Yeah be sure to say you won’t be a value-add. That’s a great way to not get laid off.
If you don’t know what’s going on, but they make you go to the meeting, just go to the meeting and stfu.
If you do know what’s going on, and they make you go to the meeting, and it’s a bullshit meeting, then you can tell them to fuck off.
Something something avocado toast. Get off my lawn.
Depends also if they include you so they don’t make dumb decisions. If they are capable of doing stuff on their own great. If they are habitually doing shit without asking you even just a question (and make every little thing into a meeting which is about just managing their decision making) it’s kind of always mandatory just to be there to save them from themselves and from taking decisions away from you.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to say ‘hey can we just grab you for a moment’ instead of and either or hour long meeting making you sit through it just to get to you about something either mildly so unimportant you didnt need you or they destroy the project
There’s one weekly meeting that I’m in where my only contribution is to notice when we’re out of stuff to discuss but no one is wrapping up. I unmute and ask, “Ok, so can we wrap?”
I don’t understand why six other people just sit there saying nothing without ending it. I’ve got other shit to do. Don’t they?
They are all afraid the manager will perceive them negatively for it, also why doesn’t your team lead / manager take the call about wrapping up the meeting
I usually join the meeting and start asking a lots of questions and clarifications because I don’t know what the stuff is about. After that, the amount of useless meeting requests drops like a rock.
Meetings are the viable alternative to work. Meetings that you don’t need to contribute to are even better. Take a break. Catch some zees.
That’s how I look at it. You want to pay me to go to a meeting that could’ve been an email? Ok! Bet!
go to meetings to avoid other meetings
I go to meetings so I don’t have to work
It’s meetings all the way down. And if they make you watch training videos…
I’m in a meeting right now. Yeah, I don’t have anything to contribute to it, so I’m browsing.
I’m going to need to pull you into a meeting real quick so we can discuss this attitude.
Problem is, that the work is still there after the meeting
So? Not your fault you had to go to a pointless meeting. Leave at the normal time.
Unemployed or self employed?
Yeah I’ll tell that to HR when I’m getting laid off again, I’m sure they will totally get it and reconsider
If HR can’t understand that, then it isn’t a decent work environment to begin with.
You can always try to explain it by calculating the cost of you sitting uselessly in meetings. Your hourly wage X amount of hours in meetings. I’m sure they will take your side.
This is definitely a difference between people that believe the work they do is important and people just punching a clock.
I teach at a community college (salaried) and my partner works as staff in the same school (hourly). She works her ass off, but when she gets to the end of the day, she is done and leaves work at the office, so attending meetings is no big deal to her. Meanwhile, I’ve gotten involved enough in peripheral committee work that I regularly stay up working until 1AM because there are literally not enough hours in the day to get done what needs to get done. I could try to leave work at work, but I’d be hanging students and fellow instructors out to dry, so that’s not always an option.
I could try to leave work at work, but I’d be hanging students and fellow instructors out to dry, so that’s not always an option.
Not your problem that your college hasn’t decided to fund enough positions to get things done within the workday.
It’s not my fault, but it is definitely my problem if I’m in a position to help people and decide not to. Make no mistake, I raise holy hell while I’m doing it, but the lack of workers doesn’t lessen the amount of work that needs to get done. Maybe it’s just naivete, but I’m idealistic enough to believe that helping students is the most important thing I can do, so I only say yes to things that are directly helping students, faculty, and staff (admin and their busy work can fuck right off with their bloated salaries and support staff)
The university is exploiting your idealism to get you to work without being paid enough. You aren’t “in a position to help people”, you are doing a job for an organization with revenues. They could allocate more revenue to accomplish this work without forcing you to work until 1 AM, but they have made the choice that the work is not worth paying for.
That being said, most good people will go the extra mile if they think it can make a difference, but I see too many who take full responsibility on themselves and “cover” for financially-motivated organizational decisions, which in turn encourages the people who make those decisions to cut even more.
Never do more than what is in your contract.
It is not like the company is going to pay you more than what is written in there. So why should you compensate when they clearly wouldn’t?
It is not your job to get everything done. But it is their job to make sure there are enough people for the work available.
One thing I’ve learned is that sometimes you need to let the problems happen. You can raise hell and keep talking about how more hands are needed, but unless issues actually start coming up and affecting people, then no one is going to care/listen.
