What is it about the public sector and meetings?

Managing Change. Change Management. Change Innovation. During my brief sojourn in the public sector we were always being encouraged to do this. In fact hardly a day went by when a perky file headed with lots of capital letters wasn’t being delivered that would transform us all into corporate team players. Except nothing much ever changed and all senior management’s missives ever did was to move a lot of anxious and slightly autistic people up to a new level of existential anxiety.

As part of the programme our Chief Executive let us know that we were all having too many meetings. Instructions went around insisting we ask ourselves if our meeting was really necessary and if it was might we try, for example, standing up and finishing off any malingerers with some deep vein thrombosis. This was all very well in theory but in practice it was the stuff of nightmare to public sector workers. Without setting up and attending meetings what exactly was our purpose on earth? What else were we supposed to do? It didn’t take long for the anti-meeting mission to find itself lost in the deep landfills of unimportant looking paperwork. We weren’t stupid. We weren’t talking ourselves out of a job.

My colleagues knew that their purpose in life was to say something at the beginning of a meeting even if it was just their name and then earn the right to a Mars Bar-fuelled glutinous snooze. As for the impertinent suggestion that they could ever do without meetings, this could only come from twenty-three year-old consultants in Prada suits.

If there ever was a vacuum it could be quickly abhorred by endless meetings about Health and Safety, fire drill procedures and an investigation into who put purple tinsel up covering the architect’s nineteen seventies hessian statement. In fact it would be entirely possible for a public service worker to spend their entire lives having meetings about policies and procedures and never actually have to do any proper work. It’s not really surprising that we remained suspicious of anyone from outside the sector telling us what we should be doing. Because if they did, er, we could always have a meeting about it.