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skullman80
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Postby skullman80 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:40 am

Summer hours sound pretty great to be honest. Today is our first day of "No meeting Wednesdays." Clearly this is a direct response to a survey where employees complained about too many meetings. My guess is "No meeting Wednesdays" leads to "**** ton of meetings Thursday."
I agree it's a nice gesture. I just don't see it really being at thing because people will just ignore it and schedule meetings anyways. Like I said I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and decline unless it's an emergency.

robbiestoupe
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Postby robbiestoupe » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:47 am

There must be an unwritten "No Meetings Fridays" and "Very Minimal Meetings Mondays" rule where I work. Tuesdays-Thursdays are full of meetings, many overlapping.

Morkle
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Postby Morkle » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:51 am

No meetings Wednesday sounds like a total chore.

skullman80
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Postby skullman80 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:52 am

I'd rather have a crap ton of meetings Tue/Wed/Thurs and have minimal on Mon/Friday.

mikey
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Postby mikey » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:52 am

Yup.

Morkle
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Postby Morkle » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:56 am

Yea my least favorite meeting day is actually Monday - because it's the start of the week and a variety of people are looking to eff it up immediately.

robbiestoupe
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Postby robbiestoupe » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:57 am

It's not bad having minimal to no meetings Monday and Friday, but man do I loathe Tuesdays.

NTP66
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Postby NTP66 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:59 am

We just got an email from leadership (snippet below).. which sounds good in theory, but I guarantee people won't limit their friday afternoon meeting stuff...


In support of our ongoing commitment to your wellbeing, as well as our hybrid way of working, I am pleased to share that we will adopt a 2021 Flexible Summer program for our North America employees during the summer months, effective July 2 to September 3.

Whether you choose to call it “free up Friday afternoon" or “summer hours,” our intention is the same: Creating more room to balance your work and personal life. To be at our best for our customers, their patients/consumers and each other, we must continue to prioritize our mental and physical health. I know after the intensity of last year, being able to organize our work in a way that allows us a longer weekend break will be welcome for many of our employees.

To do this, we will encourage you – when possible – to wind down your week by 1 p.m. local time on Friday afternoons. Naturally, we have many employees working on site with our customers who need to be available and responsive to their needs at all hours. To help that group also find a bit more time to recharge, please limit internal meetings and communications on Friday after 1 p.m. This will help those members of our team focus on key priorities and wind down earlier than they normally would whenever possible.
FWIW, we implemented similar measures last year. Different being, ours are permanent, and year-round. Unless it's critical, no meetings after 12pm on Fridays ("Managing Workloads"). Hour long meetings should be reduced to 45 minutes where possible; 30 minute meetings reduced to 25 minutes.

skullman80
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Postby skullman80 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:59 am

Monday morning meetings at like 8am are the worst. First of it's 8am.. unless this is a fire, it can wait till 9 or after (I start at like 7 or 7:30, but still). Second..it's Monday and like Morkle said... going to eff up the week early.

Next worst is the last minute Friday afternoon meeting... that gets declined unless it's really a 10 alarm fire. Bonus points if it's after lunch on Friday and the meeting gets scheduled for like 4pm. GTFO.

NTP66
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Postby NTP66 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:00 am

And yeah, block off the hours you don't want to be included in meetings. 12-1, 3+ for me.

skullman80
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Postby skullman80 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:01 am

And yeah, block off the hours you don't want to be included in meetings. 12-1, 3+ for me.
I do that now. People ignore it.... which I then in turn ignore their meeting request. It's not hard to look at an outlook calendar, but people refuse to do it.

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Postby nocera » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:01 am

Yeah we have a weekly "stand up" every Monday at 8:30. It's never actually a stand up, of course. It's an hour long slog through all of the ongoing projects and priorities with each person checking in on progress. This compels folks to come up with long-winded reasons why they're running a bit behind and feeling like they need to justify what work they did in the past week. It's a waste of time.

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Postby NTP66 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:02 am

Most here abide by it - especially now with Office 365 and their Find Time feature. That said, I never hesitate to use the Decline button in Outlook. That's what it's there for.

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Postby NTP66 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:03 am

Our bi-weekly team meeting is on Wednesday because we are all burnt out by Friday and don't want to deal with it.

skullman80
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Postby skullman80 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:05 am

We have daily short standups..that are like 15-20 minutes at most.

nocera
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Postby nocera » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:07 am

We have daily short standups..that are like 15-20 minutes at most.
Yeah a standup should be less than 30 minutes. A weekly hour long meeting isn't a standup.

Also, daily standups!? wtf.

NTP66
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Postby NTP66 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:07 am

I had never heard of a standup before today. Sounds useless.

skullman80
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Postby skullman80 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:08 am

We have daily short standups..that are like 15-20 minutes at most.
Yeah a standup should be less than 30 minutes. A weekly hour long meeting isn't a standup.

Also, daily standups!? wtf.
I'm not in the loop for all of them as our team of 3 isn't really held to the agile/sprint process. We kind of do our own thing, but I attend them when needed for the two teams that I basically help/do work for, but yeah they meet daily for like 15/20 minutes to check in.

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Postby nocera » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:09 am

I had never heard of a standup before today. Sounds useless.
No? It started in IT here so I figured it was an IT thing. Agile and all that ****. As with everything, the intention is good: quick meeting to check on priorities and progress. So quick that you don't even have to sit down (hence standup). But in reality it makes people feel the need to justify their work/time.

NTP66
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Postby NTP66 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:11 am

Source of the post But in reality it makes people feel the need to justify their work/time.
That's precisely what I thought while reading those posts. Hard pass on that nonsense. I have weekly 1:1's with my supervisor, and we have a bi-weekly team meeting. That covers all bases, and nobody sees a need for anything more. Micromanagement is a time killer.

skullman80
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Postby skullman80 » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:15 am

I could go on how the whole agile/sprint stuff is a waste of time, but that's another discussion.

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Postby Morkle » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:34 am

I had never heard of a standup before today. Sounds useless.
No? It started in IT here so I figured it was an IT thing. Agile and all that ****. As with everything, the intention is good: quick meeting to check on priorities and progress. So quick that you don't even have to sit down (hence standup). But in reality it makes people feel the need to justify their work/time.
Stand-ups are 100% trash. Nonsensical accountability meetings that ended up pulling in entire teams so the one person who got a chance to speak, had to justify whatever they were doing.

Never worked, wasted time, and just overall trash.

Morkle
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Postby Morkle » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:36 am

There are days where imposter syndrome absolutely gets the best of me. Then there are mornings like today where I feel like I've been firing on all cylinders and my boss tells me he's incredibly happy I joined his team and I'm doing great.

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Postby PFiDC » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:40 am

Man your meetings sound like a chore. I just got off a zoom call with Bob Sagat.

mikey
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Postby mikey » Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:42 am

We have daily short standups..that are like 15-20 minutes at most.
Same for us. Just to get people on the same page. Talk about what was accomplished yesterday, what will be accomplished today, as we get closer to the end of our sprint - making sure we know the priority of things, and then get collective knowledge for any known fires...

This morning's was nine minutes for me...sometimes they go longer, but they generally sit in the 10-20 minute area and virtually nothing falls through the cracks...

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