We have a whole team standing quick call at 8am every morning where everyone goes through everything they are doing. It lasts 1-4 hours, every day.
I’ve been there too. It’s such a waste of time, and then everyone’s pressured to work extra hours to make up for it.
Wtf! How does anything get done? How strict is attendance?
It’s chaos. No training, no documentation of anything. Calls are mandatory, office is 4:1 schedule, we have colleagues all over, hence the calls.
i don’t understand your ask, can we hop on a quick call?
That’s my polite way of saying “what the fuck are you talking about?”
I thought it was lingo for “could we meet and I watch you do the task?”
Or “what you’re asking may be illegal so I’m gonna mention that to you over the phone and not in documents that will come out in discovery“
That’s why any of those quick calls are always followed up by a message that recaps the meeting/has action items.
Go ahead and discuss that item you don’t want in discovery, I’m gonna note it just so I don’t forget what the fuck we were talking about
I have a coworker that does this and they think it’s keeping everything above board but instead they just create openings for opposing councils to second guess and cast doubt on internal processes.
Those kinds of calls are for making determinations and decisions, not airing concerns and greivances for the record.
People’s note taking aren’t always accurate and they aren’t taken under oath. Even when there’s nothing even closely illicit being discussed, it’s not stenography. Best hope you can defend the veracity of your notes in a deposition or before a judge.
All assuming that’s a feature of your job, of course. Otherwise it’s probably entirely irrelevant.
in my case, I almost always get asked this by people who don’t understand 2+2=4 and need me to verbally tell them that 2+2=4 even though two messages in our chat history for the past two days laid out exactly how it is that 2+2=4
but every now and then it’s from a competent person who actually doesn’t want to waste my time
This is worse than what my job does, which is schedule a meeting and then cancel it after I’ve been waiting for everyone for ten minutes.
Best part of Teams meetings, I can just throw my headphones on and keep working while people are fucking around not joining the meeting.
Plus, I can still do real work when I have to at least sit on a meeting that doesn’t matter to me.
Work took a meta turn today.
Someone reached out to ask if I was really in all the meetings I’m booked for, only to give up and schedule their meeting for sometime in February because I didn’t respond in a very timely fashion … because I was in a meeting.
I think this is actually a sign that you’ve achieved a certain level of value to the organization. If you’re constantly being reached out to to “jump on a quick call” it means your interaction is important (and possibly pivotal) to keeping the work going.
It means you’re doing other people’s jobs without getting paid extra.
I addressed how you can get more pay with this in other posts in this thread.
Yea, that certain level that comes with more responsibility but no increase in pay.
I can mean pay increase, but its rarely a direct consequence. If nothing else, you can usually use this as a pivot to doing less work you don’t like and more work you do like.
If you’re getting enough of these “jump on a quick call” situations, you can reach out to your boss and say “I’m getting reached out too often and its taking more time away from the tasks you want me doing. Which thing do you want me focusing on, these important tasks you’ve communicated already, or some rando phone call/teams chat? Are you okay with me telling them I’m busy?”. Alternatively say “I’m getting reached out to on this important work, and I think $TASK1 and $TASK2 that I’m currently responsible for should be handed off to someone else. I’m fully prepared to do a info handover to get them up to speed”.
I don’t even get to the point where I ask ask my manager about priorities, I just tell people that my plate is full and they need to go talk to my manager and have them let me know if I’m to work on your problem. I’ve got enough on my plate that I don’t want to waste time figuring out if I care about this task I barely understand at the moment when you can just go to him directly and better explain why you think you need my time.
I’ve definitely hit that fun point when you’re impacted by the curse of competence and are constantly getting asked to assist other teams. I’m just also at the point where I’m actively developing processes to minimize upcoming pain (fuck you CAB forum…) and can’t always drop and pivot.
I don’t even get to the point where I ask ask my manager about priorities, I just tell people that my plate is full and they need to go talk to my manager and have them let me know if I’m to work on your problem.
The danger here is you’re letting someone else frame the situation and present their own narrative. They could just as easily go to your boss and say “Passerby6497 wouldn’t help me when I needed it”. Sure, your boss can and should shield you, but you’re creating more work for your boss.
Nah, he knows how much I help people (I constantly joke about being addicted with the curse of competence), and he’s even told me in the past to send people to him so he can tell them no.
Yea, good communication definitely improves any situation. Especially when things start to conflict.
in my case, it did come with increased compensation
until one day when it didn’t, and now I don’t do that extra work
And once you’re invaluable you can reply ‘No’
What doesn’t matter, how many hours that quick call lasts.
The quick call is usually under an hour, but the resulting series of touchpoints, meetings with several departments, vendor calls, and data deep dives will eat a month of my time and will result in the same outcome as the quick call… That’s outside of our department’s scope.
I really do not love my job, for a multiple reasons, but there are some perks. Almost zero phone calls. When I leave the building I am done with work until I go back in (ok now that im the little supervisor their a possible off hours issue, but again very rarely and im like number 3 inline for that call). Meetings are minmal, once or month or so we have a little huddle, 15 minutes max. Occasionally we have a off site meeting or training, but i think we maybe hade one in 2025? And those are overtime so theirs that.
Unironically true.
And the acceptable levels of HR approved sass for having to hop on a quick call.
And once you’ve become really successful with this technique, you can set up the calls yourself, just to make people wait forever for you to hop in and then hop right back out again.
