Comment by recursive
2 days ago
> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour.
I've never seen this pressure.
> meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change.
It's like I live in an entirely different world.
Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just starts the classic treadmill. You might have that one friend that you tell to show up half an hour before everyone else. They mentally add the half hour back because you're always giving such early times. Better IMO to just keep things simple. Let people leave when they need to. Show up on time.
> People will learn to show up quickly.
My bosses (leadership) are in meetings literally all day long. Them showing up 5 minutes late to an internal meeting has nothing to do with them "learning". It's entirely about priorities. Teaching them to "show up on time" does nothing and only hurts me for being obtuse with them.
Unfortunately this is the reality. If I’m on with a big external partner/client and they need to finish their thought I’m going to be late to an internal meeting. If it’s too late I will try to slack and say go ahead.
Yep. Execs who are booked pretty solid with meetings, including with customers and field teams making important decisions, will sometimes be late for or even miss meetings.
Last job, the senior guy who I knew missed our breakfast meeting to discuss a job. Turned out that he had something come up with one of the regions and his admin didn't have my cell. Ended up with the job anyway where I stayed for a long time.
In the early 90s I had a new department director who would bring a kitchen timer to every meeting. Meetings started on precisely on time and the timer was set to 22 minutes. When that bell rung, you could finish the thought, but the meeting would break at the 25 minute mark. If you didn’t accomplish the agenda, another meeting could be set, but it needed to be at least 2 hours after the one that just broke. Even meetings without him had to follow the rule. He also had a request that were were supposed to follow if we could, which was to allow ourselves to only schedule one meeting in an hour.
Obviously it was pretty chaotic at first and I recall us being pretty brutal in our assessment of his “crazy meeting quirk”. However after a few weeks something pretty interesting happened:
- Brevity and productive discussion became common. People usually went with their best opinion
- we usually finished the agenda (probably because we set reasonable agendas for 22 mis) and rarely needed that rollover meeting
- we spent more time at our desks actually doing instead of just talking about doing. I recall that team being really productive overall.
Later when I moved into leadership roles I attempted to bring this methodology but my own leadership generally was not supportive enough to allow me to be as rigid and I didn’t see the same success with the method…but to this day 32+ years later I still think it had merit.
I had asked him where he had learned it. My recollection is that he formulated it after reading that the average person’s attention span in a meeting was 27 minutes and he figured no one was productive after that, so he decided it was pointless to go longer.
Well, yes, but also the critical attendees (people with something substantial to add) of the meeting aren't there on time, so the meeting cannot start on time, which leads to a culture where no one shows up on time. I was flummoxed yesterday when an SVP scheduled a large meeting and was the only critical attendee, and started exactly on time, within seconds. I showed up at the top of the hour + 49 seconds and missed at least 30 seconds of content.
On the exact opposite side, I remember when I first started working and was used to keeping an eye on the clock because of, oh, 16 years of school that had us timed to the minute. I'd walk into meeting rooms right when it was supposed to start and interrupt whoever was in the previous meeting and was going over. Surprised a lot of people like that.
A team I once ran made rules their meetings would end 5 minutes early, to create some space. We didn’t have the power to change the whole org, but we could control team meetings to create space before other meetings. Since the whole team was on board with this, there was always someone who would call out that it was time for the meeting to end, to prevent them running long.
At the same time, we had a rule that meetings would start when they say they start. This was after being incredibly frustrated by a guy on another team who would schedule his meetings to start on the hour, but then display a message that said we’d start at 5 after, to give people time to join, assuming other meetings would run long. This felt like he was wasting everyone’s time who showed up on time, and had the net effect of everyone showing up late to his meetings. If people learned they should show up late to his meetings, they can learn to show up on time to our meetings. Then we can stop waiting around hoping that everyone shows up. When someone shows up late to a meeting that’s already well underway, that sends a strong signal that they should be on time for the next one.
I find it interesting when people such as the writer of the linked post take their experience and think it can just be applied to everyone else, and it'll always be a positive outcome.