We spoke about the feminized workplace before. In this post, I highlight some of the aspects of female runs meetings. With men in charge, none of this would happen.

I had a big meeting a while ago, with over 20 attendees. The first question is obviously why there need to be that many people involved. Well, there was no reason but it was mandatory to be there. The meeting was scheduled for two-and-a-half hours. There was no agenda, just a title. Thankfully, I mostly work remotely, so I obviously pay complete attention to such bullshit meetings instead of turning my camera off and booting one of my private computers and playing a video game.

Of course, if you plan for a long meeting, you need to fill the time, so what better way is there than to start ten minutes late in order to wait for late arrivals, followed by a round of introductions? That was completely pointless as I am not going to memorize the names of a bunch of people I only interact with on and off and if I did, I it would be for a very specific reason. I do not need to know when someone joined the company or what his or her key contributions were. What followed was a poorly prepared presentation, followed by an unmotivated Q&A session, and the surprising statement that the hyper-competent woman who led this meeting will simply reach out offline to follow up on the points that have not been answered. Clearly, she could not have sent out an email with her questions beforehand.

Of course, this experience had absolutely nothing to do with the presenter being a woman. A man could have done the same, yet for some reason this hardly ever seems to happen. In contrast, the Chad approach to meetings is to not have any, or only if they absolutely need to happen. Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint at Amazon, insisting that people prepared a written document before each meeting instead. This already is a hurdle many people do not want to take. Thus, there will be fewer meetings. Elon Musk is not too fond of meetings either, as leaked memos from Tesla show. He told his staff that large meetings are a waste of time and that you should just walk out if you think you are not adding or gaining anything.

In contrast, the corporate-approach is to use meetings to signal status: if you get bigger meetings together you are obviously more important. Of course, if you knew what you needed to achieve you could just get two or three people together or, better, write a proper plan and circulate it. The more productive employees avoid meetings altogether as they simply send short, targeted emails, and that is it. This approach, however, is probably not inclusive enough and thus no longer feasible in the modern workplace.