My not-so-new employer has a really interesting meeting culture. I haven't worked that many places, but I suspect it's unusual. The culture is to arrive at the meeting place three, five, even 10 minutes early, depending how important the meeting is. Meetings almost always start on time.
This suits me quite well - I'm a punctual person, and it's no fun to show up at a meeting on time and have it start five or 10 minutes late. Yeah, guess what, late people: my time is also important. I could've been at my desk getting in another five or 10 minutes of work/e-mail/facebook, too, but I was here in the meeting place. At the time when the meeting was supposed to start.
There's one guy who's usually a good 20 minutes late to this one weekly meeting (which starts at 9:30 - it's not like it's obscenely early) and much scorn is heaped upon him by my colleagues. Earlier this week at a different meeting Mr S was telling some of the veterans at my current employer about how meetings start late at other workplaces, and they were shocked.
3 comments:
i guess you get used to arriving early, kinda like setting your clock 5 minutes fast in your car to make sure you're always on time.
here, we have announcements made about meetings. the first one is on time. then there's another one. and another one, if there's still stragglers. sometimes, for our large staff meetings, it takes 20 minutes to get everyone downstairs and settled down for the meeting. but those meetings tend to have food. :)
When our interns are new, I'll often walk into the conference room a few minutes after a meeting was supposed to start and find them there, alone and looking confused. It's kind of sad. The upside of working in a very small office, though, is that when the boss is ready to start, people can be rounded up pretty quickly.
It's like your entire employer is staffed with upper-midwesterners!
Post a Comment