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[SalmonGod]

Came across a short article today about meetings in the business world.  The article was uninteresting but it got me thinking, and I wrote up my own observations below, which I narcissistically decided to be worth sharing.  Didn't really fit in an emotion thread and wasn't really worthy of its own thread.  So I thought... this is the perfect way to launch a thread for comparing observations/survival tips, and generally bitching about the working world.  This stuff would generally go in the rage thread, I know... but here we can tangent off into general discussion about workplace culture (an expansive topic) that might have a chance of amounting to more than sporadic venting.

In my experience so far, there are four types of meetings:

1. Upper management and executives meeting to compare meaningless numbers they've gathered according to methodologies that are designed to avoid basis in operational realities, discuss who they believe should be blamed for those numbers according to the perceptions they have of lower level employees that are mostly based on passing glances and numbers-based reports, and then agree on what processes need to be further complicated or ruined in order to make the appearance of having come up with a solution.

2. Upper management meeting with middle management to dictate the findings of upper management meetings, and to belittle the middle managers when they disagree.

3. Middle management meeting with workers to say they're sorry but they have no choice, in a shallowly positive and motivational manner.

4. Upper management meeting with workers to give them a one-sided presentation about what sacrifices they will be required to make in the near future in order to increase the amount of money they make the company, with a disturbingly upbeat tone suggesting upper management truly believes and expects that employees see the profit growth of the company as their sole purpose for existing.

Although.... if you have an especially chill middle manager, they might have a hidden 5th type of meeting.  The "morale is low and we can afford a breather right now, so let's use the pretense of a team meeting in this semi-private room to just all bullshit together for a while, away from the hawkish observation of the lifeless office drama lovers on the other shifts" meeting.  I had one of those managers once.

[MaximumZero]

Well, the only "meetings" I'm privy to are twice-a-week conference calls that are essentially "What's releasing this week? Put signs up. What sales are running this week? Put signs up. Our sales numbers are low, you should work on those and put signs up. We're good at a, but not b, so work on b. Oh, and put more signs up. Any questions?" They're pretty much worthless as far as actual guidance goes, and the fact that one of them is invariably when I'm on single coverage (in the store by myself, dealing with customers,) and that they're actually supposed to be my boss' job, means that I don't take them terribly seriously.

tl;dr: I fucking hate retail and would kill to have a desk job of some kind.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah... I suppose there are professions in the business world where my categories wouldn't apply so much.  And of course, I have little experience outside of business-y type workplace settings (office work/sales).

I do not envy retail work, though I doubt you'd find office work to be that much better.  Dealing with customers is horrible... but office culture has a reputation for generating the worst management and petty cut-throat politics that make sane people feel like dissidents in the Cold War.

[MaximumZero]

Well, while I'm here, I may as well ask questions about the business world.

What kind of qualifications would I need to be pulled from the sales floor and into a cubicle?
What kind of companies even utilize desk-job labor in the States anymore?

[SalmonGod]

Well, while I'm here, I may as well ask questions about the business world.

What kind of qualifications would I need to be pulled from the sales floor and into a cubicle?
What kind of companies even utilize desk-job labor in the States anymore?

Those are big questions...

I can only speak for my experience with freight forwarding/customs brokerage.  I started out as a package handler at Fedex Express, from which I transferred to Fedex Trade Networks doing entry writing for customs.  It was an entry-level position, and their requirements weren't much ten years ago.  Being an existing employee within the company just made it even easier.  From there I got enough relevant experience to be hired by another freight forwarder into a position where I would be fully involved in every aspect of the process of international importation.

Today requirements seem a lot more strict, even for entry-level positions.  There are schools that offer degrees in international logistics, which I don't think was a thing 10 years ago, so businesses don't see it as their responsibility to train people from scratch anymore.  It's a lot tougher.  But when I left FedEx less than two years ago, while they weren't hiring anyone off the street without experience anymore, they were still hiring transfers from within the company without relevant experience.  So I guess doing grunt-labor and transferring to office-work within a company is probably still a viable route.

