It can go overboard the other way too. I worked for a company briefly whose internal meeting guidelines were such that if you were to be in a meeting with a direct superior, you were to be there 15 minutes early. If any of the corporate brass, officer level or above, were to be there, 30 minutes early. Bright eyed and bushy tailed. And there were punitive measures taken if you weren’t “on time” based on the above guidelines. Maybe not the first time, but if you were regularly strolling in a couple minutes before the designated meeting start time, your boss definitely let you hear about it. Sometimes they’d deliberately start a meeting 15 or more minutes early to drive the point home. Why even have a designated start time? I literally had to hang up on clients sometimes to make a meeting’s required early arrival time. You’d think servicing our clients would be more important than listening to some jag talk about how we can work on “bringing more energy” to the office every day. 🖕
This was overkill and a waste of time in the other direction. I was far too busy and spread far too thin to waste 15-30 minutes a couple times a day twiddling my thumbs waiting for a meeting to start. (You weren’t allowed to bring your laptop to these meetings, for fear of it being a distraction during the meeting.) 🙄
On a heavy meeting day, I’d regularly have to work until 7 or 8 pm, just to complete my core responsibilities. I’d say this was 2-3 days/week, on average. Too many unnecessary meetings in general being part of the issue. And my boss looked at me like I had two heads when I tendered my 2 weeks.
