Hello and welcome.
It's another Monday afternoon, evening,
morning, depending on
where you are listening into.
And we are recording Yves
Just Chatting, Episode 29.
We are going to cover the topic today.
Be respectful with other people's time,
something which is very
dear to my heart, actually,
and is something which I just had a
discussion on a management
seminar the other week about.
And it's kind of funny that we seem to
actually think that it's
getting more and more the
norm and more and more the accepted
factor, that being late or
showing up late for a meeting,
delivering things late is actually
becoming acceptable or
should be more acceptable from
that perspective.
So let me start off by putting in my,
let's say, two, three,
four, five cents into this
spot.
Imagine you have ten people sitting in a
meeting and a majority of
people show up five minutes
late.
But some people are there in time where I
actually ready to start at time, which is
another very, very interesting factor,
which we see lately even
more is even though people
might show up for a meeting in
time, they might not be ready.
They first actually show up for the
meeting, then say, oh,
I'm going to quickly hit the
restroom, or I'm quickly
going to grab a coffee, or...
So the point is some other people are
actually sitting in the
room, prepared for the meeting,
took the time for it, and actually
prepare and are willing to
actually get the work done.
The challenge is that if everybody is
actually going to be
anticipating to start later, that
is actually why we see more and more in
this corporate world
that meetings get planned
longer and longer and longer because the
expectation by now is that
for the first five, ten, fifteen
minutes, nothing is going to get done
during any of these meetings.
This is something from my perspective
which we desperately need to change.
I know that one part why we are having
this issue nowadays is
still something which we
got out of the pandemic because the
pandemic made a massive change.
Before the pandemic, in many business
areas, in-person
meetings were the go-to scenario
to solve most problems.
There was more or less no simple scenario
that you could
actually get away in trying
to do everything
completely over remote sessions.
Pandemic changed that.
The pandemic changed it in a way that
people were all of the
sudden perfectly fine with
running Zoom and Teams meetings.
And with having Zoom or Teams meetings,
that is actually was the
point where people started
to actually get into the scenario that
you had to deal with the
fact that you had back-to-back
meetings which caused other problems.
So people were scheduling from 9 a.m. to
5 p.m. back-to-back meetings.
Some people even forgot to cover for
their lunch break or anything else.
And as we are walking through this and as
people were walking
through this, people then
identified as like, yeah, there is an
important meetings which
I should enable in Zoom or
Teams or anything else which blocks off
time before and after each meeting.
And that actually
partially solved the problem.
But in the end, people figured out that
they never got their work
done because they actually
spent too much time
back-to-back in these meetings.
Let me quickly jump onto one of the
questions which we just
reached from the audience.
So first and foremost, why
are there not more participants?
These are live recordings of the podcast.
So it's not primarily targeted towards
being a massive online
seminar or something like
that.
It's just something we
do to make it possible.
From an audience perspective, the Eve
Trust chatting sessions
are typically set up for
a generic audience which is interested in
entrepreneurship,
company management and things
like that.
And it's not necessarily around the
comdivision or
VMware space, but from time to
time we cover that as well.
Okay.
Back to the topic of the day.
So the pandemic actually
makes things worse and worse.
And you had more and more people actually
not show up on time for a meeting because
the last meeting went over.
So actually everything in
the following became a problem.
So what we see more and more is that as
we are actually evolving
out of the time outside
of the pandemic, is that we are actually
moving into a scenario
which finally brings us to
the point that people are showing up late
for in-person meetings.
And also as people are showing up late
for in-person
meetings, we also see delays on
other meetings, et cetera.
So one of the important things moving
forward, especially as we
are trying to fix, let's
say the corporate world, and I see this
happening in more and more
organizations from the get-go,
is that A, people start planning for more
break times in between meetings, which is
one of the important things.
And then it's actually no longer an
acceptable fact that
you're actually showing up late
for any type of meeting.
So from that perspective, you might
actually show up to a
meeting and it might actually
not be on time or something else.
So what I see more and more people
actually from a meeting
management perspective do now
is that people are actually going to
start getting into a
meeting, the attempt is, and
we actually try to create the rules
within Convivision, for
example, by ourselves as
well, where we try to set it up and
actually say, it's like,
me, you should actually be
in the meeting late just five minutes
before the meeting starts.
You should actually be prepared, ideally
close email, close
teams, as long as you're not
using it for the meeting itself, and
everything else so that
you're focused for the meeting
in person.
And for example, I also in my meeting
room or in my office
actually have a separate chair,
which when I know that I don't
desperately need my computer for the
meetings, I'm actually
going to use them.
So one of the things which we are trying
to establish and which
many other corporations
are nowadays establishing as well is that
meetings again start on
time, which also means
that as you're getting into a meeting, if
you are coming late,
you might have missed
the first few minutes.
So we started that, for example, for our
weekly standup meetings
in comdivision as well, is
that is on Friday, 8 30 a.m.
The meeting starts at 8 30 a.m.
