I was thinking one fine day that “Do we really can’t live without meetings ?” and introspecting into my past experience I think we do need meetings but as long as they are short and interesting as a mini skirt and not long and boring as a 2 hour college lecture. And the frequency has to be that of fortnightly and not the same as the number of times an average human goes to toilet in 5 hours.
Over the span of 5 years I have come across people with different types of urges of doing a meeting, some who want it more than food , some who want to use these for telling the tales of their lives , some want to sing songs during the meetings, some like to look at the cleavages around the table (if any), some people just do meetings because they have to, and the list continues.
I am thinking of making up a full form of the meetings that happen around me ..hmm…let me think.
M >Meet
E >Everyday
E >Everyweek
T >To
I >Instill
N >Nothing
G >Good
Thats good , I did not expect to come up with such a great definition, but now that I have lets take the discussion further.
We have daily status meetings, then we have daily adhoc susu meetings, pantry meetings, then anytime anywhere meetings and I can ask you anything meetings. I have read in many a article that a man is most relaxed when he shakes hands with his best friend in the toilet, but I have to sometimes change the floor to do so or sometimes have to postpone the enjoyment , just because my manager is doing his thing. I dont like to be enquired about what I have done during the day even during the 5-10 seconds of peace. 🙂 and I have seen this happen quite often especially by the managers who are into quality matters. I have also seen managers being interested in another guy’s (a guy who is not in his team) work if he does not get hold of one of his.
I have never been on the other side, that is , the manager side , maybe doing this (asking while doing the thing) gives them more peace than what an average human gets. 🙂
Then there are meetings which are defined as short and sweet , they are called Scrums, but here the R has been removed from Scrums , they are the meetings that introduce scum in your work life daily. The pseudo-intelligent program manager taking notes and us guys listening to a favorite girl of the manager taking 15 mintues out of the total 30 minutes in telling a status that could have been told in 2 minutes. But you see she is different. :).
Then there are meeting that are after office hours, you have to take through Internet and phone being on mute the whole time, but your boss has to be happy that you are in the meeting. doing nothing but killing his time. I term the after hour meeting that happens with people in the US as the “Master calling Slave meeting “, as the meeting happens at the oddest of hours and you can’t say no to them and you are not credited 1 % for attending that meeting. I feel that the US managers are good at following the meeting schedules, they always start the closing ceremony as soon as the meeting deadline is declared by the clock’s hands, while for the Indian managers the meeting has just started when the meeting has ended, they start getting weird and seemingly intelligent ideas as soon as the deadline ends.
One meeting that is OK is the one in which a team trip is discussed and finalized. The only meeting that interests me is the Appraisal meeting in which I am getting atleast a 25% raise, but alas such a meeting has the probability of happening once in 5 years and in this recession this period has stretched to maybe 7 or 8 years.
My tips to survive a meeting is to either have a laptop with a wifi connection and a battery backup of atleast 2 hours. Or be patient or numb enough to survive the ordeal. God bless all those who have to survive meetings like I have to.
