There are some insights here into how to maximize meetings. Warning: it includes a huge clock on the wall that counts down the minutes. Phew!
I can’t imagine how Chinese staff would react to this. There’s a long tradition of the meeting as a social event that came from the communist period. When I came here 12 years ago, it was one kai hui after another, often to no apparent end. Things have changed, but it ain’t Google.
Ken Carroll
Could you tell us more about the meetings that started this trend, and how people expect meetings to be conducted today?
In our software development we have daily project ’standups’. Supposed to take only about 10mins and you can’t sit down (speeds thing up a little). Anything that starts looking like a big issue in one of these is taken off as a separate disscussion with only the interested parties later on.
Seems to work quite well.
As far as meetings today go the trend seems to be towards the informal and direct. larger meetings tend to focus on big issue and aim to come out with a way forward. It rare to be able to discuss many large issues and have everyone involved to the same degree in each one. It is not uncommon to call people in just for a part of the meeting if necessary.
Of course I am not involved in the rarified level of Board level meetings, I guess that they aren’t changing so much??
Sorry forgot to say even the minutes seem to be drying up in our company. Often just a list of Chris will do this…. Dave will do that… Keith and Tim will investigate the usefulness of …. etc.
NO PAPER - There was a time when I was low-person on the totem-pole and invariably the task of scribbing meeting minutes wound up handed over to me. From reading Google’s approach it appears they hired professional transcribers to do the function. A very rightous approach.
For all you interns or company newbies out there, here was my solution for avoiding the note taking, I arrived at the meeting w/o a pen, pencil or one sliver of paper. I became completely obviously unprepared and unable to take minutes. Much like the other higher-up execs. Hence my from then on meteoric rise thru the corporate food-chain, sans minutes. *Disclaimer - one may also be headed straight out the door with this tactic.
For Chris (mandarin student), the other tactic, taken from the highly paid consultants we had was to take an aggressive…excuse me, assertive approach to keeping one’s name off the dreaded ‘action item’ list, so inappropriately labeled the “honey, do” list by one consultant, was to recommend two other meeting participants for the action item, invariably one capitulates, as in “I think John was working with Sue on that.”
The low-ball tactic was to recommend two people, one of whom was not in the meeting.
Me: I think John was working with Ellen on that.
John: No
Me: Okay, so for this action item you’re following up with Ellen on that. Thanks.
My meetings NEVER ran into the lunch hour, moving on — let’s set a time block on this, timecheck it’s now 11:44. Time is money.