> Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings

As soon as I read this line I grimaced. This is a clear sign of an organization that doesn't respect peoples' time. The class should be an email (and proper follow-up by the management chain) establishing three rules:

- Meetings must have an agenda

- After a meeting, there must be a follow-up email describing what was decided and any action items

- Recurring meetings should be rare/exceptional

- Given good meeting notes and action items sent afterwards, reduce the invite list to decision makers; people who need to be informed can be added to the follow-up email

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theshrike79 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The point of mandatory classes isn't about respecting time or being efficient.

It's there to make 100% clear that you can't say "I didn't know" when you do something that was explicitly explained in the online class.

So now if a new middle-manager has an agendaless meeting, nobody shows up and they throw a massive fit - people can point at the class and say "It's company policy, deal with it"

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alach11 4 days ago | parent [-]

Sure. But there are plenty of ways to achieve the same outcome without wasting 8 hours of time for every employee. And once you scale this across all the aspects of company policy/culture you want push, mandatory training classes become incredibly inefficient.

	▲	miljanm 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		employee's time is company's time, so no time wasted
	▲	theshrike79 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Do you have a list of these "plenty of ways"? I'd seriously want to know so I can suggest them in my company.

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duxup 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Sadly you're right. It was a good company but by that time it was being run by some folks who were put in charge to sell the company. Once they were in place most of the executive team seemed to be resume building with little initiates here or there.

I rode that train until I was fortunate enough to get a moderate buy out.