Over at Words That Work, David Silverman proposes getting paid for your time. He postulates that all of those ridiculous meetings everyone has to attend (like HR training or IT updates), should have a dollar value attached to them. Specifically, we should all get paid for attending them. While the idea has merit, it’s tying to solve a greater fundamental problem of poor management.
Companies that create “meeting” cultures have way more problems then just too many meetings. It comes down to management not trusting employees. It’s well known at Intel (for example), that if you don’t think you below in a meeting, you leave. That is real trust.
Startup companies don’t have this problem. They focus on getting the job done and employees seek out what they need. Polices and procedures are lightweight. Employees are trusted and the focus is on results not feeding the corporate bureaucracy. Maybe that does not scale to large companies but it should.