And just my impression from casual reading about workplace trends in the U.S. and watching my friends navigate their (lack of) careers, it seems like that's the general trend of things everywhere.  Requirements to hire into any position requiring any sort of specialized knowledge keep getting more strict.  So you either take on debt to meet those requirements (which will upgrade by the time you're done with your education), or you do some very low-level uneducated work and look for opportunities to move about.

[Frumple]

So you either take on debt to meet those requirements (which will upgrade by the time you're done with your education), or you do some very low-level uneducated work and look for opportunities to move about.

Or rock some variation of nepotism networking. Though I guess you could file that under opportunities to move about...

[SalmonGod]

So you either take on debt to meet those requirements (which will upgrade by the time you're done with your education), or you do some very low-level uneducated work and look for opportunities to move about.

Or rock some variation of nepotism networking. Though I guess you could file that under opportunities to move about...

Yup.  Definitely falls under that category.  Connections were a factor in both the office jobs I have landed.  Speaking of which, there is a mass exodus happening in my current workplace.  One of my co-workers just had his last day today.  Another is interviewing tomorrow with the same company he's moving to.  I'm thinking about following them.

[Itnetlolor]

I often tend to get berated for not working when I should, despite the fact I keep saying that I'm looking for more work and waiting on the next job-post update. Then again, my employee does also deliver on his work, albeit with decent reviews by the end. Self-employed meetings at least keeps everyone on task more or less.

[alway]

While I have yet to experience it, there is also another type of meeting common in game dev studios: The company-wide meeting in which all employees are told the studio is shutting down without warning, they're all fired, and that the door codes back into their office have already been changed. :v

It makes further all-company meetings for those people highly amusing, as each announcement of a company-wide meeting is met with incredulity and fearful questioning of whether they should bring anything valuable with them.


As for me, my personal favorite meeting type are standups. "Hello 15 people I never interact with outside of this standup because we do completely different jobs. I will pretend to tell all of you about what I'm doing, but we all know it's just for the managers in the meeting, with whom this is essentially a one on one meeting. However, I will try to say as little as possible about what I'm doing, because only 2 of you really care about what I'm saying, and each minute I talk is a quarter hour of dev time wasted. Now my update is done, and so I will stare off into space and daydream until you are all done." If there is no useful information for managers, such a meeting with 15 people will take about 15 minutes; or about half a work-day. If there is useful information for managers, such a meeting will take around 30 minutes; or approximately an entire work-day.

[hector13]

The only meetings I ever had were occasional gatherings of the shift to say

"yeah, the store is making 6 figures every week, we're still paying you fuck all, we're not/meeting waste, not/meeting sales, not/meeting customer service, not/meeting availability. Now I'm going back to the office to drink coffee while you make me look good."

Or the times when I pissed off the manager enough for him to give me a talking to. So I told him I didn't like working for him. I don't think he cared really, but then again, neither did I.

Now I'm in the state of not really needing to work since my wife graduated and can now practice being a vet, but I probably should get a job to help pay off debts.

There wasn't much in the way of politics in the store I worked in, beyond the "workers" not really liking many of the "managers". I at least understood the pressure they were receiving from God Himself (the store manager) because he was an asshole, and probably because I don't really like playing those kinds of games. In saying that, I was probably the most annoying person to have working underneath you because I gave up giving a shit when I realised doing everyone else's job was pointless given it would never be noticed and I would never get any more money for it. I fixed the most glaring issues, and left the rest.

Retail was annoying. I expected to be annoyed a lot by customers, not by my work-mates.

[MaximumZero]

Seems that when you work retail, and I've been part of a few different retail environments, everyone is an idiot. They've either been there too long to care anymore, somehow got power that they're wielding with an iron fist, or are fresh meat.

