A distillation of sadness contained within a single Twitter poll
It seems that thanks to ongoing COVID-19 WFH situation, meetings have gone up for most of us. This is generally a bad trend when many people are potentially juggling taking care of children or other family members, while dealing with the general stress of a global pandemic and large scale protests in the US.
The increase in meetings is somewhat understandable, with teams separated now, they do need to come in contact to discuss things and coordinate, and even have those small random social interactions that help maintain a sense of being on a team. But I wish that asynchronous methods like chat (and, heaven forbid, email) were preferred over synchronous meetings.
Over a decade ago I think I saw some research saying that email volume between coworkers (as a proxy for intra-office communication) dropped off as a function of distance within the office (something like 100 feet distance between desks would cause a big drop in emails)… But this memory is almost 15 years old, back during the rise of the open office plan concept when I worked at an interior design firm that designed such offices. Sadly, I can’t find the study anymore and it’s has most likely superseded by more recent research.
I did find an interesting paper here that was suggesting that open office plans might have pushed people to use email/IM more upon switching to an open office plan. So potentially, when we’ve now all been effectively given our own personal “private office” (hah), people are swinging back the other direction and desiring that face-to-face contact.
Too Many!
It’s an ongoing cliche of the business world, there are too many meetings. Between normal 30-minute meetings, all-hands, daily/weekly/whatever standups, multi-hour work sessions, workshops, cross-functional syncs, brown bag tech talks, and the occasional “meeting about there being too many meetings”, there’s never a lack of things to “have a meeting about.”
Luckily, meeting volume tend to scale was a function of organization size, so <20 person startups would have only a couple of formal meetings (and a bunch of small informal chats), while things can start getting out of control-ish at 100, and once things get into the thousands, it’s just an inevitable battle against a firehose of meetings.
Meetings also tend to be a correlated with job function. Engineers, while constantly complaining about having too many meetings, often are able to fight for the ability to block of solid blocks of time for heads-down work. On the other end of the spectrum, it could be argued that the days of higher-level managers are almost entirely comprised of meetings, having meetings is practically their primary job function since they’re required to coordinate (and occasionally negotiate) the actions of large groups of people.
Where do quant UXRs and data scientist types fit on the meeting spectrum?
In my experience, somewhere leaning towards the “more meetings” side of the spectrum, but with quite a bit of variance. Part of it has to do with how qUXRs (as well as data scientists and analysts w/ a focus on supporting product-teams) are often spread thinly across multiple teams. While I’ve been able to handle 3-5 product teams in parallel for extended periods of time, it means that I’d be invited to 3-5x the meetings of anyone.
Clearly going to every meeting is unsustainable, if not completely impossible to do. Data work takes significant amounts of heads-down time to do, and we can’t let it all be eaten up by meetings. So the obvious first strategy to take up is to stop going to (most) meetings.
Instead, I’ll have a trusted representative go to the meeting, a fellow qualitative UXR who isn’t stretched as thin, or a friendly PM, etc. Those people already have a reason to be at the meeting, and have a good enough sense of my work strengths so they can identify points of “Oh! Randy can probably help answer that question with some data magic!” and flag my attention as necessary. It’s never perfect since they won’t know the full depths of my toolbox, but having a representative there is a big improvement. Later, I can talk to them offline to ask if there’s anything I should be aware of, or can maybe help.
It’s often the case that I won’t be needed for every single meeting. Teams will have have points where they have questions that need help with data, but other times they’ll be preoccupied with executing on their decided plan of action. So while the meeting is very useful for the rest of the team, I might not have any role to play.
At the same time, going to at least some critical subset of meetings is important for keeping abreast of what the team is doing. It allows me to provide on-the-spot feedback and data to guide ad-hoc decision making that happens at meetings, as well of just making sure they remember you exist and are working with them.
So we can’t just ghost every single meeting. How do we make the best of the ones we do attend?
Gather as much information about where things are going as you can
If you’re making an effort to attend fewer meetings, it means that you have fewer opportunities to get critical context from your peers. So in the times you do attend a meeting, try to take the opportunity to connect and get a good sense of where things are headed.
Take brief notes on who to hit up outside of the meeting for more details.
Use regular meetings as forcing functions
Regular meetings are often a drag. They often bring lose focus over time which makes them increasingly ineffective. But if we have to attend regularly scheduled meetings anyways, we can put them to some use by occasionally using them as a forcing function to drive work and coordination.
I’ll often promise to do a certain amount of work in preparation for a future scheduled meeting. Usually a promise to present a finding or work in progress. That largely artificial and self-inflicted deadline lights a fire under my butt to get some important work done. This effect can, with careful use, also be used to convince other people to get certain things done too.
Then, even if the meeting itself isn’t very productive, the “come here with something to share” part will forcibly inject some productivity into the process. The more I have to deal with very busy teams that have multiple competing priorities, having people agree to some forcing functions becomes increasingly useful.
Work in them >_>
Probably bad to do while in a live meeting, but, since we’re not in person any more and staring at a VC screen looks the same as staring at a terminal…
If it becomes apparent that I won’t have anything to contribute to a conversation, those extra 30 minutes starts looking very tempting.
The "work in them" strategy is so troubling I've started using it as a leading indicator of company failure. I mean, I don't blame anyone individually for doing it, but one of the biggest challenges organizations have is difficulty paying attention. If the only way people can get their work done is by working through meetings, and the only way they can get work done is by constantly meeting...something's going to fail.