’s because scheduling a meeting with all necessary parties is so difficult that if you don’t finish the thought, the next chance is at least a week away.
  To top it off, we had a company-wide survey that spawned a working group to tackle the problem of meetings, whose suggestion was to update Outlook settings to automatically shorten meetings by X minutes—to allow people transit time, bathroom breaks, etc. Almost no one set that setting.
  
  Maybe I am crazy but I always thought it was lazy as fuck to have meetings for absolutely everything. Like, how about you spend some time researching and analyzing a subject on your own before calling a meeting for every little step of the way.
  Now I understand that there must be a balance, but man there was so many of those meetings where nobody has a clue on the subject and it is just pointless talking for over an hour. Another meeting is scheduled with another party as soon as that one meeting is over, and it is just back-to-back meeting with everyone in the company, slowly but surely deriving a solution from everyone opinion. Seems to me like people who do well in those environments are the lazy workers who just want to spend their whole days chatting in meetings.
  Can we, at some point, derive a solution based on experimentation and verifiable facts? Can someone come up with a summary analysis with recommendations and possible solutions? Why does everything has to be the result of endless meetings, endless compromises with people without a clue, and end up being a shitty design-by-committee feature.
  Anyway, could be just be a me thing, or specific to that place I worked at.
  
  Just disconnect.
  they don't respect the meeting time, they don't respect you.
  If they couldn't fit everything in, then that's their problem for under booking the meeting.
- eh. meetings are when you post on hexbear, a few extra minutes of posting is fine i think

191 comments