What are people who WFH on teams calls meeting about?

[mjf981]

I've always had an obvious client facing (healthcare) role. I have appointments every 20-30 minutes and obviously need to be in the office to do this. All of my friends have similar jobs, or manual labour type jobs in factories, farms etc. We have maybe 1 meeting every few months, and its just 10 minutes of management giving us an update on how things are going.

I see people on here all the time saying they spent all day in teams meetings while WFH, and I have no idea what these meetings are. What are these meetings? Who are you meeting with? Is it other team members or mostly clients? How are you generating income for your employer? Enlighten me please. Its a world I know nothing about.

I'm usually in client meetings or discussing new projects and new clients with some of the people who hire me.

I am a civil servant. We are hybrid office/home now but still do a lot of meetings on Teams.

Meetings are things like:

• Regular team meetings where we all catch up on what everyone’s working on, share out any new tasks that have come up recently, get reminded about new corporate rules or compulsory training. Usually you’re in a team that’s part of a bigger team that’s part of an even bigger team, so there can be a lot of these and sometimes it works well and sometimes you end up in some Inception-like infinite meeting recursion.

• Deciding/planning sort of meetings. These are for issues we’re dealing with where we have an issue to act on or problem to solve and need to agree on the best way to do it. So it could be things like “the minister’s meeting such-and-such a person about carrot farming, what do we need to do to make sure she’s prepared?”, or bigger things like “minister wants to make all carrot-farming carbon neutral by 2037; is that feasible and if so how do we do it?”

• Meetings with people in the department who are specialists in particular things, like legal or finance, to make sure we can legally do things we want and afford to pay for them. If it’s a quick question you can just ping them a message but often it’s a more complicated situation and you need to discuss it.

• Urgent things that come up suddenly. Big carrot farming firm has collapsed with the loss of 2500 jobs, papers are running a story tomorrow about new scientific discovery that carrots are

sentient and it’s cruel to eat them, a question about carrots spreading covid is coming up in Parliament tomorrow = meetings about how to deal with it.

• Meetings with ministers, where they want to ask us questions about something and it’s faster to discuss rather than email.

• Meetings with ministers, where the minister is meeting someone else and we are there to support them.

• Meetings with external people. Like, if we were going to design a new policy about rights for sentient carrots, we would probably want to meet the Association of Pan-European Carrotfarmers, and maybe some of the big supermarkets and hospitality businesses to look at what would happen if we banned carrots from food, and some scientific carrot expert, before we actually did anything. And they often want to talk to us about things, so we have meetings.

• Meetings with other departments in government, or other governments (sometimes there are Four Nations calls for UK/Welsh/Scottish/NI governments to agree on a way forward, or pick over a total mess and work out how to do it better next time, etc).

• Training.

• HR/management stuff - at the moment with recruitment freeze and planned cuts, this includes lots of discussions about how we get stuff done with fewer people to do it, but it’s also 1:1s with people you manage and with your manager and so on.

• Big formal meetings, like board meetings for boards we sit on or chair.

• and all the other meetings that could really have been an email, but people didn’t reply to the email on time so behold! now it’s a meeting.

I can’t believe how happy this thread has made me! I’m so glad that I quit the corporate rat race to become self employed. Listening to people yak on about tedious job related shit is soul destroying. @WorriedWoking

We're literally just answering the OP's question! I wouldn't 'yak on' as you say in real life. Apart from my DH, my friends and family don't even know what I do!
And what rat race? I work a standard 40 hour week for a pretty relaxed regional law firm, typically doing 3-4 days from home. And I have masses of leisure time on top of my job. 'Corporate sector' doesn't necessarily have to equal Gordon Gekko!!

I assume the MLM bot meant she's glad not to listen to people yakking on in meetings, rather than in our posts.

Reviewing slides for an upcoming presentation

discussing how best to present evidence in a report to get the results across clearly

reviewing recent research results, deciding on the next steps in analysis, assigning team tasks

negotiating data acquisition for a research project

@gingersplodgecat - I hate the word too, but was trying to be a bit circumspect about the org i work for.

I am a nurse. My wfh Teams meetings are either:

Meeting with my team to plan clinical work.
Meeting with other agencies to share information.
Meetings to produce a set joint outcome such as a risk assessment, a placement specification or performance indicator document.
Meetings to support professionals such as supervision, reflective practice groups or debriefs.
Delivering training.
Actual therapy work with young people.

Teams meeting with client to take a brief on a project - a number of stakeholders in their business involved. So then have 2 meetings.

meeting to de-brief with my colleague on fulfilling the project for them.

so that’s 3 meetings.

Final meeting a client of ours that will help us fulfil this meeting at 6pm.

without our completion of the project it hinders our clients processes to sell their product. That’s how they make their profit! We make ours by charging on the work we are doing. Generally a % at completion.

To discuss client care
Workflow discussions
To explain procedure

Its endless

Anything you'd talk about in the office translates to Teams or Zoom

It varies day to day but includes:

Team meetings

Project updates

Budgeting catch ups

One to one with line manager

Meeting to plan for strategic meetings with senior management

Planning meetings

Project board meetings

Business Continuity meetings

I work in IT Operations.

