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.