This is the kind of lazy non-explanation I was complaining about in the recent HN thread on "laziness doesn't exist". There are people who have perosnal incentives and counter-incentives, they work in groups which bring their own incentives. Things like:
- Socially, writing up notes and sending them out is often seen as secretarial work, women's work, low status work. People think their personal interests are better served by taking high status tasks, not low status tasks.
- As well as being a low status task, it could be seen as trying to usurp your manager's authority, if you want to be the one sending out "here is what we decided and who is going to be taking followup actions".
- Socially it could be "goody-two-shoes" behaviour if you weren't asked to do it, and lose the respect of some people.
- Socially, if a coworker got lumbered with a task nobody wanted, they might resent you sending an all-hands email "gloating" and making sure everyone knows about it, or you fear they might.
- Writing memo notes invites you to open-ended future scrutiny if anyone thinks the notes unfairly represented what they said or their participation. Coworker who thinks management is getting an unfair view of their contribution because of your biased notes, for example.
- There are power imbalances and adversarial relationships among people in meetings; writing memo notes may be seen as "I'm going to write down what you say so I can take it out of context and use it against you" or in an "I'm going to hold my seniors to account" way. Maybe some things in the meeting are spoken, deliberately so they are "off the record".
- If you think the notes will not be read, writing them feels like pointless make-work.
- It misunderstands the purpose of meetings as "productivity" when they are often for avoiding blame, feeling important, or pushing something back and forth because the people in the meeting don't have the authority to make the decision(s) which need to be made.
- If the company sees meeting records as important, it should be explicitly someone's job. If it's not someone's job, the company doesn't value it, so why should you? In the YosefK "Employees can read their manager's mind"[1] sense, employees are not there to make the company productive, they are there to make their managers happy.
- If meeting memos aren't regularly taken, and you want to start, you face all the possible problems of trying to push a change into an existing system and people's reluctance to change no matter what the change is.
- If tasks are assigned in the meeting, they should go into wherever the teams track work, not into generic forgettable group emails. If decisions are made, they should be logged in whatever documentation logs decisions, not generic email. If those are done the memo is redundant.
There are only a couple of quick ways through this, the first is an enthusiastic junior who wants to be seen to be helping and has little to lose because the worst case is a manager asking them to stop. The other is a high-status employee (socially, e.g. wealthy white male, contractor, friend of the boss) or organizationally (e.g. senior title, manager, leader) secure in their skills and life who have respect and can damn the consequences - although they would be more likely to use their power to skip the junk meeting or have the memo taking task assigned to someone less busy. For everyone else, all changes have risks, especially ones which include increasing your visibility while making the implied statement "you weren't doing things properly and I have a better way".
These things which really exist and do bother people casually dismissed as "garden variety laziness" is, I repeat, a lazy non-explanation.
This is the kind of lazy non-explanation I was complaining about in the recent HN thread on "laziness doesn't exist". There are people who have perosnal incentives and counter-incentives, they work in groups which bring their own incentives. Things like:
- Socially, writing up notes and sending them out is often seen as secretarial work, women's work, low status work. People think their personal interests are better served by taking high status tasks, not low status tasks.
- As well as being a low status task, it could be seen as trying to usurp your manager's authority, if you want to be the one sending out "here is what we decided and who is going to be taking followup actions".
- Socially it could be "goody-two-shoes" behaviour if you weren't asked to do it, and lose the respect of some people.
- Socially, if a coworker got lumbered with a task nobody wanted, they might resent you sending an all-hands email "gloating" and making sure everyone knows about it, or you fear they might.
- Writing memo notes invites you to open-ended future scrutiny if anyone thinks the notes unfairly represented what they said or their participation. Coworker who thinks management is getting an unfair view of their contribution because of your biased notes, for example.
- There are power imbalances and adversarial relationships among people in meetings; writing memo notes may be seen as "I'm going to write down what you say so I can take it out of context and use it against you" or in an "I'm going to hold my seniors to account" way. Maybe some things in the meeting are spoken, deliberately so they are "off the record".
- If you think the notes will not be read, writing them feels like pointless make-work.
- It misunderstands the purpose of meetings as "productivity" when they are often for avoiding blame, feeling important, or pushing something back and forth because the people in the meeting don't have the authority to make the decision(s) which need to be made.
- If the company sees meeting records as important, it should be explicitly someone's job. If it's not someone's job, the company doesn't value it, so why should you? In the YosefK "Employees can read their manager's mind"[1] sense, employees are not there to make the company productive, they are there to make their managers happy.
- If meeting memos aren't regularly taken, and you want to start, you face all the possible problems of trying to push a change into an existing system and people's reluctance to change no matter what the change is.
- If tasks are assigned in the meeting, they should go into wherever the teams track work, not into generic forgettable group emails. If decisions are made, they should be logged in whatever documentation logs decisions, not generic email. If those are done the memo is redundant.
There are only a couple of quick ways through this, the first is an enthusiastic junior who wants to be seen to be helping and has little to lose because the worst case is a manager asking them to stop. The other is a high-status employee (socially, e.g. wealthy white male, contractor, friend of the boss) or organizationally (e.g. senior title, manager, leader) secure in their skills and life who have respect and can damn the consequences - although they would be more likely to use their power to skip the junk meeting or have the memo taking task assigned to someone less busy. For everyone else, all changes have risks, especially ones which include increasing your visibility while making the implied statement "you weren't doing things properly and I have a better way".
These things which really exist and do bother people casually dismissed as "garden variety laziness" is, I repeat, a lazy non-explanation.
[1] https://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind....