Death by Teams

[mjheathcote]

When I started work in the late 80's it was post or Telex.
Soon afterwards in the 90's we add fax.
By the mid 90's we had mobile phones.
By 2000 we had Internet access and email.
By 2010 we had smartphones.
Now we have Teams/Zoom.

Every step along the way we have been more contactable and in reach.

I don't know about anyone else but it's really starting to get too much. Teams at the moment is one online meeting to the next, my daily calendar is just a block of Tetris. One meeting trying to overlap another meeting. Any gaps being the opportunity to get pulled into another meeting, or simply dialed up instead of a phone call.

By the end of the day, you have time to actually do some work!

Before this tech we still got stuff done, but it was a much, much slower way of life.

Am I alone in suffering from this switched on world?

 

[Devonboy]

Nope - I have had to remind my team I do need to use the toilet….! It’s miserable…and I for one have had enough! I now insert “personal time” to create space….

 

[CatmanV2]

No, but the problem is that because we have no opportunity for spontaneous interactions and everything needs to be booked in....

(That's my view currently anyway)

C

 

[midlifecrisis]

I did a time management coourse and it was very useful in some ways. E-mails are the equivalent of a posted letter. Just because it arrived, you don't have to read it right away. If it's important, they will/should call you using a phone.

As Devonboy says, book time off for lunch/tea/toilet breaks and also time for you to get work done (say a two hour block to do Project X). Also use the 'busy' flag on teams, also you can stop Teams from starting up automatically.

VW prevented emails being delivered to staff out of hours, as there was a temptation for people to continue to work after hours. The unions saw this as being an infringment on the workers work/life balance. This was in 2016!

 

[Felonious Crud]

I block time every day just to focus or get some work done. It helps.

Spontaneity and proper human conversations with no agenda will be welcomed back with open arms.

 

[mjheathcote]

Problem is most of the Team calls are from customers, not internal within the group.
Teams is great, don't get me wrong, also being able to share screens etc helps massively.
It's the shear number of them.
Shear number of emails, now Teams call on top.
To think before covid didn't even know what Teams/Zoom was!
Even when driving to see customers face to face, you are on a Teams call while driving in the car... Voice only.

 

[FIFTY]

Still getting paid, right? Adapt and sh!t excellence for yet another decade

 

[allandwf]

I just set my status to "away" and ignore them lol.

 

[Oneball]

Working nationally with offices everywhere my days used to often last 14-15 hours. Or I’d leave at 0430 to spend the day in Newcastle, drive to Carlisle, stay the night, work there the following day and get home at 2200. We tried using technology but it never really worked.

Having been forced to sort the tech infrastructure out I can now often start the day at 0800 and finish at 1630. I don’t have wall to wall invites either.

So if done properly it works.

 

[FIFTY]

Working nationally with offices everywhere my days used to often last 14-15 hours. Or I’d leave at 0430 to spend the day in Newcastle, drive to Carlisle, stay the night, work there the following day and get home at 2200. We tried using technology but it never really worked.

Having been forced to sort the tech infrastructure out I can now often start the day at 0800 and finish at 1630. I don’t have wall to wall invites either.

So if done properly it works.

This all sounds very familiar to me.

 

[GeoffCapes]

Quite frankly I think TEAMS is brilliant. You get more done and have to do less traveling. What’s not to like?

 

[Felonious Crud]

Quite frankly I think TEAMS is brilliant. You get more done and have to do less traveling. What’s not to like?

Intimacy. Or the lack of.

 

[makeshiftUK]

Teams as a tool is great. What's not great is the tendency of certain folks wanting to put '30 minutes' into diaries for a Teams call when a 5 minute phone conversation would more than suffice... meetings for the sake of meetings, with a stacked calendar almost being a badge of honour i.e. look how busy and productive I am. The irony.

 

[MarkMas]

Firstly, what people are mostly complaining about here is Meetings not any particular online meeting ethos or product. This has been a problem for decades, if not centuries. When I worked at Barclays in the 1990s I once took a train from London to Leeds solely because during his train journey was the only time I could get to meet with my boss that month.

But, there is some evidence that online video meetings in these rectangular boxes is particularly painful psychologically, due to issues with eye contact etc.

I have reverted to doing the vast majority of my meetings by just basic telephony, or by using Zoom just for free audio and for screen sharing, actually asking people to turn their cameras off.

I also use a virtual networking tool called Spatial Chat a great deal, as it is more 'natural' than the darn rectangles.

Microsoft Teams is a really horrible product, though.

 

[MarkMas]

In the old physical meetings world, I used to keep many meetings short by not letting anyone sit down.

Harder to do online!

A good trick is to schedule meetings at odd times. A 10 o clock meeting will inevitably start at around 10:05 and run on to 11. Whereas a 10:45 meeting might start at 10:45 and end at 11.

 

[sionie1]

Teams as a tool is great. What's not great is the tendency of certain folks wanting to put '30 minutes' into diaries for a Teams call when a 5 minute phone conversation would more than suffice... meetings for the sake of meetings, with a stacked calendar almost being a badge of honour i.e. look how busy and productive I am. The irony.

We had similar issues at the start of the pandemic and it very quickly became apparent that some of the team would be suffering burntout so we introduced a range of protocols that everyone followed. Lunch breaks are sacrosanct , if it's space in a diary over the lunch period you don't suggest a meeting, we've limited most calls to a fixed length and have an agreed amount of time between meetings, which gives you a buffer. Having said that I've simply found declining a load has helped or blocking out my diary with made up meetings. I'm no less productive and if I see an invite with some weird title I'll pick up the phone and ask what it's about. Often it's then a phone call and not 30mins! My biggest bugbear is the insistence in some parts of the business of 'cameras on' at all times and then forced to spend half the meeting with someone discussing new home decor or new shirts. A lot really depends on the company culture and it being driven/adopted by those above.

 

[Scaf]

During covid I have missed the more informal meetings / chats, business that used to get done in the kitchen making a cuppa or whilst passing someone’s desk has now turned into 30mins video calls.
As things get back to normal and face to face meetings become a thing again, we will still make use of Teams, as used in the right way it’s a great tool.
I don’t have any video calls scheduled on a Friday and encourage my team to do the same, face to face or telephone calls only.

 

[Andyk]

Teams is the work of the Devil…

 

[Zep]

I am ok with teams, but I am brutal in my acceptance of meetings. If it’s with a client, then it gets done, but I find that a lot of calls I am just there to listen in and interject if things aren’t going the way I want. So I often multitask through these on mute.

I still have the water cooler chats with other team members, which are teams calls rather than meetings. Plus I’ll often set a meeting for an hour, but make a point of finishing sooner, reclaiming some time, but also do the odd times for meetings as this helps with time slicing. The seniors in my business are particularly good at this, they will join a meeting for 5 mins, make a decision and then clear off. Which is fine for me!

What I have noticed is everyone is different, I know people that are really struggling with the intrusiveness and constant availability and so try to take this into account when putting in meetings and calls.

Having said all of that, I have decided that this year I will be getting out more or I’ll fall out of balance, split my differential and tip the **** over.

 

[MarkMas]

Firstly, what people are mostly complaining about here is Meetings not any particular online meeting ethos or product.....

I also used to run Europe for a US company where I had to join the monthly all-day exec meeting from the UK by phone (3pm to 11pm), where everyone else was in the boardroom in Dallas, and they would normally completely forget I existed, except suddenly every 3 hours or so, someone would ask me a (stupid) question. It was ****.