At my soon to be ex-company department of 70-ish, there are 5 people who sign off timesheets, holiday requests and sickness notifications, hold team meetings, do individual performance appraisals, attend managers’ meetings and sometimes hold a weekly department huddle.
They invariably claim they’re too busy to do anything mangerial you ask them to help with but are often hard to contact when working from home. The admin tasks listed could be done by a cheap team of 2 admin assistants; the other tasks aren’t valuable let alone necessary. They exist solely to provide ballast for a management structure built to justify the salaries of those above them.
They are aware of this, of course, so justify their existence by standing in front of Powerpoints talking bollocks about something every couple of weeks that cause attendees to walk away groaning.
I think this goes a bit too far but would be true of like 95% of meetings. It’s also true 99.99% of meetings should be shorter. I’m a meeting nazi when it comes to agenda and who needs to attend. If it’s not 100% relevant you don’t come. If you think it should be 30 min it can accomplished in 15 min.
Not sure if this only applies to my job but there is exactly one technique that I find that works to have a good meeting.
Assign the task to one person to summarize the issue, options, and make a recommendation.
Insist that meeting participants read the email, memo, or whatever before showing up. Even use the first 15 minutes to force everyone to read it if necessary.
Debate the conclusion and decide on next steps.
This requires discipline but it works. Most of the waste in meetings is from people shooting the shit and going off topic and airing grievances and WHATABOUTing for no useful purpose.
This probably means that you’re good at organizing the activities of others. One of the things that drives me crazy about 21st century corporate work is that people change companies so frequently now that you often end up with people supervising people where the supervisors don’t actually have any ideas how the work gets done. There’s something to be said for the old school way of business where people stayed at a place for a while so there was a good chance that your manager used to do your job. Nowadays too many managers are just people that have been taught to so manager stuff - make “inspiring” speeches at team meetings, talk about disruption, talk about culture. I dont think it’s a coincidence that all these activities can be conducted by a person that doesnt know anything.