Are Your Meetings Worth Attending?

“Remember, kids, your projects are due a week from Monday, so you’d better get started if you haven’t already.”

This imminently relatable phrase, or one like it, is probably the first exposure to nagging that most of us had outside of the home. Oh sure, Mom and Dad had nagged us for years to clean our rooms, say please and thank you, and wear jackets. But our teachers introduced us to business nagging. I’m using the term “business nagging” to characterize the general practice of nudging people to do things for common professional effort.

If you fast forward to your adult life, business nagging morphs into things like, “don’t forget to sign off on your hours in payroll,” and, “everyone must update their email signatures to use the company’s official font by next week.” The subject matter becomes more adult in nature, but the tone and implications do not. When you hear these phrases, you’re transported back in time to junior high, when you needed to rely on a teacher to help prevent your general incompetence at life from creating unfavorable situations for yourself.

There’s a subtle problem with business nagging growing up alongside of us. As children, we actually are pretty incompetent at looking out for own interests. Left to our own devices, we’ll procrastinate on the school project and then pull an all-nighter ahead of turning in something that earns us a C minus. But as we grow to adulthood, we learn these lessons firsthand and wind up being generally decent at looking out for ourselves. We tend not to need nagging nearly as often to do things that will benefit us, so being nagged to do things that will benefit us winds up becoming largely superfluous.

And that leaves the most common form of business nagging: being nagged to do things that offer no obvious benefit to the recipient of the nagging. Signing off on your hours in payroll doesn’t benefit you directly (except, perhaps, by removing the artificial threat not to compensate you for the work you’ve done). Changing your email signature doesn’t benefit you directly. According to someone with some degree of power somewhere in the organization, you doing these things will benefit the company. Presumably, if the company benefits, so do you, somehow. But there is as much vagueness in that equation as there are “somes” in the previous sentence. From where you’re sitting, it’s just bureaucratic procedure having only one tangible benefit—getting the administrator of the business nagging to go away and leave you alone.

This was a post I originally wrote for Infragistics. Click here to read the rest.