“Toxic, Terrible, Poisonous things” are the words Jason Fried, Software Entrepreneur & Author uses to describe, take a deep breath-Meetings! Yes. Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp-a project management & team communication software elucidates 2 main reasons for many people not getting work done at work-Meetings & Managers.
For 10 years he’s been asking people the question “where is the one place where you can get work done” and he got 3 kinds of responses one was relating to a location, another relating to commute and the third one relating to time.
So, according to location people preferred a quiet or isolated room, like the basement, a spare room at home or even places outside the home or office like cafes. With respect to commute, people said they find time to think and get ‘real work’ done in trains, planes or cabs and as far as time was concerned they all hinted at early hours in the morning or late nights.
So, while corporates spend so much money on office infrastructure, it’s an irony that people did not answer ‘office’ to Jason’s question.
Jason talks about what the offices miss giving their employees – uninterrupted long hours. He points out that creative people like designers, writers or thinkers like engineers, need some quiet time to themselves to sort out their thoughts but the office is filled with distractions like colleagues, managers, ad-hoc tasks; and that’s how employees end up doing tasks rather than meaningful work.
Jason being a manager himself challenges the current work culture with some interesting observations. Managers he says are often sceptical about employees working at home due to distractions like the TV, errands, people at home, pets etc but fail to understand that these distractions are voluntary as in the employee can choose not to be distracted by them. Whereas, at work the 2 major distractions ‘M & Ms’ as Jason refers to them, ie. Managers & Meetings are involuntary distractions. You can’t ignore your managers or refuse to attend a meeting. He also blames long meetings to be one of the major reasons for low productivity. What starts as a 10-minute meeting ends up gobbling up a couple of hours. When meetings don’t need more than 2 people and when 10 people are called for them, their time & work is lost and so productivity is lost!
There are 3 suggestions Jason gives managers to keep employees from getting distracted and enable them to actually get work done in the office premises.
-Like Casual Fridays, he suggests No Talking Thursday! Pick one Thursday in a month and declare the second half of that Thursday a No Talking Thursday. He is confident that people get a lot of work done when they don’t talk to each other.
– Avoid presentations or any other collaborative communication and stick to instant messaging and emails, unless a face-to-face interaction is really necessary. These online messaging platforms are quick, to-the-point & accessible to everyone at the same time.
– The third one might sound a little too extreme especially if you are one of those managers who depend on meetings for clarity. Jason suggests cancelling a meeting. ‘Just erase it from your memory he says’. He points out that people will eventually end up doing what they had to do anyway with or without the meeting. If this works he is sure that managers will ask themselves how much do they really need that meeting to get started.
So managers, instead of fueling Monday blues with a meeting, why not give your team some quiet time to think, ponder, wonder about the things they really want to accomplish! And with that kind of time & freedom-they surely will.
