Since many of us work from home, I hear all kinds of negative comments about the large number of online meetings.
In a coaching session, my client told me that he still has to work after all those meetings.
A friend of mine tells me that she can’t even reply to her messages before 7 PM, that she has ”back to back meetings” (an expression on everyone’s lips since the pandemic).
How would it be if you wouldn’t have meetings with your colleagues all the time, if you only had a breakfast meeting once a week, online, and then, from time to time, department or general meetings. Instead, everyone should know what they had to do and did it. It wouldn’t matter what they were doing the rest of the day, you wouldn’t ask, and what would matter would be to do their job right and on time.
But a question struck me: What do people do so many hours in their meetings? Don’t they get bored? Exhausted? Don’t they have anything else to do?
I’ve often heard something even better: you have to be online all the time during work hours, otherwise, the manager starts questioning you why you don’t work.
These images with endless meetings at any time, checking others’ screen time, with tired people of too many Zoom, Teams, Webex and Skype calls make me think about the micromanagement topic.
The more we control, the less trust we put in our employees, the tighter we hold the reins, the more we make sure that, after the pandemic, they will be desperate to escape.
Of course, it depends on what we are aiming for: working another year with some people with a crushed spirit, who will gather their strength and recompose themselves in another company or on their own, or show them more trust, show them that we care, we understand, allow them to manage things in their way, as long as they do it on time?
Or are these meetings a way to justify our presence in the company?