> If there’s the chance that someone can multitask at a meeting easily and very effectively, maybe they don’t need to be at the meeting?
Speaking from personal experience, you often don’t have control over this. If I don’t attend meetings I get invited to, it’s seen as a lack of interest and being disrespectful. So I attend them to show my face, and then just do my regular work.
And if I don’t, then people stop inviting me all together and assume I’m not on the project anymore. That leaves me with little choice.
The whole thing about “leave meetings where you’re not needed”, only really works when you’re in a position of power.
> It isn’t nearly as easy to connect to people outside the workplace.
I think this is absolute core of the discussion. Like nearly all bad decisions ultimately it comes down to convenience. If this form of political discourse were as important as people claim they would find a way.
> while pretending to still be present is kind of a drawback of online meeting Vs in-person meetings. Lack of focus is a killer for productivity.
Have you been in meetings before online? People were on their phones and laptops all of the time then too.
If strapping horse blinders to your employees’ heads during all meetings is the solution to keep their attention, you have bigger cultural issues at hand.
> I want to be able to quickly resolve any issues in person, not over voice call or slack
If you mean this literally (i.e. walk over to someone's desk/office the moment you have an issue to resolve), this is highly disruptive and partially the reason why some people hate going into the office, particularly engineers.
I understand some people prefer to meet in person but it's not an absolute necessity.
> If everyone has their own office, then someone coming into your office is an everyday affair.
Why don't you introduce the rule that entering another office is only allowed for scheduled appointments and emergency cases (life is in danger or the production server crashed).
> Someone calls a meeting and 5 people show up, each carrying a laptop
So ban laptops from meetings (aside from the person taking the minutes).
If a meeting requires my undivided attention, my laptop is going to be useless anyway. If it does not require my undivided attention, I shouldn't be in that meeting in the first place.
> where I comically have to use the same technology to talk to people in other offices.
For my current company, I have no team members in my local office. So for the short period where I was going into the office, I never had an in person meeting.
> There are some who believe that meetings are work.
Meetings are work. Not practical work, but management work, which is very valuable to coordinate and unify efforts.
I agree, though, that there are people who like meetings for meetings's sake, and those waste eveyone's time. In my experience, they're usually executives with little practical background. They use meetings primarily for politics/socialization, and have the power to summon as many meetings as they wish.
>My assumption is that if you're in the meeting, it has some adjacency to your work.
This assumption does not match up with my experience.
>If the meeting isn't germane to your work, why are you in it?
I personally have gotten pretty good about declining meetings, but plenty of people aren't. Besides, I've been occasionally asked by my direct manager to attend a meeting that it turns out I wasn't actually needed at or remotely interested in for my work.
It would be nice to live in a world where meetings worked ideally and there weren't a bunch of people there wasting their own time, but that is sadly not the world we live in.
> ...you have a different and much more complicated concern.
That concern seems to disappear when I attend meetings seemingly all on phone and webex and that goes for at least half a day. Company never flies me to meet folks in other offices in different cities face to face.
>They make it impossible to have impromptu discussions that have any sensitive aspect to them.
The only place I ever worked with an open floor plan, I worked as a security analyst/engineer. Behind me were contracted programmers from various outsourcing firms who could see my screens and hear my conversations when discussing sensitive security issues.
So much time was wasted trying to find an empty conference room for an impromptu discussion about an active security incident.
> And I don’t think it’s symmetrical: WFH people don’t have a reason to insist that their colleagues WFH.
Kind of, though. If a single person wants to attend a meeting remotely, that forces everyone to talk to them remotely, which may be seen as the worst of both worlds by people at the office: commute to the office, and get bad quality (often worse than everyone remote) remote meetings.
> What would have been a 1:1 over coffee or a corridor huddle now needs a meeting room reservation, and there aren't nearly enough of them to go around.
Genuinely curious because I’ve yet to encounter this myself - but why would you need a meeting for something like this? Can you not just ask your colleague via slack, teams, etc? Or better yet, can either of you write up a proposal and put out a RFC on it? That way there’s no burden of having a meeting just to discuss something?
Sorry if that comes off rude. I’m just genuinely curious what you’d need to meet about.
I mostly don't do that in an office but I do for traveling/events which are pretty much off the table for an indefinite time. I meet far more of my colleagues at events than I do at my company offices. That's the difficult thing for me right now.
And woe to those who need to take a conference call with multiple of their desk neighbors but no conference rooms are available. Nothing like a bunch of people all sitting next to each other talking on the same phone call.
Why companies would implement an open office without a plethora of private meeting spaces is beyond me.
Don't you wonder why politicians hold town meetings in person?
Edit: Also, if your org doesn't require personal presence it is vulnerable to some attacks.
reply