There's a Meetin' Here Tonight!

[dougiezerts]

How do all of you feel about meetings at work?
Generally I like them because they're a nice break from the routine. But if they're bad news--"Improve your results, OR ELSE!"--they're not so fun!

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

We don't have meetings; we have "huddles."

And generally speaking they're inane, uninformative, and generally held right when we're in the middle of a huge-ass truck and can't really spare five or ten minutes to listen to management blah blah blah about this thing or the other.

[Kal]

We have monthly meetings and "daily" huddles. In all honesty we have a daily huddle maybe once a fortnight, but the commandment has come down from the big boss "Huddles must be done daily, no matter what".
We're currently seeing how long we can get away with lying about having them daily as there's absolutely no point to losing fifteen minutes of the day in redirecting the phones, informing other teams of the fact, losing track of whatever work you're doing, just for the team leader to say "Any issues? Nope, ok then back you go."
The meetings on the other hand tend to have an agenda and aren't chaired by the leader, so problems get discussed and sorted quite neatly.

[KellyHabersham]

Meetings at the library aren't too bad.....management always brings in pizza/soda/other snacks, and it's cool to get updated on what's going on in the system and at the branch level. And if there's mention of things which staff needs to improve on, it's kept general enough so that nobody need feel personally attacked.

We don't have staff meetings at the church, although sometimes I think we should...mostly so other people know what I am/am not responsible for doing.

[Broomjockey]

I usually didn't mind meetings at my first theatre. They were generally decent, and they told us what the upcoming films for the next while were. Second theatre there was only one, and it kinda sucked. It was a multi-theatre meeting, so we were in listening to people we didn't know, seated with people we didn't know, about stuff that didn't pertain to our theatre.

The rez was crap. The full-time staff didn't want to stay later than they had to, or come in when they didn't have to, so it was always held at 4 or 5 o'clock, lasted an hour or two, and only had about 20 minutes' worth of material. What's worse is I'd always have class until 4 or 5, so I had to bus back and go straight to the meeting, and then be stuck there until 7. I was always starving and cranky. I eventually just started skipping them, and got filled in with an email that took 5 minutes to read, and I always knew exactly what was going on. The breaking point was a mandatory meeting that took place 30 minutes before I got off my work placement, and I joked about how they could do it on *my* schedule, so Sat/Sun, and my manager (who knows I'm a joker) for some reason took me seriously and shit a brick, and told me to pick a weekday time. I replied quite simply "I have reviewed my schedule to find an acceptable time, and realized that I will have to tender my resignation instead."

[Bandit]

In my role as a sorta technical manager (I know - I said the M-word), I have 2 regular eye-glazers a week, plus however many others I get dragged into for the tech view of things.

85%-90% of them are total time-wasters with no real information actually be exchanged.

At least one of the regular meetings via phone, so I can just close the door, put it on speaker, mute the microphone, and do whatever.

B

[RestaurantDude]

We don't have meetings. We have the boss telling us "Come see me in the office before you leave today." I frigging hate that. It hangs over you for the entire rest of your shift. It could be anything from "I need an extra person on such and such a day, can you work?" or "I'm increasing your hours, groovy?" to "Can you explain the roughly head-shaped hole in the wall by table 43?" or "your services are no longer required."

[dougiezerts]

We don't have meetings. We have the boss telling us "Come see me in the office before you leave today." I frigging hate that. It hangs over you for the entire rest of your shift. It could be anything from "I need an extra person on such and such a day, can you work?" or "I'm increasing your hours, groovy?" to "Can you explain the roughly head-shaped hole in the wall by table 43?" or "your services are no longer required."

And that last one is a killer!

[RestaurantDude]

Yeah, i was expecting that last one to follow the one before it, but, whew... caught the boss in a good mood i guess.

[Crossbow]

My department has weekly meetings of about 15 minutes just to go over what's coming up. No big deal. Company wide meetings are quarterly and run about an hour. Boring, but tolerable.

It's the surprise meetings that I hate. If it's on my calendar, fine. When you get the manager coming around and saying "Everyone in the conference room please." and the senior VP and HR are there, you know it's going to suck. And it did.

[trailerparkmedic]

Most of my meetings involve talking about anything other than issues affecting me. What's going wrong in London? How is California doing? Let's talk about some really technical stuff I don't understand and don't need to know.

Thankfully, they're all conference calls, so I mute my line and go about my normal work.

The employees of the company I work at (vs. contractors, like me!) get stuck watching company wide quarterly meetings, usually run by the CEO or other important people. They're normally 2 hours long, they have to all squish together in the break room, and they look super boring. Very happy I get to avoid those!

[draftermatt]

We only have meetings when we're being audited by the Institute we belong to.

We used to have monthly meetings (as we thought the Institute required them) but no one could come up with anything to talk about so we went to quarterly, now it's twice a year when they show up.

When the old owner was still here we hated when he called a meeting. Normally it was about something dumb.

Like the time he wanted to fully automate the plant (we have all of 10 employees). I was drafted to run the power point so they could talk.

They spent so much time arguing about how "We need this" "No we don't" that I fell asleep sitting at the owner's desk with my hand on the mouse, and nobody noticed.

[cinema guy]

As a popcorn monkey, we had team meetings, which consisted of a manager going through slides of sales forcasts, the cinemas budget, retail spend per head and other stuff that was of little interest to us. Plus a blow-by-blow run down of the latest mystery shop and where we had gone wrong. The stuff we needed to know, like changes to produre on kiosk, we never got told until we did it wrong (ie the old way) on shift.

When I started, they provided food and drink. Which made it worth coming in on your day off. Then it was food. Then it was sweet FA.

As a projectionist, we have technical meetings, which consist of sitting round for a hour, eating donuts and bitching about management.

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

As a projectionist, we have technical meetings, which consist of sitting round for a hour, eating donuts and bitching about management.

Now THAT'S my kind of meeting!

[Teysa]

I can recall two meetings at my store. One was when we got rid of the loyalty cards and the other was when we had our 'unions suck' meeting. On that last one, we had to watch about a 30 minute poor quality dvd where the president of the division explained why we didn't want to unionize. At least we got paid.