back to article Microsoft: For God's sake, people, cut down on the meetings!

Microsoft yesterday squeezed out a couple of technologies aimed at encouraging teams to adopt a healthier approach toward meetings and, you know, maybe think a bit before firing off that midnight email. Helpful hints or management monitoring? You decide The first, Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork (now in preview), …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If your day is full of meetings it is likely to be the fault of middle management and possibly HR - not the individual being told to attend them.

    I became very unpopular with middle management by refusing to travel to attend their meetings. Timed slot video conferencing proved to be a more efficient use of everyone's time in cases where a meeting was obviously needed for a very defined reason.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Meetings are how much of middle management justify their salary, otherwise many would be sitting around with nothing to do.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Meetings are how much of middle management justify their salary, otherwise many would be sitting around with nothing to do.

        There is a rule of thumb at IBM that the worse off/closer to failure a project is, the more meetings they will have.

        1. JohnFen

          I don't think that's unique to IBM, it's more like a universal truth. There is a threshold involved, beyond which it's a big signal that it's time to be looking for another job.

      2. Daniel von Asmuth
        Childcatcher

        Meetings

        Without meetings there would be no cooperation nor organisation.

        A an hour spent in front of the PC is an hour wasted on administratrivia. Microsoft has been a productivity black hole since 1981.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Would be a very cool feature indeed if it would be capable of playings song like "just say no"! Then all of your colleagues would also know the system agrees that you have way to much work on your hands (breaking the ice) and it would simultaneously cheer you up a bit ;)

    But, being Microsoft, it seems to just kick open doors and it sounds like a reinvention of Clippy.

  3. Potemkine! Silver badge

    I miss GSuite so much

    I would be more happier if Outlook would incorporate at last the possibility to mail a daily digest of next meetings and appointments, something you can do in Outlook.com but not with the app.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I miss GSuite so much

      @potemkine - "I miss GSuite so much"

      By any chance are you a sadomasochist in your spare time?

      I've had a personal Gmail account for 15 (give or take a couple of years), in addition, its the "Office Suite" my employer foists upon its minions. To this very day, the features and functionality are pretty much the same, its missing even the most basic features you get with Outlook.

      I use because I must, but I'd rather not!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I miss GSuite so much

      "a daily digest of next meetings and appointments"

      That sounds like an ugly kludge. If you're using Outlook anyway, try out Outlook Today. It will show you the next few days of appointments, tasks and unread emails* on the main interface. You can reconfigure it a bit, but it's much nicer than just an email reminder of what you need to do today.,

      Yeah, yeah... it would be wonderful if it would tell you about the emails you'll receive 3 days from now.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Generating nudges if I get new tasks on my plate before I've had the chance to complete tasks from earlier emails? With the chaos that exists around here sometimes, I reckon I'd burn that sucker out in less than a day.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Right? It's not enough that management is hanging overhead like vultures, now the office tools themselves will get into the act. Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more (we hear everything).

  5. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    Yes, get back to your cubicle

    Then you cam be doing real work that we can slurp and give to our [redacted] paymasters.

    OR

    Just get the meeting maniacs to sit through a whole day of John Cleese's "Meeting Bloody Meetings"

    If that does not stop them, then it is clearly time to get a new job and pronto.

  6. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    A neat feature would be to have the system decide when the day is filling up with meetings and refuse to let someone schedule a new meeting unless they can persuade someone else to drop one of theirs. The upgrade in 6 months time would add a trading system for meetings; a meeting holder could post a price to cancel their meeting.

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Windows

    Or you could just push back on low-productivity meetings...

    I do it all the time. Meetings are fine, but i am the first to disinvite myself if the subject doesn't seem to be something that I can contribute to or contributes to what I am doing.

  9. Robert Moore
    Megaphone

    My experience.

    Probably 90% of meetings could much more effectively be dealt with by a simple email.

    I include all meetings with more than 3 people in that group.

  10. Stevie

    Bah!