Start the day with 15-30min meeting at 9am with the New Delhi team members triaging new tickets that have come in specific to our team.

10am triage meeting with company wide team members. Don't often have anything specific to my team come up, but need to be present just in case and useful to know what bug fixes the Engineers are taking on.

Once a week have a 1:1 meeting at 10:30 with my team lead to make sure I'm on track with my workload/goals.

2pm round up meeting with larger team across New Delhi, US, Romania, UK.

Once a fortnight 2.5 hour sprint planning where the team review the work we've done this sprint, what went well, what could have been done better, and then decide on what tasks we can realistically aim for in the next two week sprint.

Occasional training sessions for mentoring juniors or where one team member has learnt all about new system being introduced and needs to share that knowledge.

If some services/computers stop working then I'll have to arrange a group call with people from Support, QA, Development, Operations to determine who's affected and how we can fix it. These require follow up meetings with a smaller subset to document root cause and actions we'll take to prevent issue from happening again.

Lots of things...

Whole dept meetings
Small team / working-group meetings (I have about 20 different projects all with different people or combination of people)
Deliver training / tutorials.
Meet external clients or suppliers (I'm often a facilitator)
Coffee & chat

Also HR.

I spend about 25% of my time in meetings of various types:

Within my own team - weekly 1-2-1 with my Manager. Weekly team meeting for updates, training, and visitors from other teams. Optional weekly lunch meeting just to chat together.

Monthly directorate meetings - I look after 3 directorates and attend their meetings to present HR report and updates.

3-5 formal meetings a month with employees, their manager and sometimes union on performance, attendance etc.

Working with other departments, eg sitting on interview panels, developing new training modules, etc.

The rest are discussions with individual managers to provide them with advice.

So the majority of my meetings are still the 'doing' part of my job.

NHS (non clinical)
40-60% WFH
14 hours of meetings this week, all bar 3 hours virtually
1:1s/team meeting and appraisals (appraisals and 1:1s in the office)
Working group focusing on achieving significant training programme delivery, and another to move forward CQC action plan
Performance meeting with execs
Meeting to ensure business plan is met and unblock issues to delivering it
Strategy mtg (f2f)
Meeting to discuss patients waiting long time and what's needed to move their pathway forward

I work in healthcare.

Meetings about - how we will implement newly licensed treatments, how we can increase capacity, how we will set up new services, how we will work the rotas, how we will make sure the junior doctors get the training they need, discuss cases where people died or were very unwell and what we could learn from them, complex discussions about patients between different professionals, how feasible it is to set up new trials.

So I also don't generate income I am half public half private sector. It's an odd one. I don't have too many meetings but I've been writing a new process and system to help project teams with assurance and sanctioning for their projects. So writing lots of terms of references and procedures etc. So I am now having meetings with project managers to talk them through what they need to do. Where our process needs improved and what additional training they need.

I will have catch ups with my manager and also our parent body organisation to make sure they're aware of what we're doing and to ensure any messages that come from them are incorporated.

I'm a policymaker so this week I've meetings to discuss elements of policy we're working on, a weekly project monitoring meeting, a meeting with another organisation, a call with our comms department, a catchup with manager, 2x department/division cascade meetings, a talk from an external expert. I often speak to our legal team as well but haven't so far this week. Obviously no profit generated as it's a government body but meetings are pretty essential when your work is basically coming up with good ideas! All of these are on Teams as we've got a couple of offices so even if people are in the office, they might not be in the same office.

Reading this thread brings it very close to home to me that I’m not a proper grown up.

😂

I'm a patient facing nurse, I'm out doing assessments about 50% and writing reports/ sorting care etc the other time. This week so far on teams I have had a meeting about funding with a social worker, one with a manager of a care home as he wanted to discuss a potential new admission before agreeing them, one with a group of clinicians about our care plans and today I had my revalidation signed off and reflective discussion.

I'm a senior scientist in the pharmaceutical industry. I've only just started going back into the office after 2 years of WFH. I am the head scientist on a project designing how to make a drug and spend a lot of time talking to my PM planning resource, highlighting issues, setting milestones. I also talk regularly to my lead scientists in the different specialisms to make sure their teams are on track and we have a realistic and scientifically sound workplan (particularly if we have unusual results that need investigating). I have regular technical meetings with all the scientists on my project where the teams all give updates on their work and we plan and coordinate future work and identify risks, it's also beneficial for the young scientists' development to understand the whole project. I have programme meeting with reps from other depts like supply chain, manufacturing, engineering, QC and QA who all give updates on their work for the project and we have regular updates with the client giving updates on the work we've been doing and discussing the future work. I also have a regular meeting with the other head scientists so we can give updates on our projects and share scientific learning and changes to regulations.

That's my day job but I also attend meetings with suppliers about their new technologies and meetings where our innovation people talk about all the cool inventions they are working on. And there are scientific conferences as well which are much easier to attend now. There are monthly company wide zoom calls about new initiatives and campaigns. Some of these are better on zoom and some are ĺess good. Generally i prefer to work F2F.

Most of it's bollocks, yes. I mainly generate value for the company by writing position papers summarising what decisions they need to make. They already know this, but they need me to give the whole thing a strategic sheen and technical detail on the costs/timelines.