Meeting culture

What is your opinion about the meeting culture?

I love meetings with friends and socializing. Sometimes I see it with unexperienced managers. They want to create a meeting culture during the workday.

In theory, more meetings, more people interact and more people are in the loop, means more productivity.

The reality is totally different when those meetings do not contribute to the overall goals of the team or organization. When you have more unproductive meetings, which is usually the case, they lead to a less productive team. And this eventually slows down the development.

Who is guilty in the end?

The development team and manager, the senior manager or someone else?

This is the wrong question to ask, but it usually happens after the development miss deadlines.

Therefore, many agile organizations encourage people to leave a meeting if it is not productive enough.

But there is another issue here. Most of the people won’t provide a feedback about the usefulness of the meetings. They are afraid that either they won’t be liked (being the bad person) or they will miss something out (FOMO).

So it is not enough to only mention this to people, but also make a way to encourage a direct or indirect feedback about the quality of the meeting.

Only then, the meeting culture will make sense.

When was the last time you were a victim of a meeting culture?