As a Canadian, the thing that always astonishes me about working with my American counterparts is how many calls you want to have, and how often the topics discussed are the exact same points as the previous calls.
It’s because the person who wanted the call doesn’t actually write anything down from the call. Nothing gets documented, referenced, rechecked. Emails can at least be reviewed later.
No such luck with calls. Everybody wants to have calls and calls bypass documentation...so they want to have more.
I’ve always wanted a BPM system that hooks to my company calendar and automatically requests meeting notes to post from the person who called the meeting...and blocks them from requesting more meetings until those notes have been posted.
Too bad you can't force people to review prior meeting notes before initiating a new call or meeting.
Simple truth: technology will not fix your culture problems. The most technology can do is serve as a scapegoat for organizational policy, e.g. "the system won't let me do X" instead of "my boss won't let me do X".
If you want to change your culture, then reward positive behavior, fire sources of unapologetic cultural toxicity, and hire people who believe and profess the cultural change you seek.
I don't agree, I think the issue is that it is certain people jobs to just have meetings. They have no productive work to do, they measure there progress in number of meetings had. Business people usually.
Yeah, who does important meetings without meeting minutes anyway? If it's important, you want to remember it, and the way memory works, you will forget things without notes.
You forgot the standup meeting, the pre-standup meeting, the endless slack messages, the text to tell me you emailed me... it's crazy making, isn't it?
It's dangerous to stereotype but from my experience US companies are much more prone to have meetings for every little thing than German ones. And then meetings to prepare for meetings. And meetings to process results from previous meetings. And hopefully sometimes you get time to work on something.
Funny. I have the opposite experience with US companies (extremely few meetings at US companies in my experience compared to Canada especially), but my experience with German software companies is all about meetings, meetings, meetings, bureaucracy, documents, meetings, very hard to get actual work done.
Maybe culture is a factor. But to me, it's almost as if everyone's experience is completely different from everyone else's and that companies operate differently. None of us have worked at enough companies in enough countries to accurately identify what is what.
It's all anecdotes and none of them matter. Some people are lazy and some people are not. Some people schedule too many meetings and some do not. That's all there is to it.
My only experience with Germany (granted at a telecom company) was calls twice a day on the project I was working on. But it was on topic, made sure everyone was making progress and we had no blockers, and everyone involved seemed to be working on JUST my project for that entire week, so it actually worked. It was quite refreshing compared to my job in the US where I'm working on 100 things at once.
I've worked at several companies that had very different ways of doing things. One place I worked had many complaints on glassdoor.com about "micromanagement" yet I had the opposite experience because I got to work on a project or two for a week and make weekly progress reports, as opposed to another company where we had a meeting every morning and had to account for all our time working on many different things in 6 minute increments.
Everybody says they want to hire someone who can "multi-task" but it totally changes your outlook when you have experience enough to know deep down that it's not necessary and may well lead to lower productivity.
I assumed it was mostly culture within my company and industry, but then an article was posted about how there is a major loss in productivity across the nation so I thought I'd share a small example that I have witnessed and see if others notice the same.
edit: for what it's worth, I use to be Canadian focused in my role, and this was not an issue. Then I became more globally focused and it became instantly a problem, but consistently only in America. Not in Europe, not in Asia, Canada still mostly chill, but America wants to have a call to discuss.
I don't disagree that most people are terrible about summarizing and acting after meetings, but just to bring up a contrary stance: Occasionally this approach can be the result of a problem on the opposite side.
For example: Due to circumstances outside your control, you must work with someone who is ineffective, too busy, or simply can't wrap their head around whatever is going on. So you end up having to baby-sit.
In certain cases that will feel a lot like what you are complaining about, particularly when the opposite party is in denial/don't understand that they are the source of the problems.
This is an over-generalization. I worked one job in Canada, where we'd waste an hour on a 'standup' scrum meeting, every day, and another job in the US, where we'd spend 30 minutes once a week on a sync-up meeting.
Yes and no. It's generalizing sure, but it's doing so based on my own experience. I have no doubt that there are some Canadian organizations that have adopted this strategy, I just haven't seen it nearly as bad myself.
Take my original post with a grain of unproductive salt.
That's ok, can we re-schedule, by which I mean leave it open ended so that you spend the day with a gentle dread in your heart, eyeing the phone with anxiety throughout, and second guessing bathroom/lunch breaks?
No agenda? No Call.