Post #3.
I didn’t think it necessary to spell out the entire joke.
Whatever you do, do not schedule more meetings!
You should schedule a meeting to make this clear.
I never understand the “no meetings” thing. From what I’ve seen, people love meetings, because it allows them to do nothing while pretending to do something. This is what 90% of the working world wants out of its day.
(I actually do believe that to a degree, but am partially joking.)
For real though, if you are having problems with morale, I would be careful simply eliminating meetings. Meetings can be a place where people believe they have a rare chance to be heard, and to gain satisfaction from feeling like part of an actual team and process. The issue is to simply hold the right types of meetings, not to eliminate them.
Professionals want to do well at their jobs. They want their time and effort to matter. They want to go home at the end of the day and feel like they accomplished something.
Ways to make work more fun for professionals:
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Ask people what can be done to make them more productive. Some things aren’t practical but in many cases small changes can improve their value to the company and make them a happier employee. You are a project manager, one third of your job is to make sure your team has everything they need to do their job (the other two thirds are managing the schedule and communication).
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Aggressively attack those things which are wasting time, energy and effort. Ask people what they did that day, if you get a lot of churn on non-productive things figure out what can be done to free people from that process (as was mentioned above useless meetings are often a cause of this, but it can also be working with unresponsive groups or analysis/paralysis processes).
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Trumpet your teams successes. Sell the value of your team to the rest of the company, and to your team as well. Celebrate milestones, talk widely about accomplishments and new records set. Take any opportunity to spotlight individual efforts. We are to quiet in IT, we need to speak up about the amazing work that is being done. I knew a manager that had a high school marching band come through campus with signs and banners to celebrate a new milestone hit by our team. It’s hard to not go home feeling like a rock star if you are getting that kind of attention.
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Life isn’t fair, but the office should be. Look for cases where people feel that their peers are given special privileges or that they aren’t held as accountable This tends to drag everyone around them down as they feel like their special effort is wasted if coworker X floats by coming in late and leaving early every day (as an example).
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Figure out if you have negative team members who are dragging to the morale of the whole team. It’s amazing the impact of a sour apple in a group, talk to them, ask for support and a more positive attitude from them. As a bonus if they pretend to be more positive they will become more positive.
Re meetings, the quick agile standup sort of meeting at the start of the day does no harm, as do the occasional absolutely necessary meeting required to get something important done that requires approvals or consensus.
But that soul-killing grind of meeting after meeting after meeting every day with different overlapping subsets of all your colleagues, superiors, and subordinates… when most of your schedule is meetings that means your job is pointless and so is everyone else’s, and the company would really be better off with all of you gone – and apart from the loss of paycheck, you’d be better off too.
Give out some raises. Nothing improves morale more than getting a nod of appreciation in the form of concrete dollar signs.
I worked at an Italian gold importer many years ago. Every Friday they had a meeting at lunch hour. Free food and everyone got a scratch off lottery card. It worked for me.
Free food and an ounce coin would have worked better, maybe?
It was gold jewelry so a few feet of 18k rope chain would have been nice. ;-)