To think that pre 9am and post 5pm meetings are just wrong??!

[Youngatheart00]

I’ve noticed this creep recently, working day extended by up to 90 mins / 2 hours especially as I am in a lockdown area so they pretty much know we can’t be doing much else but be available for work (🙄🙄). They are justifying it as no one is commuting so figure it should be acceptable and ‘there is a lot that is urgent and diaries are full’.

Looking at my diary this week I have 3 days with 8am meetings and 2 days with 5pm and 5:30pm meetings (working hours are 9-5). Also seeing meetings scheduled over lunch, they introduced a protected lunch hour at the start of enforced wfh but that seems to have gone out of the window too.

It seems we’ve entered peak zoom over scheduling and with no change of scenery of f2f interaction by 5pm I’m absolutely spent and just need to get out to walk the dog!!!

It’s a salaried role so there is no overtime pay.

I don’t mind the occasional meeting out of hours if urgent but AIBU to think they are unreasonable, not me, and start pushing back?

Yes it is unreasonable, mind you so is the expectation that emails will be answered, phones will be monitored at every hour of the day.

God so many of you sound like your employers take the piss out of you.

If work can't be done inside the contracted hours of the employee then they need more staff. I bet none of you are getting paid fir doing the work of 2 or 3 people.

Its pretty common sense surely that if they fill the days with meetings then there's no time for actual work.

If you're high enough seniority I'd definitely have a word with your line manager and possibly your colleagues at a similar level. Come at it front on "I've noticed a distinct creep of the working day to cover hours not normally worked. This is having a huge impact on moral for the teams and is causing problems with people's family commitments. I realise we are struggling to schedule all the meetings so should we be looking at how productive and necessary these meetings are for all involved?"
As a PP said, if the company looked at the hours each individual spent in unnecessary meetings, they'd probably be horrified at their costs Vs productivity.

yes it is a bit ludicrous. As much as I hated commuting, at least I got 90 mins of relative peace at the start and end of the day.

Now I have regular days when the meetings start at 8am and the last one is at 6pm and there's certainly no break in between.

The only good thing I have noticed is v few people are putting in meetings on Friday afternoon

Yes and i definitely notice a slow down of email traffic on a Friday afternoon too!! Which is one blessing. Mind you in the ‘old days’ we’d be in the pub at 4 for an hour 😔

Far too many people, and especially women, seem nervous of sticking up for their rights. Check your contract of employment and simply state calmly that you will work the contracted hours you are paid for.
If the employer wants to you to do overtime, then they need to pay you for it. If they are trying to insist on unpaid labour, that is by definition slavery, and it is time to involve your union.
I am retired now, but I simply didn’t turn up for the extra hours my health Trust was trying to impose. I was a hospital doctor, paid on a session basis from 9 to 5. When told to start work at 8.30 every day to anaesthetise patients for a 9am operating list, I just smiled sweetly and turned up at 9 as usual. I still finished all the lists on time, so the surgeons were happy to work with me!

nxt meeting you have do it whist feeding the kids brakfast or dinner and thy will realise why your hours are your hours lol

I think it very much depends on who the participants are. I have worked in global teams where it was necessary to arrange meetings (not regular ones) at early/late times to include colleagues in the US or Asia.
On the other hand an ex-boss used to arrange weekly team meetings at 15:00 (European time) on a Friday afternoon, which often meant booking a later flight home. This was fine until he started cancelling them at short notice, which left me hanging around at Zürich airport until 21:00 some Fridays. Very irritating.

If you want some flexibility to have long lunches occasionally, or pop out in an afternoon, then the flip side is occasionally working outside 9-5

If you want to rigidly do those hours, don’t expect any flex when you want it

I saw this happen to. In the last couple of months I have added repeating bookings to my diary:

8-8.30am: "Daily To Do"
12-1pm: just a private booking
4:30pm-6pm: "Admin"

That way, I've found people less likely to book over them unless it is something that is urgent - in which case I happily accept.

Any of DH's meetings held before 9am are liable to have yells of, "BREAKFAST!" "SOCKS!" and "RUB THE TOOTHBRUSH ON YOUR TEETH!!!" in the background as I go through the daily aggro of herding the children out of the house (one has SNs that affect his organisation) along with a parting call of "IT'S 8:52!!!" as the darlings are bundled out of the house.

Occupational hazard of having meetings at times when other family members are present. I refrain from noisy activities like vacuuming at sensitive times through the rest of the day.

Yes, I can understand that would start to get you down. I used to wonder whether people scheduled meetings to get their face known / be visible in the office.

Is it possible to speak with your manager and say that the volume of online meetings is making you less, not more, productive? You won't be the only person who finds this.

As you are relatively senior, it may be that you can't get out of all the meetings that creep in around your core working day. However, perhaps you could say that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you need a hard finish by 5:30am and that on Mondays and Wednesdays you aren't available before 8:45am (say). I am not sure that I would say why - it encourages people to "helpfully" think of ways to get around your childcare / dog walking problem.

Why on earth do people want jobs where so much is expected of them? I would far rather have less money and a stress free job. Your employers are taking advantage of their staff.

Er, some of us are single income families with high outgoings.

We know our employers are taking advantage but that's the trade-off.

No-one wants a job like that, but in reality for pay above a certain threshold its a given.

I need to earn (relatively) a fair amount of money because I am the only person who supports my child and because I live in London. Taking a nice part-time job with built in work/life balance just isn't possible for me.

Sorry to rant but if you're privileged enough to be able to pick and choose a nice comfy little sinecure to fit around your charmed life could you have the decency to realise not everyone has that option.

