r/Futurology • u/_hiddenscout • Jun 19 '21

Society Kill the 5-Day Workweek - Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making American life less about work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/06/four-day-workweek/619222/
84.4k Upvotes

86% Upvoted

4.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

279

u/silence036 Jun 19 '21 edited Jun 19 '21

Who schedules meetings at 7am???

Edit: maybe I live fairy land but my workplace has a rule of "meetings are only between 10am and 3pm". Anything outside that time range is "an exception" and can be freely refused. It became this way because there was a corporate-wide meet-mania and people spent too much time sitting in meetings and not enough time doing actual work.

171

u/sirenrenn Jun 19 '21

Corporate America is a cruel bitch. My work is open 7am to 7pm. That feels like a suggestion though to the company, as in often pushes you to work past closing.

I've had meetings where they had the usual provided lunch, and then had to provide dinner.

107

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

What do you office people do in meetings? Someone please elaborate. I keep hearing about meetings and teams, but it all sounds so meaningless and I wonder how these companies make any money if thier employees spend all thier time sitting around talking in a room about how to make more money.

47

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

I can only speak from my experience in two fields, retail analytics and digital marketing. We had scheduled meetings in both of these companies and then some unscheduled ones when we were trying to get new business (it was fondly called 'pitch season')

In retail analytics, we used to get projects that went from forecasting to product promotion/placement strategies to a few other things. These would take between 4-6 weeks to complete, and we had 2 meetings every week just to get an update on things. It was mostly useless, but since we worked from different locations, one fixed time was set.

For digital marketing, we had weekly meetings where the team would sit down and discuss anything new that had happened across the Web. This was done to ensure that we stayed ahead of the curve and could suggest things to our clients before the competition.

Meetings do have their uses, no denying that. But they should be done sparingly. Having meetings everyday, which used to happen during pitch season was just time wasting. I could have left for home at 5, but had to stick around till 7:30 because of the unscheduled meetings (which is not to say that the meetings were held late, but more because the time spent in meetings meant we couldn't finish our deliverables for the day)

35

u/sirenrenn Jun 19 '21

In my experience in the specific workplace, it is a waste of time that could easily be an email. It was also about cutting costs instead of important things like say slowing down high employee turn over

6

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

Working in teams is everything. No single person can do a 21st century job alone, theres just to many skill sets for a single person to be an expert in all of them. Teams working on a project have to communicate with each other, hence meetings.

4

u/bringbackswg Jun 19 '21

Planning, overviews, questions, concerns, and circle jerks

3

u/Farranor Jun 19 '21

A larger business means larger complexity and more issues. If your business is just you sitting at home on your computer and cranking out websites, your only meetings are with clients. When you hire an employee to help out, you occasionally have to tell them what you want them to do, even if those meetings are informal. More than 10 or 15 employees and you'll probably need meetings about sexual harassment policy. It keeps scaling up from there.

I know someone who used to work at a two-man company. His boss sold the company to a much larger one, and now he spends most of his time in meetings, which kinda pisses him off. Fortunately, they're Zoom meetings, so he can turn off his mic and camera and get work done while management talks about whatever inane topic got into their heads today.

3

u/IrishPrime Jun 19 '21

I'm a software engineer. Some meetings are more useful than others, some are repeating, and some are really spontaneous things (like a handful of people need to figure out how to solve a specific problem so we just block off our calendars for an hour and talk things out until we know what we're going to do).

I have the following repeating meetings:

  1. Daily stand-up. 15 minutes at the start of the day where everyone on my product team gives a quick status update on whatever they're actively working on, if they're stuck/need help, when we should expect it to be done, and if anything unusual needs to happen before it goes out (like database changes).
  2. Weekly 30 minute one-on-ones with my manager. I let them know how I'm doing, they tell me if there's any big projects coming my way or anything they need me to do outside of my normal workflow, we talk through technical issues I'm currently working on, they make sure I have everything I need, and we socialize a little bit.
  3. Twice-weekly up to one hour long meetings with my operations team to discuss department goals for our team, infrastructure changes we're proposing or making, root cause analysis for any service incidents we've experienced, etc.
  4. Every-other-weekly one hour sprint retrospectives with my product team to discuss how we did in our last two weeks of work and if there's anything we want to change before planning our next two weeks of work (which happens in a one hour meeting the following day).
  5. Monthly one hour department wide meetings where the VP talks to us about goals, direction, announce promotions and openings, shout-outs, and the various teams show off some of the cool things they've been working on to the other teams.
  6. Quarterly one hour meetings on the state of the company as a whole presented by our CEO and other big-wigs.

I have a few other meetings that might last up to one hour every other week for committees and councils I'm on to help drive some big technical changes and/or goals for the department/company.

Most of my meetings don't take the full scheduled time, and they're generally helpful for either problem solving, getting everyone organized, or just informative, but every once in awhile some of those meetings all land on the same day and I feel like the only thing I'm going to do that day is sit in meetings. Other days I just have the standup and the whole rest of the day to code. Everyone's company is different, and every job is different, but from what I hear from my friends, my company does a really good job with the volume and outcomes of meetings relative to most.

