One of my previous jobs was with a small company- no more than about 15 people in the office at the time- and despite their small size, these people LOVED their meetings. Some of you think that having meetings to talk about what you’re going to discuss at the next meeting is an exaggeration, but I’m here to tell you it’s the truth. We had sales team meetings, marketing team meetings (never mind that two of the three people on each team were the SAME), customer management team meetings, company meetings, blah blah blah.
It wasn’t at this job where I developed my white-hot burning hatred of meetings, but this job certainly didn’t help matters. I could last about 15 minutes in one of these meetings, but then got more and more fidgety and agitated, trying to keep my ADD boss on task, trying to keep discussions from turning into dead horse-beating contests, before the meeting would finally end an hour later with my boss wondering, “What’s with Tiffany today?”
At my current job, I’m fortunate that my coworkers aren’t particularly big fans of meetings and when we do need to have them, are pretty good at keeping them short and productive. This is no small feat, since some of them are from creative fields and have a much more stream-of-consciousness work style. That said, my boss did go through a phase where her bosses apparently decided to have meetings and conference calls until they could figure out why no work was getting done. Those were a bad few weeks.
I firmly believe that even if the only ROWE recommendation a company can implement is to make meetings optional, there will be noticeable increases in productivity. And impatient people like me will be happier.