I had a job in the past that was vastly understaffed. I kept getting more and more, and working longer hours. I brought this up with management many times but nothing was happening. “Not in the budget to hire more” is what I kept getting.
When it got to be too much, I decided I would only work 40 hours, and whatever happens, happens. Our lives are too short to be wasted away at work.
So tasks started to take longer, and whenever something needed doing, it was added to the queue and prioritized appropriately. Sometimes that meant I couldn’t get to it in weeks. At first, I came under fire. “Why haven’t you done this yet??” But each time I explained my situation. “There’s not enough hands and I am doing the best I can with the resources given to me”. And guess what? Most people empathized and understood my predicament. So now I have an army of colleagues who understand the issue here, and now the issue gets more visibility with management as more people rally to my side.
A few months of this, and they decide to hire two more positions to help with the overload of work.
It’s a risky move for sure. They could just fire you and dig themselves into a deeper hole. But then if they do that, is that really the type of environment you’d want to work in anyway?
People are surprisingly understanding when you explain yourself. You don’t need to fix everything and everyone’s problems. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to let the problems happen and observe how others deal with it.
This is very true. The manager is also overworked and busy, and they hear complaints all the time from people. People are very different, some complain all the time for nothing, while others stay silent why their back is on fire. It takes a long time to get to know somebody, so you can confidently tell. But if issues start showing up, they know there is a real problem, and they can allocate resources to fix it.
Badass. Great job!!! Self advocacy can be so powerful with a little luck
The biggest part of the issue in state-run higher-ed is the glacial pace at which hiring happens vs. how fast the works shows up. My organization is legitimately trying to hire appropriately (I believe), but we can’t allocate resources until the students show up, and then it’s an 18 month turn around between filing a faculty hiring request and the person starting work due to the standard academic hiring cycle and state-mandated EEO requirements (and that’s assuming that admin approve the hiring request the first time you ask for it, which they do as often as they can). On the other hand, it only takes 2 weeks for people to resign and move on, so we’re losing people as fast as we can hire them. We could to try to hire faster, but it’s a tiny school with a tiny HR (so we’re capped at hiring about 4-5 faculty positions per year) and a small number of faculty (so it’s hard getting enough people to volunteer when you need to fill a hiring committee).
Honestly, I really like the organization and think admin are making good choices, but we legally can’t turn students away, so when more people enroll, there’s more work with the same number of workers for at least a year. It’s honestly a good problem to have, and they do a decent job at compensating me for my extra work, but I’d rather have more help and less OT as soon as we can manage it.
All that said, working in private industry or in an organization that doesn’t have as many restrictions, I would absolutely be saying “no” a lot more. As it is, when I say no, it’s my colleagues and the students that feel the repercussions, not admin, and I have a hard time being OK with that.
The phrase ‘act your wage’ springs to mind. I realised you probably care deeply about the students, but it sounds like you need to care a little bit more deeply about yourself and stop letting them exploit you. Understaffing is management’s problem, not yours.
Are you paid by how much work you get done or by the hour?
paid by the hour, fired for not getting the work done
See, now you’re talking hourly versus salary. That’s why if the meeting is bullshit, I peace out.
What if you enjoy your work and find value in it; and the meeting is pointless bullshit that just breaks your focus?
Do whatever you want, mate. Decline the meeting?
I think OP’s screenshot is tactful and effective. It’s similar to my approach. Which starts:
“Thanks for the invitation, what’s on the agenda?”
Then I decide to accept or politely decline and ask for minutes.
Someone after my own heart.
This is all well and good as long as you’re not that one person who has to actually generate deliverables.
yeah what the fuck; when you’re asked to do nothing on company time, you take it!
You don’t really want to tell your boss “I don’t add value!”.
If you are hired to sit at meetings, not adding value to them is indeed a very severe issue.
I’m sorry, is this some corposhittery I can’t relate to due to me being an enlightened SME-guy? (My salary is 3 months past due because of the company’s financial struggle)
Tf am I doing here?
When I started my career I quickly became convinced that meetings are the opposite of work. Now a large part of my career is hosting meetings. 😬
My biggest piece of advice to junior staff is: if you’re not provided an agenda prior to a meeting, your attendance is not required. RSVP with Yes if it sounds interesting/beneficial and you have the time, otherwise Nope (or Tentative) your way out of it.
