We had a publicly viewable calendar policy. And I couldn't believe the audacity of people in other areas to take it upon themselves to just book over the top of existing meetings because they had decided their meeting was more important. And I'm not talking a group meeting where it's hard to find a gap that works for everyone, these were essentially 1:1 meetings where the organizer was someone with a little more seniority. No polite ask/DM first if it's ok, or a note in the invite to explain. Just see "focus time - no meetings" or something else _they_ deemed not important and they'd schedule it in that block and assume the IC wouldn't challenge their authority.
So had to play them at their own game to give my team their time back. The meeting was as much as an invite to them to challenge my authority as their previous attempts were. Conveniently it worked and nobody would book over my meeting. I do not miss working for larger companies.
Blocking out, say, 2x2 hours each day for "problem management" (fixing root causes of recurrent issues) becomes easy in that situation, with no subterfuge needed. Alternatively, you can nominate part of the team to be either on-call or entirely dedicated to incidents, shielding everyone else who can be dedicated to strategic work full-time (obviously, you need to do regular rotations).
The team themselves often need help in adjusting to that (firefighting can make you feel like a hero so, although stressful, it can be addictive). Blocking out specific timeslots can be helpful from this point of view, too - incidents often seem a lot more manageable if they're not crashing in on top of you at unpredictable intervals.
Then the heroic engineers get promoted and then learn that they can use their weight to shove others around. Meanwhile the ICs that had to do fire drills to make crap happen don't typically get anything out of it, other than watching some manager that shoved them around get promoted.
To me this seems like a matter of company culture that is set from the top. If CTO and VP level act like that, it trickles down and that tone becomes the norm. In either way.
If you're management, that's literally your job. Synthesize and communicate the important context bits.
It really can help an organization if departments are not siloed off. But sending everybody into every meeting is a recipe for not getting anything done.
> The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I'm not going to bother you with any of the details--and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.
Again, this is definitely not this extreme in corporate culture but this is exactly the kind of division of labor I see with most successful teams.
I've been part of these and the focus time is nice.
It doesn't address the root problem, though. If engineers are being bombarded with meetings, those meetings just get squished into the afternoon time slot.
The secondary problem was that some people started treating the blocked-out time as their only work time. Once that dedicated block came to an end, they mentally switched out of work mode and were not going to do any more work until the next morning. Before all of the "nobody can do more than 3 hours of good work per day" replies, this was a real problem because people also used this time for discussion things with each other on the team, actual team meetings, and various things other than heads-down work, leaving less than the allotted time for actually working. It was also a problem when something would come up at 2:30PM and the person responsible would defer it to next morning's work session instead of taking an hour to do the work. This might all sound like minor annoyances and it was only some people doing it, but the theme repeated itself so much that many of us soured on the idea over time.
The bigger problem was that it didn't address the real issue. Every situation is different and in my case the manager was part of the problem. His solution to everything and answer to every question was to get two people talking. He thought of himself as a switchboard, routing people to other people on our team.
Blocking out meeting time helped a little, but what we really needed was an active manager who was handling communications himself and only bringing the team in when needed. We also needed him to have our backs when we declined meetings or asked if they could be an e-mail.
The healthier managers I've had take a constant, active interest in keeping their teams' meeting workloads down and rooting out interruptions and distractions. They also empower their team to forward meeting requests to the manager to evaluate and ask that external requests at least cc them for visibility. Every time I've had a manager like that, I haven't felt the need for blocked out focus time.
It worked exceptionally well because then the other employees were unable to individually bother team members. The team name in the HR directory was something vague and reported to the skip level, so unless you were in the know, we were totally invisible to the rest of the org. For some context we were keeping many millions of dollars of daily transactions afloat and it was not unusual to receive death threats from business folks when they couldn't do their jobs.
I don't miss it remotely, but I sometimes miss being a member of an invisible force with superuser privileges, with the blessing to unfuck anything we saw fit.
That's crazy. My team works on a part of a system handling several million $/day, and if something goes wrong then everyone's chill about it. Lost $100k revenue? Happens. We'll have the comms team send out something about it. The most heated things got was a time that a manager said something along the lines of "yeah it'll be bad if we can't roll out this thing in the next 2 hours." If I got a death threat that's an instant email to HR.
Working in education I am glad that this is not a problem where I am. As government employees we are all understaffed and overworked, and all meetings are short and to the point, because they are good when you need them, but most of the time you don't and a well written Email or a phone call is enough.