Several years ago I did some work for a large, bureaucratic utility that had only recently been privatized from being a governmental organization. In some ways, they made the transition to a private enterprise well, but many old bad habits from a public sector culture refused to die.
Perhaps most obvious to those of us from outside the culture was the quantity and poor quality of the meetings. It is not an exaggeration to say that many managers spent every day listlessly drifting from meeting to meeting, and occasionally answered an email in between. This was loosely described as “work”.
Most often, when a meeting was scheduled for 10:00, I would be the only one in the room, causing me to behave like Dustin Hoffman’s Rainman, checking my calendar to make sure I had the right time and place, and repeating the meeting request over and over to myself. I quickly discovered that I needed to run all appointments through the special Bureaucratic Decoder. Here’s the formula:
- Meetings that start before 9am are entirely contingent upon traffic and weather. If either one is not cooperating, the meeting will start at 9.30 at the earliest, and perhaps won’t occur at all if conditions are adverse.
- Normally scheduled meetings between 10am and 3pm will start at fifteen minutes past the scheduled time to allow people time to use the bathroom, get coffee, and arrive at the meeting. There may be some stragglers, so time was allocated to bring all people up to speed as they drifted into the meeting. For those there on time, they may have to listen to the recap four times before everyone is there, so it was generally agreed that showing up on time was a bad idea.
- If anyone had a meeting scheduled prior to your scheduled meeting, they would be at least 30 minutes late, because the previous meeting would never end on time, and they need their fifteen minute “transition buffer” (see bullet above).
- If you scheduled a meeting for after 3.00pm, it was considered optional. This is because all meetings started late, and ended late, and there was no guarantee that this meeting would be over by quitting time, which was the only appointment that was regularly respected in the organization.
It sounds frustrating, but the spotty attendance at meetings actually worked out well. Rarely were decisions made, and there certainly was no collaboration. The most important thing was maintaining the status quo, and any attempt at the smallest change was put down faster than rabid Rottweiler next door to a daycare.
If this sounds like your organization, then you better hope you don’t have to compete in the open market. You’ll be put out of your misery faster than the dog I mentioned above. In many cases, meetings are a necessary evil at best, and don’t do anything to move the business forward.
Governmental organizations and big utilities may be able to afford such excess… your organization probably can’t.