    Real convo:

    "Didn't you get my email? The service was down!"

    "What time did you send it?"

    "2am! It's in your inbox!"

    "Along with about 850 other mailings. Wait; 2am? I was asleep. Why didn't you call?"

    "I sent an email!"

    "And sat and waited for me to wake up. Oh well, your call. Or not, as it happens."

    "I'm going to report your attitude"

    "You must do what you feel is best. On an entirely unrelated note, were you aware there is legislation underway to make forcing people to read email out of office hours illegal?"

    later

    "You must read your email and be responsive!"

    "Sorry, boss. I don't do email in my sleep. But I do answer the phone when I'm called."

    "I expect better from my people."

    "Well I copied you on the original email and explained why it wasn't actioned in a timely manner."

    "When?"

    "This morning. Didn't you see my email?"

    "I get a lot of email."

    "I know how you feel."

    1. Deckard_C

      Re: Bah!

      I was disappointed when outlook started telling the recipent that you used the don't send before feature. As I used that for those people who would sit in the emails and reply immediately with another question involving more work. Slows it down and gives me a chance to deal with my emails.

      Although most people these days don't seem to bother reading emails, at least the ones from IT. The times I've head "Oh I don't read emails from IT"

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Then there are the Meetings about a meeting to set the agenda for another meeting

    Seemed to happen quite regularly at a Mobile company in Newbury in the late 1980's.

    It was just accepted as the way that they did things.

    1. Deckard_C

      Re: Then there are the Meetings about a meeting to set the agenda for another meeting

      And there are meetings to prepare for a meeting

    2. -tim

      Re: Then there are the Meetings about a meeting to set the agenda for another meeting

      Most companies are at the opposite edge of the spectrum with no records and no agendas. I've been telling middle-managment that any meeting that doesn't have an agenda and minutes isn't a meeting, it is a waste of time. I figure they will find the middle ground for about two meetings sometime in the next decade and then swing all the way to meetings about a meeting to set the agenda for another meeting.

      1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

        Re: any meeting that doesn't have an agenda and minutes isn't a meeting

        Ah, that's going to be in the Workspace Analytics Solution for Teamwork Enterprise edition.

  12. JohnFen

    And unicorns could poop nuggets of gold

    " an enlightened management could also"

    I have never seen a company that has more than a couple dozen employees that also has "enlightened management" (although I've seen lots of companies that thought they did). I suspect that such a beast is as common as unicorns.

  13. TomPhan

    Travel time

    There needs to be a calendar utility which automatically adds to any meeting the time it'll take to get to and from it.

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: Travel time

      "There needs to be a calendar utility which automatically adds to any meeting the time it'll take to get to and from it."

      Just book a minimum of 4 hours blocks for meetings if they are in the office and the entire day if they are outside. You likely have to review material and maybe even prepare some of your own (to CYA) before the meeting. After the meeting, you may need to spend time creating, collating or responding to items from the meeting. That's half the day wasted.

      Meetings in other locations mean you need to do even more preparation since you are outside of your office LAN and may not be able to access information that you could be asked to provide. There's the drive each way. Somebody will be stuck in traffic or a train will be delayed making the meeting start late. You'll use the excuse to have lunch or an informal meeting with somebody from that location since you are there. You'll want to pop into that shop that you like, again, since you are nearby. When you get back to your own desk, there is an hour left in the working day that you will spend trying to dispense with emails and memos that have backed up while you were gone.

    2. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: Travel time

      A (long) while back when working in Ireland, we discovered that people would leave their desks at the appointed time and thus a 10am meeting would actually start at 10:15 and thus a 1 hour meeting was at best 45 minutes and actually more like 40 minutes, if you didn't want people leaving early for their next meeting. Once you got used to this concept things were pretty straight-forward, although colleagues newly arrived from England always needed to be told otherwise they turned up and expected the 10am meeting to start at 10am and complain that people were late...

      So this working practise seemed to get around the problem of Outlook not including travel time - it was assumed to be part of the meeting time.