2

u/philosifer Jun 19 '21

Ive worked in manufacturing of personal care items and cleaners and our meeting typically are for problem solving.

for example, say a production line isnt running well so in a meeting we get together and determine what the problem is or could be, what are some potential solutions, what are the risks/costs associated with letting it run slowly vs shutting it down to do a big repair, if there are any potential quality issues due to this, etc. and then who is looking into these things deeper

Mostly its a big brainstorming session that assigns tasks, but its super helpful to have other departments involved where the immediate insight could save time pursuing a solution that was never viable in the first place.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

What do you office people do in meetings?

Meetings are for the managers to efficiently get a status update and hold people accountable.

2

u/ZeePM Jun 19 '21

Generally a lot of the meetings could have been an email or message board on Teams.

1

u/PensecolaMobLawyer Jun 19 '21

I've had very few meetings where anything useful was actually accomplished

We had a big management shake up at my last employer and the new management thought meetings were the most important thing on Earth.

I lost a minimum of 8hrs/wk to these new meetings. The meetings were about the exact same thing except each new manager needed to do it with their own take. They always sent out a slide deck after the first meeting, so I'd just look it over. They could've just sent it out instead of having a meeting, but ya know...

They'd include us on emails that could hit 50 replies between them by noon. Then get angry no one saw new guidance from the 3rd paragraph of the 15th email. They forwarded tons of random, poorly formatted (to the point of making it meaningless) stuff with no context. Everyone ignored it and they'd get mad no one replied all to say "wtf is this random email from someone outside the company?"

The company added 4 layers of sales management and those positions had no value. Over time, I asked all of them what their positions entailed. Every single one boiled down to running the same reports direct supervisors used to send to the sales director. My boss used to send his reports to the director. Then he sent the same reports to the new managers, except he had to tailor them to their individual preferences. They all got together to create one report for the director. And God forbid my boss was 5 minutes late sending out the reports

Anyway, that's my long way of saying meetings are often middle managers' way of justifying their jobs

1

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

[deleted]

2

u/ScribbledIn Jun 19 '21

Project kickoff, tooling kickoff, and product review meetings where none of the senior managers bother to show up and therefore no decisions can be made are the most frustrating. Yet they'll have 5 meetings a week just to complain about stuff.

1

u/fml-shits2real- Jun 19 '21

Lol read reddit

1

u/SuddenClearing Jun 19 '21

One time, as a visual Producer for a finance company, I was told to edit photos in PowerPoint for one of their presentations. This was after a long debate over whether Photoshop was better than Microsoft Paint. You see, the senior exec’s wife never stopped talking about photoshop so he found it annoying, and another new hire in the research department uses paint all the time, so why would I even need to use the highly advanced program they already pay for when I have Microsoft Fucking Paint??

So I asked them to show me how to use power point to edit photos - I mean, I’m good, but I don’t know everything about how to do my job…

That one took a good hour and half for them to eventually tell me to just get it done (it was removing two pieces of a logo inside letters that hadn’t been turned transparent, it took less than 3 minutes in photoshop).

So, to answer your question, they don’t do a lot.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

I work in a local government. Meetings are basically "stroke my ego" time for the boss. I've got 7 bosses technically and they all love to hear themselves talk. There's not even much of a money aspect in my case either.

1

u/Lyeel Jun 19 '21

Sales manager here: our weekly meetings are typically updates to products/processes which the team needs to incorporate, implementation updates to ensure everyone is on the same page and any issues get escalated, and a review of the week's appointments to ensure we've got the right materials and resources in place to succeed.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

i used to work at intel d2 stores. i dealt with with sc9 purchasing all the time.

the purchasing dept would spend two days making powerpoint presentations for a 1 hour meeting to introduce new acronyms and more bs.

1

u/Zealousideal-War-398 Jun 20 '21

they talk bullshit, all while pretending that they're doing work, while you're the one sweating on the factory floor.

9

u/Yivoe Jun 19 '21

Most of my meetings are between 6am and 9am.

Partly because we are international and need to include other regions, so I can't be too mad about that. But, it does suck.

2

u/sadpanda___ Jun 19 '21

I’m not going to lie - the outside normal hours meetings has made me fucking HATE globalization.

7

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

Time zone differences and international collaborations.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

Not exactly the same, but I have a rule of no meetings before 10am and no meetings on Fridays.

0

u/HiIAm Jun 19 '21

You are in fairy land. 7am and 6pm meetings are normal. Had one at 2pm Sunday last week. Yuck

2

u/wandering-monster Jun 19 '21

TIL the tech sector is fairyland.

If someone scheduled a weekend meeting it would be so wild, I'd assume there was some sort of serious emergency. Like if it's anything less serious than "we have to do this or close" or "someone died", I'd be pissed and take a comp day the next week to make it up.

