The Causey Consulting Podcast

Incessant Zoom meetings ≠ knowledge work

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!


Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com, and now here's your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in if you're in the United States. Happy Independence Day, Happy Fourth of July. Hopefully you have the day off and you are doing something fun, and also hopefully you're out of the heat. I don't know about you, but where I'm at in the Midwest, the oven started early in late June. It felt more like August. And I thought this is going to be a long, hot summer, if it's already this bad in June, what is it going to be like in August? In this episode, which I will try to keep short because, quite frankly, I intend to be out of the office and doing something at least relaxing. I want to answer this question that Amanda Claypool posed on medium, are knowledge workers producing value in the economy? Her response is, uh, not really. And I want to read a little bit from her article for you now. Of course, I'll drop a link. Please check it out for yourself. Back in 2017 I asked my Boomer boss if I could work from home one day a week. Fridays were usually slow, and I wanted to save some money on gas. Telework was part of my contract, and we had all the tools to be able to do it. She still said no, even though I was young and naive, that seemingly inconsequential interaction changed my perspective on work. I couldn't see a future where continuing to commute to an office every day would be tolerated for much longer. End quote, I have her beat by a few years on that, after Tim Ferriss' book The Four Hour Workweek came out, it made a huge splash, and I read it and I was skeptical. I'm like, I really can't see myself starting a business, hiring somebody in India to be my virtual assistant and then only working for four hours a week. I don't even know what kind of business I would freaking start, but I was really interested in the idea of telework. I had a long, long commute, and I was also working a lot of overtime hours at the job that I was in at that time, and I thought it would be amazing. I could actually be more productive. I could get more work done, and it would make my quality of life so much better if I didn't have to go through this long, long drive Monday through Friday. So I tried to make this pitch, because in Tim Ferriss book, in my opinion, he makes it sound easy, and he gives you these stories that, in my opinion, are hopium of these people, like, Well, this guy in Silicon Valley did it? You can too, right? Sure. Of course, I didn't get very far. I got the speech of, well, it's a small company, and even though we might be able to trust you to do it, what we do for one we have to do for everybody. Everybody knows everybody else's business. There are a lot of people here that would not be able to handle working from home, so we're not going to be able to accommodate that. We understand why you're asking, but it's not going to happen. And it's funny, because in this article, she mentions that one of her favorite books is The Four Hour Workweek. I'm a little bit like on that book, because I think, in my opinion, which could be wrong, it has the tendency to over promise and under deliver. But in the kind of byline here, she's written, if the bulk of your day is spent responding to emails or attending zoom meetings, are you doing real work that adds value? That, to me, is an interesting question as we think about the future of work as well as the current status of work. What lies ahead? Is it knowledge work to answer emails and be on incessant zoom meetings? No, I feel like universally we could be able to agree on that there are the extroverted people that love meetings and check ins and touch bases and all the stuff that makes me want to barf, but I would say the majority of people, if given the opportunity to sit and respond to a bunch of emails or to sit on a bunch of meetings, versus doing actual real knowledge work, really being in their craft. I think they would rather just do the work. I published earlier this week a blog post over on Causey Consulting. This is not a copilot I want because I saw this article pop up on Yahoo Finance, and it was Microsoft's copilot will let you join three. Meetings at once. But experts say and misses the point. And I just sat there like, oh God, one meeting is bad enough. But three meetings who in their right mind, what sane, civilized, rational human would want to sit and participate in three meetings at once. And why would anybody think that's a good idea? How are you really going to add anything to any of those meetings? Your attention would be so split. And I'm thinking from an introverts point of view, I would be nervous and unhappy because I have to be on, quote, unquote, on for three different meeting halls. I would just pass on that in a major absolute way. And I quoted in my blog post one of the passages that Dag Hammarskjöld writes in Markings. If you have not read markings and you are an introvert, I would cordially invite you go check out a copy from your library or buy a cheap paperback copy. It's worth your time. When I read it recently, there were points in his discussions of his own introversion when I just sat there and thought I have never felt more understood, like whatever wavelength that is, he and I are both on it, because I just completely and totally got what he was saying. And so I think if you're an introvert, I think if you value quiet, if you think that forced socialization sucks. You're going to get something out of markings. So I quote one of the passages where he writes to be sociable, to talk merely because convention forbids silence, to rub against one another in order to create the illusion of intimacy and contact. What an example of la condition humane, exhausting, naturally, like any improper use of our spiritual resources. End Quote, that's what I thought of when I saw that article about being in three meetings simultaneously to be sociable, to have to go to not one, not two, but three meetings at the same time, because the company forbids you from being silent. The company forbids you from keeping your camera off. The company forbids you from, I don't know, doing your flipping job instead of having to entertain emails and meetings. One thing I've said before, and I stand by, is that in a lot of cases, when you get hired into a company, somebody else is in charge of you, somebody else is signing the paycheck and has that power over you. You're beholden to whatever it is they want you to do, and very often, they want you to do the corporate tap dance. It's not about productivity. It's about conformity. It's about obedience. Are you going to go along to get along, or are you going to be a problem pal? They're assessing your flexibility, your pliability and your willingness to just sit down, shut up and obey. As I wrote in my blog post, it's exhausting enough to have to attend one meeting, but three no if companies are having that many meetings, if somebody would feel like it would be appropriate for you to try to be in that many meetings at one time, there needs to be a serious and immediate audit of why is that happening, and then also, who is permitting it to happen? If there's some overzealous extrovert who thinks that's a good idea, or there's some Ned the needy Mike, the micromanager type that is riding heard on everybody who feels that it's necessary. I need to tap check ins. I want to have eyeballs on all of you. Oh, that person needs to be fired. In my opinion, get rid of that person, because anybody worth their salt is not going to stay at your company and put up with that nonsense. But to return back to Amanda's question, in my opinion, no, you're not performing actual, real knowledge work, I would say you're not performing work period, really, by any meaningful definition. You know, Dag also calls small talk a spiritual hell, and it is. I'm like, Uh huh. Yes, I get it. Somebody else gets it too. Having a meeting, having a touch base, having a check in, just to do it, just because somebody feels like you have to. I can't live unless I've seen you on camera. I can't trust that you're working, unless I'm able to monitor where you're sitting and what's going on and how you're dressed. People like that. I don't know what will become of them as we get further in. To the AI revolution. I don't know if they will just be phased out of the workplace and they will have to make changes in order to survive, or if they will take over as the overlords, because they clearly love having power and control. I don't know. I don't have the answer to that question.

True knowledge work is not shuffling papers around, it's not answering emails. It's not playing on the telephone, and it's not having 15 zoom meetings in a day. I feel like this should be common sense. Unfortunately, as we know when it comes to corporate America, common sense is not common stay safe, stay sane. Make sure you keep all your digits if you're gonna go and play with fireworks, don't blow your fingers off, and I will see you in the next episode. 

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