The obvious caveat is if that meeting is called by someone with role power over you. In which case: as they clearly don’t respect your time, it’s on you to (politely) ask them to provide an agenda. It may also indirectly train them to be less shit.
When I started my career I quickly became convinced that meetings are the opposite of work. Now a large part of my career is hosting meetings. 😬
I feel/felt similarly but I am now calling for meetings because it seems to be the easiest way to get my peers and superiors to do their fucking job so that I’m not stuck in limbo waiting for their parts to be finished. It seems like they only respond to slack mentions / emails / task assignments at random which leaves important, unanswered requests/questions just sitting there.
Sorry, this past year I’ve been working with another department for a project that, due to aforementioned woes, has run about 6-12 months more than it needs to.
I’m in the public sector and everyone is very busy and pulled in many directions so I kind of get it… but I want to be done with this thing.
You don’t need to set meetings. You need to set deadlines.
I’ve tried deadlines. I’ve asked for things to be done before our next meeting with the vendor we’re working with. Hell, almost everything I need done is clearly conveyed as “I cannot proceed to move your project forward until you perform X task that I don’t have the rights to perform or make a decision regarding your department’s policy on X.” In fact, I’ve shown up at the meetings with them and the vendor and literally told them the situation - they do everything that’s piled up in like 5-10 minutes and are apologetic. Then two days later I need another small thing and it begins again. So now I call for a meeting to “go over the project days the next vendor meeting.” I really just have a list of shit I can’t work on for the next vendor meeting because ya’ll don’t respond to all my requests otherwise.
Also remember, some of these are directed at my superiors - like the boss of the department I’m working with. It’s their project so it’s not like I’m getting in trouble or missing my deadlines. It just murders my flow state and frustrates me to no end when it can take days or weeks to get a response.
Also in the public sector and when I started, project managers were required to include everyone under the sun for pointless update meetings every two weeks for the PM to read out the reports everyone gave them so nobody missed anything. By the time they were done everyone wanted to bail, including me. They were meetings that could be an email, and if there were issues then additional meetings were scheduled.
Over time I have been promoted up through PM and now get to define the best practices for projects including meetings. My meetings are productive and people actually want to show up as they are discussions where work might be canceled or put off so people don’t get overloaded. I make sure everyone is included without putting anyone on the spot. The departments we work with to create web apps like us more since we started giving reasons for saying no instead of working devs to death in overtime because PMs were not allowed to say no.
I do have one project that is an albatross I can’t kill because of the sunk cost fallacy, but at least it is one small project that gets raised every few months to get put on the backburner while the largest and most complex project is now running smoothly. Other PMs have also improved their interactions when they were given examples in how to more clearly communicate their challenges, although a few don’t want to give up the ‘do everything asked’ approach.
We have also had 5 developers who left for the private sector come back over the last 10 years because of the work culture. The grass wasn’t greener, but they did come back with new skills and a better appreciation for the improved communication and overtime is almost entirely voluntary!
Just noped out of my last job cos the new manager was randomly calling me without a heads up to understand what the next steps are. Aka asking me and the other team member to do his work for him. I see highly competent people struggling to find jobs and guys like this in F500 companies — and can’t help but wonder what’s wrong with selection.
Meeting host here too Agenda : defective thingamajig from supplier
- agenda Hello everu one we suspect that some mcguffins have been shipped with defectives turbo-encubalators. We have 24h to decide if we need to informed government agency
Inventory people - please identify origine of the turbo-encubalators and deliveries Engineers -please make risk assessment form, we strongly suspect defective product are in service.
Providing agenda is only useful if people fucking read it and inform themselves on the subject before coming in. Hi everybody why am I here? - you were supposed to evaluate the safety risk for customer using this defective component we discovered. - oh Why me? -you are the engineer that designed the part Can’t the supplier do the investigation, I have to make a report to my boss to identify where we can cut support
Agreed.
I didn’t mention that I also spend time after every meeting I host putting together a summary of what was discussed along with a bullet point list of deliverables, who agreed to work on them, and due dates and then send it to all attendees, invitees, and stakeholders.
