White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now – The Meeting-Industrial Complex
The article highlights the rise of meetings in white-collar work since the pandemic, emphasizing communication over creativity, with many tasks shifted to evenings, and skepticism about AI's potential to reduce inefficiencies.
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The article discusses the increasing prevalence of meetings in white-collar work, highlighting a shift from creativity to communication as the primary focus of modern jobs. Since the pandemic, remote work has surged, leading to a significant rise in the time spent in meetings, which has reportedly tripled since 2020. Research indicates that many workers are now engaging in work-related tasks late into the evening due to the overwhelming number of meetings during traditional work hours. The article notes that while collaboration is essential in complex organizations, the growing emphasis on inclusion and input from various team members has contributed to this meeting-heavy culture. Critics argue that many meetings are unnecessary and could be replaced by emails, leading to inefficiencies. The article also mentions the "coordination tax" of scheduling meetings in a hybrid work environment and the cognitive costs associated with switching tasks. Ultimately, the author suggests that the current work culture prioritizes communication over creativity, with workers spending 57% of their time on communication-related tasks compared to 43% on actual creation. There is some hope that artificial intelligence could help reduce unnecessary meetings, but the author remains skeptical about whether technology will truly alleviate the communication burden in the workplace.
- The time spent in meetings has tripled since 2020, impacting workers' productivity.
- Modern work culture prioritizes communication over creativity, with workers spending more time discussing tasks than completing them.
- The rise of remote work has led to a significant increase in scheduled meetings.
- Critics argue that many meetings could be replaced by emails, highlighting inefficiencies in the current system.
- There is potential for AI to reduce unnecessary meetings, but skepticism remains about its effectiveness.
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8 commentsIt feels like we're working and "being productive", but it's more like meetings are a crutch for layers of management who aren't able to clearly define what the business or technical objectives are.
It comes from far too many layers of management and empires that constantly need to align themselves, document things, track things etc.
In my experience, every layer of manager adds an order more of red tape, meetings, and complexity.
And when they couldn't do it all, instead of removing managers, they started asking rank and file to do the same meetings and produce enormous status reports so that the layers can read it all.
Everyone is wasting time without asking the root question: Is having so many managers and management pyramids worth wasting so much time of the most productive people of the company - the people actually producing whatever you produce.
That doesn't necessarily imply that all working hours are productive, instead we seem to need to fill them with something, and meetings meet the requirements. Or in other words
> The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) - Stafford Beer[1]
Meetings serve to look like you're doing something and they take up a lot of time. They serve the purpose precisely.
Rather than try to decrease meetings and increase productive working hours, we should take the cue, read the room, and match the cure to the diagnosis, and do what Keynes predicted[2]: work 15-hour weeks. It's what we're doing already, we're just afraid to admit it.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
The truthing the matter relize on meetings to do buisiness. No meeting, no work. Simply, it's that. If you let engineers spend their time, they playing with their tinker toys. Sometimes trains. Simply, it's that.
It's not Christmas times when a nice train would be welcome into the office. For now we do buisiness work accordingly the schedule (which is posted). In the meaning times we have meetings. We still doing the work. Simply, it's that.
The meeting type I don't get, which is common, is where some manager or leader calls in a dozen people only to then go around the room one by one getting some data that is irrelevant or already known to anyone else there.
Why don't they go around to those people one by one and not disrupt everyone?
Come to think of it, that's why CEO's hate remote work so much.
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