  14. N2

    Meetings

    I'd walk out after 45 minutes, if you can't get it by then theres no point.

    & power point should be limited to 12 slides, after that I'm asleep.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      Re: Meetings

      My first thought: "PowerPoint is being deprecated? Who knew?"

    2. JohnFen

      Re: Meetings

      In my experience, any given meeting becomes worthless after the first 15 minutes. And any meeting that involves PowerPoint at all is almost certainly worthless from the start.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    firing off emails at anti-social hours

    So is it considered bad manners to pop a letter in the postbox at 9pm now?

    (I thought that was the point of E-mail: asynchronous delivery)

    But I do get what they mean about not doing things promised by E-mail. E-mail is a poor substitute for a ticketing system; but I think you could usefully move most business chat off of E-mail and onto a ticketing system.

    Any E-mail which doesn't require an action from someone probably shouldn't be sent in the first place.

    1. Stevie

      Re: firing off emails at anti-social hours

      It's bad manners to do so and expect an answer by overnight pony express.

      It's bad manners to do so on a Friday and expect an answer on Saturday morning.

      It's just stupid to do that when you need someone to do something quickly.

      If you have a problem and need me to help you fix it out of normal working hours, overcome whatever mental/social impediment you have against activating your phone *as* a phone and call me.

      If you disturb me at dinner, or wake me out of a sound sleep, expect curtness for the first few minutes. Call it the "someone else's problem" tax.

      If you get voicemail, I'm either doing something more important to me than work on my own time, or my phone is hors de combat and you are SOL.

    2. JohnFen

      Re: firing off emails at anti-social hours

      Yes, the asynchronous nature is one of the main benefits of email. There's nothing wrong with sending an email in the middle of the night.

      "Any E-mail which doesn't require an action from someone probably shouldn't be sent in the first place."

      Well, I frequently use email in a way that doesn't require an action on the part of the recipient -- for recordkeeping and to ensure understanding. I've been in the business for a very long time, and have been bitten far too often by uncertain and imprecise nature of conversations (and, more importantly, the imprecise nature of memory).

      So, when I have had a work conversation that resulted in a decision or action item, I will always follow it up with an email that states what I took away from the conversation. That has often highlighted misunderstandings that would have caused trouble in the future, and it also covers your ass if there's a dispute later on about what you should have been doing.

      1. midcapwarrior

        Re: firing off emails at anti-social hours

        That's all very well and good but why send it in the middle of the night.

        If it's only CYA than just wait until the next day.

        It's annoying at best to see a message in the middle of the night and see it's a complete waste of time.

        Good way to ensure your messages go in the ignore pile.

        1. JohnFen

          Re: firing off emails at anti-social hours

          "That's all very well and good but why send it in the middle of the night"

          Why not? Email does not demand time or attention, so it's safe to send any time day or night. If you're being woken up by incoming emails, that's because you have some sort of annoying notification system going on, and I say that's on you -- you shouldn't be treating email as if it were instant messaging.

        2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: firing off emails at anti-social hours

          It's annoying at best to see a message in the middle of the night and see it's a complete waste of time.

          Then don't read email when you don't want to see email.

          As several previous posts have pointed out, the whole fucking point of email is that it's an asynchronous medium. If you're letting email interrupt you, that's your fault, not the sender's. If you're letting it interrupt you when you don't want to be interrupted, then email is the least of your problems.

    3. Deckard_C

      Re: firing off emails at anti-social hours

      "Any E-mail which doesn't require an action from someone probably shouldn't be sent in the first place."

      I find any E-mail which requires an action from someone needs to be followed up by a telephone call or actually visit. The email is actually just a record that I've asked them.

      So if see little point in doing something I will E-mail the person asking for a confimation they do want me to do it preferably requiring them to supply me with some information I need to proced.

      Or if it's something I want to do, E-mail them to say that I will preced with it by some date and they need to E-mail before then if they don't want me to go ahead and do it.