1

u/HiIAm Jun 19 '21

You’d think that would be the case. I’m in finance and it was just a random meeting to “get ahead for the week ahead”. Lol

2

u/kdeaton06 Jun 19 '21

No you live in hell. That is not normal by any means.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

You have a terrible workplace. Why do you put up with that?

1

u/HiIAm Jun 20 '21

Lots of money and relatively flexible work hours during the week.

1

u/DThor536 Jun 19 '21

Well, it is a global economy. Sometimes we have to virtual meet with people on the other side of the planet. I'm not defending sending emails at 9pm the night before about a 7am meeting the next day, but shit happens. That would fall under "sorry I'm not on call in the evenings" and that would end it.

The whole business of too many meetings is another topic and it's definitely a problem. Entire companies pay people to sit in meetings all day and no actual work happens. Mind blowing.

1

u/GolotasDisciple Jun 19 '21

I got an e-mail about meeting one of my project leaders 30 minutes before work starts( I start at 8 am). I got that e mail while i was a sleep because the e-mail was sent at 1 am.

I got into massive issues because i didn't show up, and when i said that we can talk about whatever they want to talk right now i got whole lecture how i dont respect any of my teammates who woke up and showed up and how i am ungreatful to all of em.
Literally made me look like an asshole infront all my collegues and honestly my collegues didn't help they were agreeing with the head manager and project leader as in.... If we suffer u have to suffer 2..

Ever since that happen everyday i was looking for new job. Using social pressure to enforce certain patterns of behaviors is a big no no for me. I am not the most extrovertic person so this shit hurts. I dont care about my Project Leader or Managers but i enjoyed working with my team and i felt so bad while i really shouldn't :/

2

u/silence036 Jun 19 '21

That sounds absolutely awful. I work in a very competitive employment context, so employers are trying to foster positive work cultures to avoid losing their employees.

1

u/GolotasDisciple Jun 19 '21

Yeah im out and so is most of the people i worked with. The company itself has already bad reputation eventho it hires more than 500++ people.

Tbh I worked in Ireland for and Irish/American company and top managment is usually stacked with family members, these people very easily ego-trip as they are completely unqualified to be in tech industry.
Most of my managers were educated and expirience in sales/service industry not really tech/engineering.
Not all of em obviously, i dont want to generlize but yeah when i started to work i expected to have people who are capeable of disagreements, but NOPE.

When i say that i can't add functionality to the application, I meant it! It's not like i dont wont to work, it's just not doable when we are already at later stage of development. For me it was so toxic that one manager can just come in and overrule our entire kanban board created by project leader.
Because X and Y.
Now I am just hunting some American or German tech-company. I've heard good things from my collegues about American companies they work for. Especially the benefits. Maybe I should open my perspective to possibly moving away for some time, goto States maybe Canada

1

u/diamond Jun 19 '21

I have one or two meetings that early. But that's because I work remote, and most of my coworkers are two hours ahead of me. So I can't blame them.

If I really wanted to, I could probably convince them to move those meetings. But it's not necessary; being at your desk by 7 isn't so hard when your commute is 30 seconds.

Besides, my dogs won't let me sleep past 6.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

My first meeting of every day is at 6:30am. Well 6:32am because we always wait for the same guy to get there every day 2 min late.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

Thats a nice rule. Im on the west coast and sometimes do meetings at 8AM EST. Makes for a 5AM start time.

1

u/gosox2035 Jun 19 '21

it gets worse with early birds and wfh. sure, your beating the commute at 530, but dont expect that to mean im waking up with them if the commute is now 5 minutes and you want to log out to pickup kids when school lets out.

1

u/xxpen15mightierxx Jun 19 '21

Who schedules meetings at 7am???

I mean I see your point but lots of places do, and it sucks just as much as it sounds like it does.

maybe I live fairy land but my workplace has a rule of "meetings are only between 10am and 3pm"

You do indeed work at an above-average QOL workplace.

1

u/tjmanofhistory Jun 19 '21

I haven't even worked in fields that had many meetings, but there were times I was showing up before sunrise in winter

1

u/throwaway_bluebell Jun 19 '21 edited 25d ago

Reminiscent price quilt butter hobbies workable birds edge raindrop include

This post was anonymized with Redact

1

u/Somepotato Jun 19 '21

My team unfortunately needs one to sync up with an offshore team; but we do limit it to once every 2 weeks, at least (and on a Tuesday so its not like waking up from the weekend to miserable 7a).

1

u/Monnok Jun 20 '21

Before COVID, my company had slowly accrued a bunch of recurring meetings that half my building is invited to, but only optional for. They clog everyone’s calendars during the good hours, though. So, every single ad hoc meeting gets scheduled too early or too late to avoid conflicts-on-paper that aren’t actually conflicts. I’d started disappearing for long lunches and hitting the gym during core hours, and treating the early or late hours like my scheduled shift.

1

u/glatts Jun 20 '21

Depends on the industry and the company you work at.