It deals with the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme problem and “magnanimous work dodgers” - those who promise the world in meetings but then seemingly disappear off the planet.
It probably should be noted that many of the meetings I host are recurring, often weekly or fortnightly, so it’s easy to find a rhythm (and identify the problem children).
Fluent companyspeech
It’s just being highly effective at applying peer to peer team interaction synergistics skills.
Sometimes it’s “because you’ll be paid for your time and your boss wants you on the call”.
Email recap never comes. Miss out on key decision points. Attend next meeting. Nothing is agreed just talk for the sake of talking. Objections disregarded. Side meeting happens without you. Key points agreed with management in your absence. You’re just a cog in a giant hamster wheel. Not even the hamster. Cry at night.
Cry at night.
That would imply that I care. I wouldn’t recommend caring.
I’m here for the income, not the outcome. You want to pay me then disregard my advice? That’s cool. Check still clears.
Some meetings, I wish I’d bought a steamdeck.
I think I’ve been “management” in this scenario… Not intentionally, I’ve just been on so many shit ass working groups where our meetings were just political grandstanding that I feel we had to “get work done” in the off hours.
“Other duties as assigned” of course. 🙄
I think “What is the purpose of this meeting and why am I being included” is almost polite as-is, but “why am I being included” sounds a little rude. Maybe “what is the purpose of this meeting and is my presence needed?” Maybe “beneficial” instead of “needed” depending on who exactly you’re emailing.
If you ask the person who invited you to a meeting “is my presence beneficial” they’re going to answer “yes”. That’s why they invited you.
The purpose is to figure out whether your presence is actually needed, not whether they think it is.
I do like a lot of your ideas though, I might suggest:
“What is this meeting about? I’m trying to figure out if my presence would be beneficial.”
That way you are the determinant of whether your presence is necessary, and the other person has to articulate what the actual benefit would be as opposed to just saying “yes”.
If someone sends me a one word reply of “yes” to “what is the purpose of this meeting and is my presence beneficial” then it wouldn’t matter what I asked lol. They’re clearly on auto pilot. I’d probably add my manager and see what they say
If someone sends me a one word reply of “yes” to “what is the purpose of this meeting and is my presence beneficial” then it wouldn’t matter what I asked lol.
lol
But just to reiterate the point I was making earlier, the idea is to avoid someone responding to “what is the purpose of this meeting and is my presence beneficial” with something along the lines of “the purpose is to discuss X, Y, and Z. Yes your input would be a big help thanks.”
Curious on your thoughts on the suggestion I made and whether it improves communication or not?
I had a situation like this where I’d like to be involved in the meeting that I was requested and they thought I was required to be in. I’m a just barely above entry level employee and was told by my supervisor that I should not be attending the meetings anyhow the request is coming from project managers.
Finally get pinged in a meeting chat asking where I was and told them I was informed I should not be attending these moving forward. The project manager asked if this input came from a director that is 5 levels above me. I told them no, it came from my supervisor, if you need me, I will attend the meeting however I’m not sure if my input would be the information you are looking for.
2 months later, still getting required meeting invites but told by my supervisor to not accept it.
Eh, useless meetings are great for timesheet filler while playing Pokemon Go.
Sometimes my wife says she doesn’t like so much downtime at work. I understand her frustration, but I don’t empathize.
Pay me to slack off, that’s the life.
When I first started my job, I was really anxious about being seen as “slacking off” whenever there was downtime (which is pretty frequent and can range from 10 minutes to two hours). That made it pretty exhausting, which in turn fed the anxiety because “how can doing nothing wear you out?”
Luckily my colleagues and leads were great people and helped me get more comfortable with it, and I’m really grateful for that.
Yeah, I have a lot of droughts of work. But also, my job is babysitting a little data center. If I don’t have things to do, its technically a good thing because it means everything is working right.
I also get a lot of praise from management for how great I am at my job, ahich feela really weird sometimes because I have had weeks where I basically did nothing. Hell in December we have a lot work freezes so nothing breaks and all the routine work for the year is done so sometimes jts an entire month of basically nothing.
I often spend the time learning new stuff so thats kind of work related.
Useless meetings are the perfect time to charge all your portable battry packs too, check out gearscouts.com if you need a new one for those extra long “strategic planning sessions” lol.