Should people for whatever reason come in
later, their topics are going to be moved
further down the pipeline.
So for example, we go through the list of
projects, typically,
yeah, not necessarily
always in the open meeting order.
But if you're actually going to attend a
meeting and it's and you're
the first one being called
out for that standup item, then in that
specific scenario, I mean,
if you're not there, your
topics are going to be moved further down
to the towards the end so that others who
are there and who are in time can
actually follow along and
actually join for that meeting.
So this actually helped us to
start these meetings on time.
And while up until I think last year, we
had two meetings a
week, we actually were able
to reduce the standups down to one
meeting week so that we
can actually cover more in
one specific meeting.
So exactly a 30 that meeting starts.
And believe it or not, more than half the
people are typically in
the meeting room already.
Before the meeting starts, it's also very
common now that we
have rules in place which
actually say that if you can't actually
cover or if there is a
topic which shouldn't be
part of the meeting, then you should
actually be able to move
that topic to later to the
end of the meeting.
So what's going to happen is the your
meeting actually goes,
let's take our Friday standup
meeting.
All the topics of the
meeting are going to be covered.
If someone, let's say Gerhard or Matthias
is actually covering
something where he says,
oh, I need the
following two or three people.
If you have time, if you could stay at
the end of the meeting,
then we can quickly cover
our topic there.
These things work perfectly well,
especially as nowadays our
standup meeting is shorter
than the planned timeframe.
And so from that perspective, we cover
everything in time, then
people have some off topics
can actually come on them later.
We also integrated in our company
something which is, I
think, a three weekly or four
weekly, like virtual beers evening, which
is something where
people can come together
and just actually talk out
whatever is on their mind.
And it's not nothing work related.
It could be around other topics.
It could be around something going on in
the world or whatever else.
And I think that's great thing as well to
reduce a lot of that
chit chat talk out of
the standard meetings.
So this is something where you can
actually work with corporate meeting
culture and actually
make this a more attractive scenario and
actually get more people
into attending meetings from
that perspective.
I wouldn't go as extreme as, for example,
Amazon does it where every meeting starts
with several minutes of silence so that
people could actually read
through the meeting notes
beforehand because let's be honest, let's
face it in most corporations, even if you
send out a comprehensive document before
the meeting, in many,
many cases, people are not
going to read it up front.
Amazon also bent powerpoints
out of out of most meetings.
And to be honest, I like
the idea more and more.
We try to reduce them and get them out of
as many meetings as possible.
But also when we are doing product
demonstrations and stuff
like that, we are utilizing real
life demos.
That is far more
convincing for customers.
It's actually bringing
us faster to the point.
And this is also something which we
utilize as part of our architecture
meetings and architecture
workshops where during these architecture
workshops, we are then
automatically pulling
people in and showcase them how we have
done a reference
implementation and then discuss
around the topic.
As proven to be far more effective from a
people's time scale perspective, that you
could actually attend
from that perspective.
So all of these different topics are
helping corporations to
grow and actually be more
effective during their meetings.
The other thing is from being respectful
with other people's time,
if you are actually asking
for someone else's time, give them a bit
of a heads up of what
you want to talk about.
So something again, which we established
in our cooperation over
the last couple of years
is there is no meeting
without an agenda anymore.
It doesn't need to be a complex agenda.
For example, for me,
it makes a difference.
If someone says, hey, I have a paragraph
and a quote or SOW or
something else, which I
just want to cover, then that might be
something we can cover in five minutes.
If someone says, oh, I'm struggling with
this customer, I need
more help and I need actually
more people to visit this one, then I can
foresee this is going
to be half an hour to
an hour.
So I need a bigger time window to
actually squeeze that in my day.
What I try to avoid and what everybody
else tries to avoid
within convolution as well
is trying to get away of having meetings
with follow up meetings.
Ideally everybody comes to a meeting in a
prepared way so that
you can actually cover
everything in that meeting and then
actually don't need any
follow up meeting or anything
like that anymore from that perspective.
So again, something to be more helpful
from a timing
perspective and be more respectful
from an overall time.
The other thing which we discussed on the
management training
week or two ago was that
we covered how are we going to deal with
or what is the scenario with?
It's typically called a Gen Z phenomenon.
And I wouldn't actually call it a Gen Z
topic because I see this
very often in corporate
America as well.
So people actually show up to meetings by
intent every five minutes.
And from that specific perspective, it's
perfectly fine that
you can actually cover
that specific topic and then you can
actually start the meeting.
I have seen in corporate America very
often that once we
actually establish this, we start
the meeting on time.
People after the second or third time
will get used to the
fact and actually will show
up in time.
Otherwise, you end up in scenarios again
and again where people
just always show up five
or 10 minutes late.
If you have only a 30 minutes meeting
slot and then people
want to leave five minutes
earlier, that's not going to work from
that perspective either.
So just take the aspect which works for
you, but actually make
clear for people that wait
for meeting time is
actually very unproductive.
