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Nah, fuck this lickspittle corpo speak!
“What is the purpose of this meeting and why do I need to be included?” is a perfectly polite sentence appropriate in any work environment consisting of mature and distinguished adults.
Do not enslave yourself to the machine, because the people running it will treat you like a slave.
That is absolutely not something to say if the meeting is pulled together by management on high. Peers? Sure you can say stuff like that, but to someone you may not know or have little interaction with that can be a death knell for your reputation.
The trick is to be so reliable that no one would conceive of getting rid of you even if you come off a little assholish sometimes. I started on the help desk at my last job (fairly large company with around ~25k employees and within a year or two I was the go to for a few of the c-levels when they had issues. I pissed off middle management types occasionally when I couldn’t do something they wanted right away because I needed more information or whatever and had to wait on something. Anytime they tried to start shit with me it never took long for a bigger fish to get involved and have my back because they were familiar with my work and knew I wasn’t just fucking around.
I often find that misappropriating an out of context Paul Rudd quote arguably condoning sexual harassment works perfectly to describe the level of effort one should put in;
“Work 60% of the time, Alllll the time”
Any more than 60% effort and it becomes a drain, any less and management will look to replace. 60% effort is the sweet spot for surviving corporate life rather than succumbing to it.
consisting of mature and distinguished adults
That part can actually be problematic in many places in my experience.
I just say, “So, you guys need me in here?”
But we all know she’s not looking forward to reading the recap, and probably won’t.
Talk to your manager.
Shortly after I was hired, my manager told me I should feel free to decline any meeting that didn’t seem useful, or that if it was preventing me from getting “real” work done.
Or just ask the person organizing the meeting.
“I saw you added me to a meeting tomorrow. Can you provide a bit of context so I can come prepared?”
Y’all are invited to optional meetings??? Lol
‘Do you really need me? I still have a lot on my desk and would like to get to work on it, if you don’t mind.’
Never did anyone have an issue with that, including my boss.
The beauty of this is its not using brainrot LinkedIn language
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.
Corpospeak. Never a clearer way to be sure that someone or something doesn’t give a fuck about you as a human being.
Fluent companyspeech
It’s just being highly effective at applying peer to peer team interaction synergistics skills.
Or just preemptively reply with the second bit.
The first way sounds polite enough for me.
I work on the floor in a pretty specialized role, so I can always just use the excuse of having to attend to any given machine coincidentally whenever they want to have a meeting I don’t feel like attending.
None of the managers really understand what we do, so they don’t challenge the excuses ever.
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
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?
Someone telling me my input would be a big help would be satisfactory to me though. Maybe I’ve just had a different meeting style since I’ve been working from home though. If a meeting is something I’m not needed in I just work on other stuff. And because nobody can see me it doesn’t have the same vibe as doing it on the room. Plus my calendar isn’t teeming with meetings today like it has been at other jobs in the past. Back in 2019 not only was I in the office but I had a ton of meetings. I would probably take a different approach then. Or ask my manager if I was unsure.
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.
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).
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.
Ah, so you’ve been given responsibility without power (renumeration).
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.
