Obligatory meetings

Every two or three months there are meetings at my office for the entire department, about a hundred people. These meetings are pointless, and were exercises in misery until the organizers got more strict about time limits.

Incompetence at public speaking doesn't help, of course. Each of thse meetings has about half a dozen speakers, and about half of them or fewer are competent at it. Oddly enough, one-time speakers generally do better than the regulars, maybe because if you speak in public annually or less you'll prepare for it, whereas if you do it more regularly you won't bother to, even if you really should.

Besides that, though, the meetings themselves are pointless. It's not like an hour or two every few months is a huge ordeal, but given that we're going to have them, why have so much pointless stuff in them? Meetings start with announcements of arrivals, departures and commendations for either going above and beyond on specific projects, or general milestones of years of working for this agency. It's nice to know that kind of thing, but the solemnity of such ceremonies is spoiled somewhat when people don't bother to show up for them. Really, call me rude and insensitive, I know lots of people care about things I don't care about and vice versa, but at June's meeting nine people were recognized for something or other and at least three of them (my notes are vague) didn't respond when their name was read because they weren't there. So how much am I supposed to care about that stuff if the people in question don't show up and the presenters don't know about it until they call the name and see no response?

And then there are presentations on what certain groups are doing. For every meeting, two speakers from certain project teams, sub-departments, low-level offices or whatever are selected to give five-minute presentations about what their group is doing, with PowerPoint slides. They stand up, click through slides, and talk in layman's terms about what they're doing and why. I'm pretty sure management asks for these presentations just out of a general belief that it fosters a sense of community or something. Again, this seems like it might be interesting, but isn't worth the time of everyone in the room.

Finally, we get to announcements that actually matter, like changes of policy in higher levels of government. For example, a January executive order increased scrutiny of regulatory burdens on the public, and at the June meeting an economist stood up and talked a bit about what that has meant for our agency and what it probably will mean, now that we have a few months of experience with it. No announcement is of interest to everyone, and anyone who does need to know about this kind of thing needs to know in more detail than can be covered in a large meeting and probably has already heard before the quarterly meeting anyway, but still, this is useful stuff I'm glad to hear about.

I probably couldn't get away with walking into an hour-long meeting 45 minutes late, though.