“This could have been an email”, is a sentiment we have heard way too often. While it is true that a lot of meetings are just people faffing about to fill the time, as someone who is early in his career, I find these forced interactions quite helpful.
I started my first proper job in the middle of the pandemic and initially, I had very little interaction with my colleagues. It was quite isolating and as a result of it, I decided to grab any opportunity I got to attend a meeting.
I attended all sorts of meetings, such as one on ones, casual hangs, heated project discussions, awkward calls, fun calls, heartbreaking calls. Almost all texts I sent in those initial years were in the service of organising calls. I would collect my queries until the next time I got a chance to ask them. Many times, I would end up finding a solution by myself. It’s funny how just a few years earlier, I and everyone else of my age would shudder at the thought of answering a phone call. Texting had dominated my youth so long and I did not appreciate the importance of face-to-face communication (either in person or virtual) until after it was gone. I had to adapt to the changing world by (rather ironically) embracing the practices of the older world.
Now, the reason I had to adapt was simple. I had just started my career, and I felt that I would get nowhere if I did not develop connections. Let me be clear, I have and always been an introvert. Yet, the compulsion to not end up as just another chat bubble on someone else’s screen forced me to get out of my shell.
This one practice has been instrumental to my learning journey. Being in the knowledge work business, it is easy to get siloed out and treated as a report churning machine. It often feels isolating and mind numbingly monotonous if you only focus on the work. The real fun and the real knowledge (which I think are my primary incentives) lie in human interactions. It is challenging for me to establish new connections. I just moved to a new company and am currently in the middle of building them. At times, it feels like hard work, but in the end, I really do think it is worth it.
For anyone starting out in any company or industry, my one suggestion would be to get into as many meetings as you can. It doesn’t matter what level of expertise (if any) you have in the topic of conversation. In fact, more than a risk, meetings present you with opportunities. Every meeting is an opportunity to talk to someone new, make yourself known. Even if you cannot contribute much to a meeting it would always help to learn from it. I often draw two columns, one titled “insights” and one titled “actions” on a sheet of paper before attending any meeting. Even if you are not contributing, at the very least, you are engaging in the conversation. Meetings are an invaluable source of knowledge, human connection and leverage for building a career, especially if you are just starting out.
And so, I would like to push back on the rhetoric that meetings at work are a waste of time. They are as useful as the attendees want them to be.