I used the scenario in one of the videos
or one of the sessions
which we did a few weeks
ago where I was working
with the larger UK bank.
And during that time, one of the things
which I noticed is any
one of these meeting rooms
had a British pound clock at the wall.
So instead of having a time clock at the
wall, they had huge
LED screens showing what
the meeting was currently costing the
company from that perspective.
So that was actually fitted with
information from the
different salaries, room meetings,
and everything else.
And then you could actually see how much
this was actually going
to cost the company from
that perspective.
And as you were actually running these
meetings, you could see
that it actually became more
and more effective for everybody to
completely attend these meetings and to
join these meetings.
And people tried to actually be done in
time and not actually
make it a coffee break.
The opposite way around, I was working
with a larger public
sector organization in Germany,
and I was trying to figure out why the
hell I was invited into
every meeting, whether
it was relating to me or not.
It took me a while until I figured out
and actually spoke to people as I said.
Why are you inviting me
to all of these meetings?
I'm actually
responsible for that project.
There is not even an overlap.
And at one point, the answer came out
very bluntly from one
of the more junior people
is that no matter what's going to happen
is if there is an
external at a meeting, it will
actually bring coffee and cookies.
So that's the other extreme.
It's like inviting people towards a
meeting just to get a
better room or specific tools
or specific food or whatever
else is also never a good idea.
So from that perspective, just be sure
that you cover really
whatever is necessary and
have only the people
attend which are necessary.
And if corporations think that it's a
good idea to punish people
for not inviting externals
or anything else,
then just do as you like.
But in the end, it's not going to help.
So these are things on how you can
actually improve that.
During the management meeting, one of the
topics was also
management training the other
week, where also one of the arguments was
everybody should actually be more relaxed
in the in the current scenario and
actually allow for people to be late.
And I think that's actually the wrong
scenario and how we could
fix the issues we have in
the corporate world at the moment,
because the issues we
face in the corporate world
is that people no longer take tasks very
serious, that releasing
things or doing things on time
is actually no longer
seen as an advantage.
And there is basically no damage done if
you're not actually
delivering on time, which is
also part of the European or especially
the culture in many
European companies is because
it's no longer easy to
fire someone for not working.
You need to have much
better reasons by now.
It is actually safe to do it as long as
you're not actually
completely misbehaving against
colleagues or the company by itself.
It's very hard to actually fire someone
with this has good parts
and bad parts, but that
leads to some of this cultural scenario.
On the other side, I can also clearly
showcase based out of
corporate America, where it's
much easier to quickly just fire someone
if you want to get rid of them by the end
of the months or whatever else, that that
would actually be an easy solution.
But in the end, the meeting culture and
the time respect for
this in the US is even worse
than we have it here in Europe.
But it's actually something which is
becoming more and more of an issue.
As we are trying to evolve corporations
and as we are talking
and as I'm talking with
startups and help startups actually be
more successful in their
cooperation or with financing
and everything else, I'm always
encouraging them to take a very, very
close look in trying
to understand what Amazon does, what Elon
Musk does at SpaceX,
partially also at Tesla,
but not at Tesla that much anymore.
And he tried to cultivate at Twitter
slash X as well is
trying to cultivate a culture
where if you don't actually have anything
to say or to bring to a meeting, stand up
and leave.
Don't even say goodbye because that's
interrupting everybody else.
I've seen this,
especially in online meetings.
Sometimes you come in and start a meeting
with 20 plus people.
Within five minutes, you're down to three
or four or five, which are the ones based
on the agenda and everything else, which
are really necessary.
And the others can
actually get their work done.
The other important part as we are moving
along is also that if
you're attending a meeting
or if you are actually with other people,
a good part of being
respectful with their
time and their presence is to not
actually play on the
mobile phone or do your emails
or anything else.
So for example, that was one of the
reasons why I said in the
beginning I would actually
close down email clients, team zooms
whatsoever, which I don't necessarily
need during a meeting
to be completely focused
on that specific meetings.
And I actually also started about a few
couple of months back when
I see and have the feeling
that people are absent during the meeting
and I have the
feeling that they are doing
the emails or anything else, then I'm
either going to pause for a few seconds.
That actually gives people the point that
they are actually looking back at you and
it's like, OK, why is he pausing?
And then once you see that everybody is
back on time, you actually start again.
Or if that absolutely doesn't help, then
calling out people for
their behavior or just calling
them out and say, it's like, oh, it seems
like that you have
something more important
to do than attending this meeting, then
maybe you should leave or something else.
That sounds very harsh, but in the end,
it's actually helping
in most corporations and
in most organizations to get people into
a healthy meeting culture.
OK, that being covered.
Thank you, Aya.
Thank you from that perspective, those
who were attending live, everything else.
The session is going to go out via a
podcast and it's going
to be streamed on all the
usual platforms from that perspective.
And that being said, thank you all for
watching and watch out for
the podcast to be released
in the next couple of days.
Thank you and goodbye.