One thing that companies should never do is hire time consultants. We did at Sara Lee and it was a disaster for management. The FIRST thing they recommended was that we cut the number of meetings. It sounds good but meetings are a chance for managers to preen and demonstrate their authority. There was never any need for technical people (like me) to be there. I was one of the people who left every day at 5PM. The difference between me and the people who left at 7PM was that I never attended meetings. My time was completely spent on productive work. My cowowrker was the same way. Every other department had 5 programmers and we only had two. Later it changed to one. We were able to do that because we sat at our desk and worked.
When I went to a larger company, we had to endure 3 hour meetings with 40 people in the meeting. 40 people!!! You can’t do anything with 40 people in a room. We ended up getting coworkers to page us out on our beepers so we could go back to work.
I will never work for a larger company again.
One of my previous employers was a large, regional bank. The meetings were as you described - huge chunks of time wasted with way too many people. I recall several meetings which ended up being for the sole purpose of scheduling other meetings.
Oddly, a few jobs later I ended up as a consultant at the very same bank. I still got pulled into meetings, but since they were billable hours, I frankly didn’t care. What I noticed, however, was that the company had hired a bunch of talented technical people. Then they took those people and subjected them to meetings upon meetings to the point that more than half the day was spent somewhere meeting about something, and the rest of the time was spent following up on the previous meeting or preparing for the next. They ended up hiring me and my consulting peers to do the jobs that their regular employees were hired to do, and wanted to do, but weren’t allowed to do.
Obviously, in that environment, cooperation with consultants doesn’t flow freely, which just meant that more consultants were hired on. It was a huge cluster fiasco.
It finally got so bad that our company started pointing out how this was costing them boatloads of money and our staff was getting tired of doing “in-house” work when we all wanted to work in our own specialties.
I left shortly after Y2K to go inhouse somewhere else. I doubt much has changed and from my peers in the business, just about every large organization has various degrees of similarity.
I couldn’t agree more re hiring time consultants, efficiency experts, staffing consultants, etc...especially when (as I have personally experienced) senior mgmt. already has its mind made up about what they will and won’t change. Makes you wonder why they hired them in the first place (can you say “reciprocal agreement”?)
Of the countless meetings I’ve endured, a few have actually been productive...but only when the group was small, the subject matter narrowly focused, the agenda carefully followed, and the clock was closely watched. The rest were black holes where time and enthusiasm go to die.