Wasted people hours

Just when I think that I have distanced myself from still being hung up on the complete idiocy of the corporate world, I’m reminded of the weekly, time-sucking standing team call.

Have you ever paid attention to the number of people on a given conference call that’s about as useful as the proverbial tits on a bull? That’s not even proverbial, tits on a bull aren’t useful, and neither is a weekly hour-long call that smells like it could have been an email with a few bullet points.

It’s worse than recruiting a half dozen colleagues to join you on your trip to the first-floor cafeteria for coffee or standing around the water cooler.

Everyone knows that coffee trips and water cooler conversations are basically code for acknowledging that they’ve all been at work for almost an hour and have amounted to nothing so far. Now, they’re about to see who else they can help amount to nothing for a little bit longer.

The call opens and the organizer agrees to no one’s request of waiting five more minutes to see who else joins. It isn’t long before someone’s rambling about some useless goal that was set that everyone knows won’t ever be met and will be replaced by some other goal in sixty days.

That discussion alone consumed two-thirds of the call time and there are still nine more items on the agenda.

Meanwhile, twenty-one people are on the call. Half are in the conference room and the other half are working remotely, still in their pajamas and trying to get a load of laundry in or give their kid a bath.

Let’s round that up to twenty-two since we know someone else will join in a few minutes.

If the call is an hour long, that’s twenty-two work hours wasted in a single hour.

Here’s a thought- follow the agenda. Maybe even put the number of minutes for each agenda item that allows the top-level discussion. If more side discussion is needed, take it offline.

Stop wasting everyone’s time. People have other shit to do, like get coffee and hang around the water cooler.

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