[Baffler]

Heh, I worked in a factory. The only meetings I ever went to are presentations made by the department head about just what happened to so-and-so who injured themselves to set the record straight and so people don't make the same mistake. Likewise, as long as I kept up on my line and didn't make things difficult for the other guy (when there was one) by taking too long breaks or "going to be bathroom" every 45 minutes (both things I've seen people fired for) or making some other kind of trouble I didn't get anything from management either. Maybe management there was just unusually good, or the shitiness doesn't filter that far down the ladder, but I never experienced or even heard of anyone here having the sorts of problems people here talk about concerning their supervisors, or even their coworkers, when I was there.

My brother at McDonalds, on the other hand...

Edit: Made past tense, am back in school now.

[hector13]

Seems that when you work retail, and I've been part of a few different retail environments, everyone is an idiot. They've either been there too long to care anymore, somehow got power that they're wielding with an iron fist, or are fresh meat.

I sometimes amused myself by seeing how long it took newbies to become as jaded as I was.

It usually didn't take long though, so it wasn't much entertainment.

I did seem to find that the deputy managers were always really good to work with/for, because they generally lead by example, usually by doing something (or at least looking like it...) they didn't need to do, so you never had an excuse for pissing about, which I always found refreshing for some reason.

The store manager usually only did this when he was getting visits from area managers and such, which... that kind of brown-nosing is painful for me to experience.

[timferius]

I have a meeting afternoon about a topic which could briefly be covered in like 1 or 2 emails. Instead I have to sit through an hour of talking about the topic for no reason...

On desk jobs, the entry level here is not high at all and it pays quite well. I came in with half a uni-degree, and some work history at walmart, mcdonalds and a restaurant. I work for a major utility in the area.

[RedKing]

Y'all do realize that meetings are essentially what I do for a living now, right? (along with budgets and schedules)


My weekly meeting types:
1. Meet with the client to determine what they want us to do. This is frequently more difficult to determine than you would expect.

For an analogy, consider that you build houses. Your customer comes to you and says, "I want a house. How much is it going to cost?"
"Well, that depends on the specifics of what you want."
"Well, we don't know yet, we're still figuring that out. But when can you get me a quote?"
"....Well, do you want a ranch-style, a split-level, what? How many bedrooms? How many baths?"
"I dunno, my wife makes all those decisions. But she doesn't want to commit to anything until we have an estimate. But we need this built by next month, so you need to get started today."

2. Meet with my project team to tell them what the hell they need to do and find out what arcane procedures I need to follow.
"Okay, guys. We need to get the foundation laid this week, so that the carpentry team can get the outer walls up by the end of the month."
"Ok, You'll need to submit a foundation levelling request with the masonry review board first."
"What do I need for that?"
"Well, you'll need the engineer to provide a CDD to put into the OPD, which you bundle with the MCE and send off to the MRB."
"....I'm SOL."

3. Meet with all the other project managers and our org head to give updates on how our projects are doing and why they're crashing and burning, if they're crashing and burning.
"So.....we're going to be another two weeks behind schedule because someone made a typo and instead of ordering an 80-gallon water heater, we appear to have ordered 80 gallons of hot water."

4. Repeat #3, but with all our delivery heads (in this analogy, the Director of Masonry, Director of Carpentry, etc.)

5. Repeat #3, but with the client. Proceed to get excoriated for every failure and mistake, and learn to bite your tongue when the delays are caused by the client giving you the wrong address to build the house at. Or changing their mind halfway through construction and deciding they want an indoor heated pool on the second floor.

6. Monthly meetings with my org head. These are mostly "how's life? how's the kids? see any good movies lately? Well, you sound like you're holding up well and not going insane yet, so I'm giving you another two projects. Enjoy!"

7. Semi-annual meetings with my manager (who is actually in a whole different chunk of the business). "Man, you are doing a great job! We're all really proud of how well you made the jump from tech support to project management, and the client apparently loves you! So in recognition of all your work this past year, here's a 50 cent raise." (To be clear, I don't fault my manager for this. Raises are capped at 1.7% for the whole company -- not including executives, of course.)