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Did you hear about the zero-waste meeting somebody held the other day? It seems quite unbelievable; all meetings are designed to waste time. But it turns out to be true, after all. The meeting was to discuss “greener low carbon alternatives to a proposal for a giant waste incinerator”.
“Everyone has his favourite story about meetings,” says Mumbai-based HR consultant D. Singh. “A former colleague of mine used to say very seriously: ‘We are going to continue having these meetings every day, until I find out why no work is getting done.’ He came to the conclusion that too many people were not attending the meetings and were, therefore, out of the loop. He got a promotion for that.”
Entrepreneur Jason Fried has just written a book — Rework — with David Heinemeier Hansson. He poses the question: where do you go when you really need to get something done? The answers Fried hears most often (they could be a place, a thing or a time) are: porch, deck, kitchen, basement, coffee shop, library, train, plane, car, commute, early or late, and weekend. The office is almost never mentioned.
If the office is a place for meetings and meetings are a waste of time, that’s axiomatic. But there are other dangers that lurk in the workplace. In the cubicle farms that have become quite commonplace today, there is no such thing as privacy. Have you noticed the phenomenon of people scurrying out to the loo or the staircase when they get a personal call on their cellphones? Some office ears are sharp enough to hear the other end of the call though the handset is jammed to your ear.
There are other distractions. Just when you have a lot of work, your colleague decides to go walkabout and lands up at your desk. And when you get rid of her, it’s that nag from down the hall asking for a file she has lost.
The jobs people can do well at home fall into two buckets: those that need creativity and those that need concentration. Sometimes they need both. For such jobs, an interruption, even if it lasts a minute, means much more. Very often, you need to start the process of thinking all over again.
Why then do managers, especially the older variety, object to people working out of home? (There are distractions at home too, but that’s another story.) Singh says it stems from a lack of confidence. A manager’s job is to manage. If there’s no one in the office, there’s no one to manage. People who work out of home are self-driven; they don’t need constant supervision. They work at odd hours, so communication tends to be by email. “The manager will not be able to justify his job, even to himself,” says Singh.
Insisting that people come to office is then the survival instinct. But what explains meetings, which is a much older problem? First is a desire to appear democratic. (Though skeptics say it’s a device to evade the blame if things go wrong.) Second, meetings take on a life of their own. Most meetings end with an agreement to meet again. Meetings appoint subcommittees, which appoint work groups, which appoint task forces…
“The only way to avoid meetings is to work from home,” says Singh. But, today, that isn’t a foolproof escape. If you aren’t wary, you will get caught in an online meeting.
There is a way out of that: pretend to be technology challenged. Not everybody, however, can get away with that. What happens if you are the company’s IT evangelist?
MEETING SEASON
Three suggestions for making the office the place for productive work:
■ You’ve got casual Friday, how about “no talk Thursdays”? Start with one afternoon a month. You’ll see that a tremendous amount of work gets done.
■ Start switching from active collaboration to more passive models — email, instant messaging and various collaboration products. Some say email is distracting, but it’s at the time of your choosing. Yes, you’re going to be interrupted, but you can be interrupted when it’s convenient. The important concept underlying this suggestion is that very few things need immediate answers.
■ If you have a meeting coming up, just cancel it. Everything will be just fine.
