I used to have a fantastic boss, but she retired right after she got three junior faculty, including me, through the tenure process three years ago. (She stuck around for an extra year specifically so we would have an experienced chair at the helm. She was the best.) We had a succession of interim chairs, and this year for the first time we have a chair who is expected to stay for a while.
"You have a lot of meetings here," he said in our monthly department meeting this week. Reader, he was not wrong.
Over the interregnum our meeting norms have shifted. I would guess that it's partly because of our previous chair's departure, partly because of COVID and the Zoom meetings it begat, and partly because of shifts in societal norms, but to my eye our meetings have gone off the rails. It used to be that only one person would have a laptop open; now it is three-quarters of the people in attendance. Only one of those people is in charge of the minutes. Perhaps at any given time one or two of the other people is looking up useful information on a laptop. Mostly people are poking around in their email. People's phones are constantly making noise; this week it sounded like someone's YouTube video started playing unexpectedly before it was paused.
There is also a degree of drift that never used to exist. People step out, they disappear for a while, they wander back in. And it's not that I want people to feel that they can't attend to their physical needs. It's just-- this is a dumb way to have a meeting. If there is actually a need to gather 25 people for 90 minutes, then that represents a significant cost to the department. Let's use the time well. Let's be all there if we have to be there. If only half of my brain is at the meeting, is it really worth my time to be there?
Let's tell the people who tend to go on and on that they should be concise. If the agenda is not worth paying attention to, let's revise the agenda. Let's not keep a meeting on the schedule because we've always had this meeting on the schedule. And OH how I would love to see a moratorium on scheduling meetings in the day's most productive writing window.
Are you also seeing post-COVID shifts in meeting behavior? Have you ever had any luck telling That Person that s/he has said quite enough already, thanks and be quiet now? What might happen if I just...opted out? Some days a person wonders about these things.
Recent Comments