  16. MachDiamond Silver badge

    A use for saved air sickness bags

    "To be fair, an enlightened management could also use that information, coupled with survey results, as part of a change process. Workspace Analytics can dump out action plans to help enrolled teams understand where changing habits would lead to better productivity. "

    Two sentences like that can induce a serious bulimic response.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Have more meetings then you will have less time to release the shit you produce

    And give up on windows wait, it's a pile of garbage, just develop a theme for whatever flavour of Linux you want to fcuk up and be done with it.

  18. InNY

    I'll get around to commenting on this article

    after I've been to the second of a series of five preparatory meetings, discussing the subjects of / for and the participants for the introductory meetings, meeting about reducing the number of meetings that are happening around here...

  19. whoseyourdaddy

    First of all, MS Office products are where company-critical information converts to an email attachment so it can vanish forever.

    Double for the codorker IQ test known as Powerpoints ("WTF is this? Couldn't be bothered to send me a PNG file?").

    Since I hate meetings, Atlassian Confluence ranks up there with coffee as my best friend.

    But, if I had a choice between meetings in a meeting space or my idiot coworkers holding a meeting I wasn't invited to, next to my cubicle....

    Meetings for the win... O_o

  20. Anonymous Coward
    IT Angle

    A healthier approach toward meetings

    "Microsoft yesterday squeezed out a couple of technologies aimed at encouraging teams to adopt a healthier approach toward meetings and, you know, maybe think a bit before firing off that midnight email."

    Nothing useful ever comes out of meetings and emails are only usefull for covering your arse later on if something goes T.I.T.S.U.P :]

  21. P.B. Lecavalier
    WTF?

    Office 365?

    "[...] those who are fully bought into the Office 365 platform and ecosystem"

    You know a place where everyone got M$ Office slapped on their computer? <yes>

    You know a place where this Office 365 is used? I heard of this thing for years, and unless it's a buzzword, I've never dealt with someone using this. I have no idea what it looks like and what it does, but from what I hear, it's made for people who (once upon a time) thought that the Palm would revolutionize their productivity.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Office 365?

      "You know a place where this Office 365 is used?"

      Yes, hundreds. Covering hundreds of thousands of users.

      "... from what I hear, it's made for people who (once upon a time) thought that the Palm would revolutionize their productivity."

      Ah, now you are talking! Yes, the Palm devices I owned did indeed revolutionise my productivity. Not forgetting the Psion's that came before them.

      It was the real start of the mobility revolution for me. Now, I don't have to care where I work. Everything I need is available where I want it, when I want it.

      B-)

  22. the Jim bloke

    Nostalgia aint what it used to be

    Microsoft continually making the "good old days" out of whatever isn't their current product.

    Are they going to use an animated paperclip to provide the "nudges"?

  23. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Is there a Reply to All Nudge?

    "Do you really want to send this email to everyone in the NHS?"

  24. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

    Good ideas?

    To be fair to Redmond, these are probably all good ideas

    They are? They sound dreadful to me.

    Outlook is annoying enough as it is, even with the settings clamped down as tightly as possible. (And that's the desktop UI. The web interface is supremely irritating and far less configurable.)

    I don't need Outlook to tell me how full my calendar is getting, because I can read. Hell, I can tell without even reading, thanks to my magical ability to count little boxes on the screen.

    I don't need Outlook to pester me about tasks it thinks I'm responsible for.

    And as various people have already noted, there is nothing wrong with sending email at any hour. There's something wrong (very, very wrong) with people who feel compelled 1) to read email when they don't want to, and 2) to whinge about it. Having the fucking MUA "nudge" users about a non-issue like this is worse than postnews's old "this post will cost the net hundreds of dollars" nag.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "a canny Human Resources (HR) department"

    Urm, I'm really surprised nobody has picked up on this!

    I have yet to find such a beast, I think that I'd more likely be abducted by aliens or win the lottery (which I don't play) than find one.

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