Why on earth do people want jobs where so much is expected of them? I would far rather have less money and a stress free job. Your employers are taking advantage of their staff.

Aside from the fact that not everyone is in a position to be ok with less money, it's also pretty hard to find a job that is low stress, has no expectations of employees going over and beyond and that isn't boring as fuck. Doing repetitive, unvaried work is a lot less appealing to me than working in the evenings sometimes is.

It's been years since I even heard of a "9 to 5" job outside of MN.

Most roles are contracted at least from 8:30 to 5:30, or up to 6 or 6:30pm.

So YABU. Most people have been at their desk, caught up with emails and more than ready for meetings by 9am, and no one I know is near the end of the day at 5pm.

I wonder if going into winter with so many of us working from home is an opportunity to raise the issue in some way? During my work team meeting this week we were talking about how wfh and the shorter hours of daylight will mean that if people have days of near back to back meetings from 9-5 (and beyond!) then people just won’t be able to get outside in daylight hours. Which is a wider health and well-being issue, but may be something you can use - eg you can do the 5-6pm meeting but you’re unavailable 1-2pm as you need to get out and see some daylight?

And the suggestion above about blocking out eg 4-5pm with ‘admin’ each day sounds good! But of course so much depends on company culture and what as seen as acceptable in your workplace.

Nothing stops you from booking 1 hour in your diary. Put it that way: once you have a meeting scheduled, you won't be able to book another one at the same time anyway!

So unless you have to attend a board meeting or some team thing with everybody in it and that takes you all day, it's very possible to manage your diary to give yourself an hour to be outside.

It might mean you work 1 hour instead in the evening which some posters are allergic to, but it's silly to stick with office hours AND THEN miss out and moan because you can't go outside. It's a beautiful day in the South East today, I'd rather be outside and catch up later.

*Yeah I think its all very well to be po-faced about "I never work past 5pm".

That might be OK in, say, local government. It just wouldn't fly in a lot of sectors.*

Why do people assume those in LG don't really work?

I'm.in local government, I was working until gone 8pm last night and have an 8am meeting tomorrow. I'm typing this in a 30 minute lunch break which I've got only because my 2pm.meeting has just been cancelled.

I do think its important to be flexible. I'm.very used to doing early or late meetings, but there are also other times when I will finish at 4 and go for a bike ride.

Until June I was in an admin role in Higher Education, having worked at two different universities over the past 8 years.

Unless it was an incredibly stressful time like the lead-up to exam boards or a UCAS deadline, everybody worked 9-5 with a full hour for lunch. Finishing time was 5pm on the dot and if you ever ran over for some reason, managers encouraged you to take that time back (even just 30 minutes) during a quieter period.

My last manager was so flexible she'd let you work through your lunch and finish at 4pm for personal reasons, like a haircut or getting home to watch a football match!

The result of this was loyalty to the job and everyone was very happy to be there. Nobody grumbled when the manager asked for something.

Why don't you block out the time in your work diary so they can't put in meetings then? Same for lunchtime.

And 9-5 jobs absolutely do still exist - or 9.30-5.30. 9-5.30 if you are particularly unlucky.

These sorts of threads always bring out those who think working long hours is a status symbol and anyone who doesn't want to is a slacker.

I guess some employers have realised that since they can no longer insist on a presenteeist culture, putting in meetings before 9 and after 5 is one way of getting around that.

All these people saying decline, you'll be first in line for redundancy if you do trust me.

Only if you work in a ridiculous organisation with no procedures would this happen.

Decline..doesn't mean I'm not participating..you decline and suggest an alternative time.

I work as a HR professional and never in my 25 years experience as declining meetings been given as a reason to make someone redundant...and I've supported countless restructures and redundancy exercises.

And 9-5 jobs absolutely do still exist - or 9.30-5.30. 9-5.30 if you are particularly unlucky.

they might

but shops here open at 9am, so staff are expected to OPEN at 9am, meaning start at 8:30 at the latest.
Schools are opened at 8:30 (and I guarantee you that teachers don't finish as early as 5pm!)
GP surgeries are opened at 8:30

I don't even need to look at office jobs. I'd love to work 9 to 5 Monday to Friday (same salary and bonus of course). I just don't know where these mythical jobs exist!

At the start of lockdown I was working online every day and this started to happen, the highest ups started pushing the managers at first to "check in" with their teams at 8am three times a week , then it moved to every day , then it was adding stupid work so the manager would have to schedule a separate one for the evening for something else because she was being told she couldn't do it in a standing one because that was to check on our "mental health " .

I had so much respect for her that she snapped and told them off , she refused outright because these constant early and late sessions were really impacting our downtime and making things worse. I have no doubt she got in trouble but she got a huge amount of respect from her team , we then pulled together harder and showed great numbers.

Absolutely nothing to do with the company and everything to do with the fact when we needed her to she had our backs. She banned any meetings before 9am or after 5pm (to be finished by 5 ) except for one genuine emergency that noone had a single problem helping her with.

Managers who creep into out if work time regularly are simply bad or inexperienced managers

I'm having major timetabling problems too.

We all have two days a week in for things we can't do at home, which is great, and I am really glad to have at least some time back. But everybody wants do Teams meetings on days they're at home, which is fine until you need to meet people who have opposite days. This week I have two wfh days that are practically empty (and not a great deal of work to do), and Friday is back-to-back meetings. I'll get work as a result of those meetings, but no time until next week to do it.

I'm doing a meeting with three people from 7.30-8.30 tonight as a favour. If we'd been in, it would have been a 15 minute chat with just one person, probably with a coffee!