The Pain of the Never-Ending Work Check-In
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The Pain of the Never-Ending Work Check-In

Meeting burnout got worse in the pandemic; hybrid schedules could make things even messier

By RACHEL FEINTZEIG
Tue, Jul 20, 2021 10:25amGrey Clock 4 min

Brenda Fernandez has tried blocking off time on her calendar. She’s tried to keep conversations focused. She still can’t escape them.

“Everything becomes a meeting,” the 29-year-old Miami copywriter told me. Her overwhelming feeling? “This could have been an email.”

Then she excused herself to hop on a 7 p.m. call.

We are deep in the age of the never-ending check-in. Meetings have gotten shorter during the pandemic, according to researchers, with one paper finding the average length dropped 20% in late 2020.

But meetings are multiplying. There’s the 25-minute client touch-base, the general life catch-up with your manager, the bite-size performance feedback session, the meeting to prep for the meeting.

“It just never ends,” Ms. Fernandez says.

We were already on the road to meeting burnout before the pandemic. A shift from hierarchical organisations to de-layered, matrixed ones means more bosses and teams to coordinate with. Increasingly global business means invites for times when we’d normally be in bed. Caroline Kim Oh, a leadership coach based near New York City, says that in recent years, many of her clients have started feeling like meetings are just something that happens to them.

“You have no control over your workday,” she says. “They’re just popping up.”

Working from home and living through a crisis seems to have made it worse. In an April survey from meeting scheduling tool Doodle, 69% of 1,000 full-time remote workers said their meetings had increased since the pandemic started, with 56% reporting that their swamped calendars were hurting their job performance.

Constant check-ins have become some bosses’ version of micromanaging, a way to keep tabs on workers they don’t trust. Coordination that used to happen by swivelling your chair or walking across the hall now requires extra formality and time for everyone still spread out across home offices. Plus, there’s the sense that empathetic leaders should stay in touch during moments of transition, whether that’s as the world was shutting down last year or as we head back to headquarters now.

The message to managers is often, “Hey, check in with your employees. See if they’re OK. Care more,” says Ms. Kim Oh, the executive coach. Sometimes caring more means saving a worker from one more Zoom, she adds.

What happens next? If we all go back to work five days a week, we might return to those efficient, in-person check-ins, says Raffaella Sadun, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied meeting loads before and during the pandemic. But organisations testing a hybrid set-up should brace for a mess.

There are now two kinds of interactions to manage, Dr. Sadun says. “One is at the water cooler, one is on Zoom.” If you make a decision with the colleague who sits one desk over, you still need to dial up the teammate who spends Tuesdays at home to make sure she’s on board. Suddenly, all Zoom all the time doesn’t seem so bad.

Nonetheless, many employees are optimistic that things will get better. In the Doodle survey, 70% of respondents said they hope to have fewer meetings once they head back to the office. Angela Nguyen, an independent healthcare consultant in Boston, predicts workers will return to the good old days of back-to-back meetings, as opposed to the double- and triple-booked schedules she sees now.

“It’s not sustainable,” she says. She has watched clients attempt to divide and conquer, hopping on for 15-minute cameos or dispatching various team members to different video calls. Then they sync up after—with another meeting.

Did we all just get used to having our professional contacts a click away for all these months, without travel time or personal plans as a natural boundary? Does loneliness play a role?

“I wonder if people just want to connect, just to chat, because they don’t have an office to go to,” Ms. Nguyen says.

Overall, employees have been putting in five to eight additional working hours a week during the pandemic, says Rob Cross, a professor of global leadership at Babson College and author of the forthcoming book, “Beyond Collaboration Overload.” More meetings mean more tasks to catch up on at day’s end, when we finally have a minute to take a look at our ballooning to-do lists. Plus, toggling between more, shorter meetings is hugely taxing on our brains.

“They’ve created work that they don’t see,” Dr. Cross says of organizations. “That’s crushing people.”

Becca Apfelstadt’s team at marketing agency Treetree headed back to their Columbus, Ohio, office last month for two half-days a week. The CEO’s verdict on meetings is: They’re no worse than before. Early in the pandemic, workers complained they didn’t have time to grab water or use the bathroom. “It was like, we won’t survive if we can’t figure this out,” she says.

The company moved some communication to messaging services such as Slack, trimmed meetings to 20 or 50 minutes and encouraged walk-and-talk conversations, using AI services to take notes.

The efforts helped, Ms. Apfelstadt says, and so far the shift to hybrid hasn’t created any meeting creep. Still, there have been hiccups. The other week, she spotted three employees crammed onto a couch together, attempting to share one laptop camera for a video conference.

“They just had some tiny person in the middle, and she was just getting smushed any time someone would try to make a point,” Ms. Apfelstadt says. She recommends companies keep the formal meeting schedule light as they transition back and lean into serendipitous conversations around the office.

Still, not everyone is craving those. Seanna Thompson, a physician and administrator with New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, has loved her remote meetings over the last year-plus. The dread comes when she thinks about returning to those ad-hoc, meandering check-ins by the water cooler.

“I’m like, oh God, that just derailed my whole day,” she says. “I don’t think what we were doing before was all that efficient.”

Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: July 19, 2021



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Audible alerts at the gate call out travellers trying to board earlier than they should

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TUCSON, Ariz.—Passengers in Boarding Group 1 were filing onto American Airlines Flight 2721 to Dallas Friday when an ominous sound went off at Gate B11: dip-dip-dip-DOOP. The gate agent delivered the bad news. The passenger was in Group 4. She asked him to wait his turn.

The same sound—the last-gasp sound from AirPods running out of juice, or sad “Game Over” music for an old videogame—went off minutes later. Dip-dip-dip-DOOP.

“You’ll be boarding with Group 5, sir,” the agent said. Five more passengers were turned back before Group 2 was called.

American Airlines is cracking down on line jumpers. All major U.S. airlines do their best to maintain boarding order since priority boarding is a perk for frequent fliers , credit-card holders and big spenders, and is often available for purchase. But American is the first to develop an automated system that instantly flags offenders.

The airline is experimenting at gates in Tucson, Albuquerque, N.M., and Washington, D.C., as part of a broader upgrade to American’s boarding technology. The airline has tested the alerts on more than 4,500 flights this month and will expand to several more cities this year, with an eye to taking it systemwide if no major issues, such as slower boarding, arise at larger airports. The airline says early feedback from fliers and gate agents has been encouraging.

The idea for automated policing grew out of complaints from travellers fed up with line jumpers and the employees who feel their wrath. In particular, top-tier frequent fliers gripe about too many passengers in the first boarding group, says Preston Peterson, American’s managing director of customer experience.

Group 1 is reserved for travellers in first class, certain business-class tickets and American’s executive platinum status. Active duty military members with military I.D. are also allowed. Groups 2 and 3 are similarly elite.

“They’ve earned that [priority] boarding group and they want access to it,” Peterson says.

The biggest perks, of course: plenty of overhead bin space and no worries about the dreaded threat of gate-checking your bag.

A clear difference

The new system promises smoother boarding for passengers and gate agents. I flew to Tucson International Airport to try it out. I put the airline’s traditional boarding to the test at my departure gate in Phoenix. Could I slither into an earlier boarding group? I was in Group 4 but breezed right through with Group 2.

Gate agents tell me it’s hard to monitor passengers’ group numbers manually, big plane or small, especially with boarding-pass readers where travellers plunk their phones face down.

American isn’t telling passengers about the test before their flights, and that’s on purpose. It doesn’t want them to change their behaviour simply because they’re being watched.

Chad Vossen, a 46-year-old chief creative officer for a video-marketing company in Virginia, knew nothing of the test until he and a colleague tried to board in Group 6 instead of Group 8 for a flight to Phoenix. They had done it on other American flights and others, in hopes of avoiding gate-checking their camera equipment.

His first thought when the dip-dip-dip-DOOP went off: “Wow, that doesn’t sound good.”

Vossen says it triggered the sounds losers hear on “Hollywood Squares” or “ The Price is Right .” (American says the sound effects are generic videogame clips and is still testing different sounds.)

He stepped out of line and laughed about getting caught. Vossen says he sees the change mainly as a way to get travellers to pay up for priority boarding. He’s unlikely to pay, but says he will probably finally sign up for American’s loyalty program. Members get complimentary Group 6 boarding regardless of status. That’s one group ahead of regular Main Cabin customers without status.

Peterson, the American customer-experience executive, believes most passengers aren’t out to game the system.

“I think most people just see a line and go, ‘Oh, we’re boarding,’” he says.

Toot toot, hey, beep beep

About one in 10 passengers on American’s test flights have boarded out of order, the airline says. Not all want to cheat the system. Some are travel companions of those with better boarding positions. American’s policy allows them to board together if they’re on the same reservation but didn’t assign the same boarding group. (The alert still goes off, but the agent can easily override it.) And the airline says its system doesn’t flag pre-boarders, like those with wheelchairs.

Exceptions excluded, I counted as many as seven passengers on one flight boarding in the wrong group; on another, it was zero. That math no doubt changes at a busy hub like Chicago or Dallas. So does the potential for tension.

The passengers I saw seemed to take the ejection in stride, moving aside and waiting for their group. One even apologised to the gate agent.

The test is already having an impact beyond the walk of shame. Peterson says the airline has noticed some passengers jumping out of line after seeing fellow fliers turned away. He says he witnessed the same thing at a non-U.S. airline that began policing boarding groups.

Peterson’s ultimate goal: zero boarding group alerts. “I don’t want anyone to be dinged,” he says.

For now, passengers should expect a cacophony at American gates employing the new tech. Not all alerts will send you to the back of the line. Hear a slot-machine-like sound when you scan your boarding pass? You’re probably seated in an exit row.

Even if you get the dreaded you’re-in-the wrong-boarding-group alert, it could be a mistake. A passenger in Group 8 was taken aback Friday afternoon when it sounded on her flight to Phoenix.

“That did not sound good at all,” she said to the flight attendant.

“You failed at ‘Pac-Man,’” the agent joked.

She was in the right place. The agent hadn’t yet flipped the switch in the app to her group.

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