Comment by smeej
2 days ago
I've worked mostly remotely, and in companies where management insists on having visibility into subordinates' calendars. So I've placed an awful lot of official sounding decoy meetings on my calendar right after meetings that were completely unnecessary (could easily have been an email), hut where management would certainly listen to themselves talk past the buzzer.
My department head made a point once to instruct us that, if you need it, you should schedule time on your calendar as a meeting to just be "heads down" on work.
We have a lot of meetings so he encourages we do basically whatever it takes to keep meetings timeboxed.
I once was in an incident call where one of the execs was brought in and eventually said "We have 20 people in this call who all have good salaries. It will cost $600 to just inform our customer service agents to take care of this. Let's get out of here"
Management has to push that culture downwards, and reinforce it themselves, and continually encourage it as people join and leave and teams change.