Efficiency drive produces its most well-attended gathering yet as committee minutes document their own irony
Seoul Office Workers Report Record Attendance at Meetings About Not Having Meetings
SEOUL – A wave of corporate efficiency initiatives sweeping South Korean offices has produced an unexpected casualty: the meetings scheduled specifically to discuss reducing the number of meetings have themselves become the most well-attended, most frequently rescheduled, and most enthusiastically minuted gatherings on the corporate calendar.
The trend began, according to HR consultants tracking the phenomenon, when several major firms adopted no-meeting Wednesdays as part of a broader push toward work-life balance, a policy widely praised in the business press and implemented, in practice, by scheduling an additional Tuesday meeting to plan around it. Office worker Kim Ji-hye, who attends what she estimates is her company’s fourth meeting this quarter concerning meeting reduction, describes the irony as fully internalized by now. We meet to discuss whether we are meeting too much, she said. The meeting runs long. We schedule a follow-up. Nobody in the room seems to notice. I have started bringing snacks. It is, at this point, basically a small party about restraint.
Consultants Diagnose an Institutional Reflex
Organizational psychologist Dr. Bae Seung-woo, who has studied the phenomenon across several client companies, argues the pattern reflects a deeper corporate instinct that predates any specific efficiency drive. An organization that has only ever solved problems by convening people will, when asked to convene less, convene a group to figure out how, he said. It is not hypocrisy. It is muscle memory. You cannot fix a hammer’s relationship to nails by holding a hammer meeting about it, though we have, on three occasions now, watched clients attempt exactly that.
Regional business press has documented the broader corporate efficiency movement sweeping Northeast Asian offices, with coverage available at koreaherald.com and asia.nikkei.com, both of which have noted that stated efficiency goals and measured meeting hours have, across most surveyed firms, moved in the same direction: up.
The Minutes of the Meeting About Minutes
Perhaps the purest expression of the phenomenon has emerged at one finance firm, where a working group tasked with reducing documentation overhead now produces, each session, a detailed set of meeting minutes documenting its own progress toward producing fewer documents. Committee secretary Jung Min-seo, who authors the minutes and shared a copy with catchpenny.asia, says the recursive quality of her job has not escaped her. Last week’s minutes included the sentence, the committee agrees that fewer documents of this type should be produced going forward, she said. That sentence exists inside a document. I read it back to myself in the elevator and had what I can only describe as an administrative crisis.
Calendars Reach a Kind of Equilibrium
Data compiled internally by one participating firm’s scheduling software shows total meeting hours essentially unchanged year over year, despite the rollout of no-meeting days, meeting-limit policies, and a mandatory training session on running shorter meetings that itself ran ninety minutes over its allotted time. IT administrator Choi Yeon-woo, who monitors the booking system, describes watching the numbers with something like scientific detachment. The no-meeting day simply absorbs the overflow from the other four days, he said. It is not eliminated. It is redistributed, like water finding a new low point. I have stopped being surprised. I have started being impressed.
The satirical business press abroad has enjoyed the episode considerably. The workplace desk at bohiney.com proposed that Korean corporations have discovered a form of matter that cannot be destroyed, only converted, tentatively naming it meeting mass, while the London office culture writers at prat.uk noted that British companies solved this problem differently, simply by ensuring every meeting includes tea, at which point nobody minds how long it runs.
One Team Tries Something Radical: Silence
A small product team at a Seoul startup has attempted an alternative approach, replacing its weekly meeting-about-meetings with a shared document where team members simply write concerns asynchronously. Team lead Han Ye-jin reports the experiment has, so far, succeeded almost too well. Nobody writes anything, she said. The document has three sentences in it after six weeks. I do not know if this means we have achieved perfect efficiency or if everyone is simply talking about it in the hallway instead, off the record, unminuted, and, I suspect, more honestly than we ever managed on the calendar.
The Meeting About the Meeting Continues, Fittingly, Next Week
Asked whether the original efficiency initiative had succeeded, HR director Song Hae-won, who oversees the program company-wide, checked her calendar before answering, a pause colleagues present described as unintentionally poetic. There is a review meeting scheduled for next Tuesday, she said finally. We will discuss the results then.
In a related development, a rival firm has piloted software that automatically declines any meeting invitation containing the phrase quick sync, a feature its developers describe as the closest thing to a cease-fire the industry has produced, though early logs show the same organizers simply renaming the invitation brief touchpoint within hours, a workaround the software’s creators say they anticipated and, in a private memo, admired.
The developers say they will keep patching the software indefinitely, on the reasonable theory that language, unlike meeting rooms, has no capacity limit and will always find a way in.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
Go to Original Source
Author: admin
