Scheduling a 4.55pm meeting on Friday should be a workplace offence

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

You've used all of your gift articles. 3 more will become available on the 1st of every month.

Someone in my team keeps scheduling meetings very late on a Friday afternoon. Worse, they’re given the title “Quick Sync Up”.

Is this legal? I strongly believe this person should go to prison.

No, what you’ve described is strictly illegal and your sense that the person should be incarcerated for their crime is entirely fair. No jury in the world would acquit this person.

This, believe it or not, is the first time I’ve heard the word “quick sync” or “sync up” in this context, and I’m not a fan. As I always say with new workplace buzzwords and jargon, criterion number one for whether or not it’s necessary should be: “Does it do something other terms simply don’t do?” This one gets a huge cross in that column.

Quick meeting. Little catch up. Short chat. Five-minute get together. Brief discussion – it barely even has a tonal difference to the many options that already exist. And that only makes the central crime worse, in my eyes. Let’s look at that vile felony a bit more closely.

Nobody wants to have meetings at 4.55pm* on a Friday afternoon. Nobody wants to go to a meeting at that time on any day of the week. Yes, maybe it’s convenient for the meeting maker, but that’s because they’re the only ones with the gall to even consider it a sensible meeting time. Of course, it’s “free in all our calendars”, Dennis* - it’s the weekend in everything but name!

And a more, ahem, business-minded reader of the line of reasoning above might suggest it comes across as typical Millennial laziness. Sorry, I don’t buy it. If you want to work 10 or 12-hour days, go for it. But don’t force it on others and, for goodness’ (and your own) sake, leave Friday exempt.

Okay. We’ve had some fun with this and played around with the idea that a probably well-meaning colleague should be criminally prosecuted, and removed from society, for putting a meeting in a work calendar.

But, for a moment, let’s be fair and look at it after taking off our smart-aleck specs.

We’ll assume your co-worker is not being a deliberate pain, but genuinely believes an end of week debrief is valuable for all parties concerned.

The problem I still have with this scheduling decision is that, although we like to tell ourselves a good meeting is a short meeting, the truth is, the best meetings often meander off into unexpected tributaries and tangents. Down these unplanned discussion paths can be fascinating insight or new ways of looking at a work problem.

And you reach such places not by demanding all participants stick strictly to the agenda, but by encouraging the kind of free-wheeling conversation that has a tendency to uncover something previously hidden or dormant.

Which is all lovely.

But such discussions have a tendency to gobble time with the voluble enthusiasm of that green slime thing from Ghostbusters. And what’s not lovely is wanting to get back to your family for Friday night fish and chips after a demanding week, as your genuinely useful “quick sync” turns into a 75-minute epic.

My advice is that if imagining this inconvenient scheduler behind bars prevents you from saying something unwise, keep doing it. But if you find your frustration building as the meeting continues to get scheduled, you’ll probably need a strategy to either stop them from doing it or to alleviate your frustration.

I assume you’ve already proposed a different time but, if you haven’t, that’s a simple opening gambit. Surely, a time with a “3” in front of it can work as well as one that’s literally minutes from knock-off.

If that’s been tried and failed or is just not feasible for some reason, I think the next best bet - assuming you (like most people) want to avoid seeming like a caustic churl or using your middle finger as a response - is to get some collective action going. Organise with others in your team who find this time inconvenient and decline the invite en masse.

After a few of these meetings attended by few or no peers, your Friday night assassin will surely get the hint.

* The colleague’s name is not Dennis and they did not necessarily schedule meetings at precisely this time.

Send your questions through to Work Therapy by emailing jonathan@theinkbureau.com.au.

Get workplace news, advice and perspectives to help make your job work for you. Sign up for our weekly Thank God it’s Monday newsletter.