> Are people afraid of speaking out against meetings or declining them?

Depending on org culture, being direct about opting out of meetings can cast you in a negative light at best, or put your job at risk at worst.

The better the culture is around creating safety to be direct and have agency to do so, the less likely these hacks are needed.

I’m am very blunt with the dozen or so people who report up to me: if you don’t think you need to be in a meeting, say so, and drop me a message if I might have to defend the decision across the org or manage up. But all orgs are different along with their politics and quality of middle management.

Right, in most cases it’s not worth it to burn a bridge by being the one person willing to speak up (especially when you can just go camera off and work on something else). There is a collective action problem where nobody wants to be the first to “defect” even if most do.

And IME the useless meeting problem is pretty common when you have an ineffective manager who likes to “hold court” with as many cross team stakeholders as possible. You probably aren’t close enough to candidly tell them the meeting structure needs to change or just to cancel the recurring meeting, you need to be on their good terms because you work with them relatively often and ask favors of each other, the worst your or their team is doing the more you need the meeting as evidence of crossteam collaboration…

At any company you’re going to end up with this problem, maybe at a startup its easier to communicate frankly and weed out the type of person who would do this, but I think it’s still quite possible for an otherwise good employee to make the mistake of creating inefficient meetings/processes where everyone is too nice or polite to give candid feedback.

I was always willing to risk my job over this. I’d rather have to find a job again than spend 10 hours a week in pointless meetings.

I have done what you describe in the last paragraph, and also cancelled team meetings or sent a single representative. I also sent people back to their seats halfway through a meeting if it no longer concerned them. I have no regrets. Nobody complained. My team seemed to appreciate it.

Sound like an org culture you better avoid. Seriously, what good is an employee if it isn't allowed to state your disapproval constructively. You wouldn't ever get an honest answer this way about anything more important than the next meeting.

It’s not that simple, for example I work with several different teams, some of the teams have recurring meetings that they expect me to attend to varying degrees. In one case I’m only needed about 25% of the time and even then only for 5-10% of the meeting, and 33% of the time the meeting is just cancelled a few hours in advance by the manager who runs it. But the manager for that team is kinda pointy-haired, so if I just stopped showing up he’d eventually talk with my manager and be like “we need a representative from your team at this meeting and X stopped showing up, what gives?”, my manager would know already that the meeting is useless for me, but the incentives are such that it’s easiest if I just go (because if I refuse he’d have to go himself and/or send someone less equipped to help).

The actual feedback my manager and I would both want to give is “this meeting is in practice just <other team’s manager> giving and getting a status update we don’t need to be present for, then asking us questions for his projects, we’d rather it be more collaborative or less frequent” but that would hurt that other manager’s feelings. And we need their buy in to help us with things sometimes. And probably we dominate meetings sometimes that the pointy haired guy (or members of his team) goes to anyway. It’s kinda aggro to just refuse to let him hold court and it might burn a bridge we need to be maintained…

I’ve seen the same thing happen with a TL or manager who tries to force a really inefficient process like 30-60m 10+ person standup every day. Yes to an extent status updates are necessary but in this other case the manager is even pointier haired and has no idea how to manage, his ICs are actually quite talented, this is just his way to hold court.

With anonymous meeting feedback you can have a better way of surfacing a signal that the meeting isn’t valuable to most attendees. And you avoid foisting the political risk on whoever is bravest enough to speak out. I know you might think all these failure modes I mentioned are just big company politics, but I think they can happen in basically any situation where there is a power imbalance (even a little startup with a ceo insisting on an excess of meetings with the 4 other employees).

Maybe 5% of meetings are useful, in my experience. But when you are calling out 95% of meetings to be cancelled, well… it’s a bad look. You’re not a team player. You are being negative. It especially looks bad to managers who rely on meetings to give themselves the appearance of doing something.

I brought this up with my manager the other day. He basically said no one is counting how many meetings I go to. Just decline and don't go. And that's what I've done. And no one has given me shit so.. works for me I guess.

You miss out on the few decisions that get made doing this. It's like remote work, everyone needs to be on board or it doesn't work. Unless your truly don't care about anything that goes on.

This. I also tend to skip optional, often 99% pointless meetings, but then weird tribal knowledge appears that I'm out of the loop on.

Well.. I'm not skipping everything. Mostly just 'status update' style meetings so far. If the agenda looks interesting or relevant I go. And everyone seems to be pretty clueless about what's going on regardless. Too many people, too many moving parts.

So maybe call out like the 10% of worst offenders/time consumers?

It may depend on the function of meetings at an organization. If it's a practical thing among peers, then sure, nothing wrong with saying, "I don't have anything this week; can we skip it?" But in a lot of places, meetings are more an expression of primate dominance dynamics. How's a boss going to feel important if they don't have a lot of people in a room listening to them blather?

There are a lot of better and more specific answers about canceling and how useful meetings are.

I can give you an insight into one way to measure that. (Like every time you measure things with a normative proxy, this gets far more controversial than you’d like or expect very fast.)

Measure the speaking time for everyone.

How is that controversial?

Well, you can ask what the goal of the meeting is, but if the point is “discussion” and the boss talked 94% of the time, we are in “this meeting could have been an email” territory. Because the boss is very much a listener, as he likes to remind people, that isn’t a great look. Or rather, whoever suggested to measure who is speaking isn’t a great fit for the team.

I tend to be the one complaining the loudest, but after a while I don't want to be the only one doing so so I have stopped. I think others agree but are too afraid to speak out. Something like this would be a good tool. Although no way it passes security requirements.

It really depends on who is making the meetings and what they want. When the division executive director invites me to a meeting, I might dislike it, but I'm going to show up.

software companies suck so bad, in part because so many normal human interactions get shoved into different apps.