Every Tuesday and Friday at my work, we have a "Good Morning Call". Sounds pleasant, doesn't it? A nice way to get remote teams together and have a nice chat over a coffee and croissant or something.
No. The Good Morning Call is possibly the ultimate example of a plague on modern workplaces: endless, needless, pointless meetings.
Ostensibly, the Good Morning Call is intended for our team and our overseas colleagues to catch up on the various projects that we're working on, but in practice what it tends to turn into is an hour or more of us listening to one person drone on and on as they simply read out what our online project management tool says. Anything that does get discussed tends to be a conversation between our overseas colleagues, who are all in the same office anyway.
I get that organisation is important, but so much time is wasted in meetings and conference calls these days — not just at my place of work, but pretty much everywhere. And it's one of those things I don't really understand; how did this happen? I don't know anyone who likes, enjoys or finds these meetings and conference calls valuable. I don't know anyone who would be sorry if they stopped being a thing. Even the people in charge of them seem bored shitless… so why are we doing them again?
Still, at least it's not as bad as the meetings I had to suffer while working at energy company SSE. Company policy dictated that each of those must begin with a "Safety Moment", which was where someone in the meeting explained something that made them "think about safety". (This usually ended up being someone whingeing about drivers on the road on the way to work.) SSE was obsessed with health and safety to a fault; you actually got reprimanded if you didn't hold the handrail going up stairs, so it's unsurprising their meetings would incorporate such mandatory asininity.
Oh, that and colouring in. On one particularly memorable occasion at SSE, we had a residential weekend that was ostensibly a conference, but at which we spent a significant portion of the time colouring in a poster about, you guessed it, safety.
I guess things could be worse.
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