Stupid Meetings / Trainings You’ve Had For Work?

[KAMALARAMBO: BOOMSHAKALAKA!!!]

I opened up an e-mail from my work’s training department and the first sentence was literally, “We are excited to offer Use the force of Luke!”

All I know for sure is that I enjoyed Star Wars and I really don’t want to read the rest of this e-mail.

[Push R Truth]

We had a "How to use ZOOM" meeting right after our covid shutdown and the meeting was held on ZOOM. Mind you they weren't teaching us how to set up a meeting. They were teaching us how to join it.



Yeah.

[King Devitt and the Woke Mob]

When Blockbuster was slowly going under, our DL thought it would be a good idea to have a "morale boosting" meeting with the district where we all gathered early one Monday morning, and had some strange woman give us a pep talk and then played the entirety of Mariah Carey's "Hero".

It was f***ing awkward.

I should also mention that before our DL became DL with Blockbuster she was working for Mary Kay.......



(she was notoriously horrible at her job)

[ERON]

The principal at my high school from 2014 to 2020 insisted on having faculty meetings on the third Wednesday of every month whether there was something important to discuss or not. At our first meeting with him, he had each of us write a personal question we wanted to ask him on an index card so that at our monthly meetings, if he had nothing else for us to discuss, he could pull the stack of cards out of his back pocket and answer questions about himself just to kill time.

He did that exactly once, and got such a negative reaction that he never did it again. After that, if there was ever nothing new to discuss at one of our meetings - which was usually the case - he would either find a YouTube video to show us or come up with some team-building activity like trust falls or building towers out of toothpicks and marshmallows. It wasn't until his last year with us that he finally just started calling off the monthly meetings if there was no reason to meet.

["Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay]

Working in my line of work means periodically sitting through training that people at my level barely need to know about and people at the next level up should know or they wouldn't be employed in that job

Perfectly pitched training that is useless for everyone by being too advanced and too basic

[G✇JI☈A]

A boss at my old job came up with the bright idea for doing training meetings during lunch breaks so production would not be stopped.

Everyone thought this was bullshit, the lunch breaks were unpaid. So everyone basically ignored the training exercise, until he gave up on doing it again.

[Mighty Attack Tribble]

A few years ago the hotel chain I work for spent almost £4 million sending all 30,000+ employees on a six-hour day course that taught us the following things:

• be polite to guests
• empathise with guests who have a complaint

That's basically it. There were some acronyms designed to help us remember how to do those two things, and at the end of the day we were each asked what we would do differently to achieve what we had learned that day, to which my response was "Nothing, I've already been doing it for 15 years."

[YAKMAN is ICHIBAN]

Presently watching a training about records retention and email management

Just a dry powerpoint slide with a monotone reading voice

A brief moment of excitement occurred when there was a random Minion on one slide for no particular reason.

[bibboid]

A company I used to work for held a series of team building exercises. Every six months or so they would fly thirty or forty of us from around the country to spend a week at the corporate headquarters in Cleveland. Put us up in the Radisson. Fed us in nice restaurants. Took us out drinking and partying every night. We got tickets to see the Indians in summer and the Cavaliers in winter. And during the days we would meet to brainstorm ideas for how to make our company more efficient and profitable. We came up with a whole bunch of great ideas. Not a single one of them got implemented. Eventually the company realized how much money they were wasting and gave up on the program.

[HeyYo]

I swear this is true. I worked at an insurance company for a whole six weeks before I got fired for refusing to do illegal shit.

They had an annual meeting at a movie theatre a block away. Management was easily making the kind of money where they were uber rich and everyone else was basically just making enough to survive. They spent an hour telling us the company was making record profits and showing us slideshows of their recent luxury vacations. One specifically was "Here's my family at the most expensive ski resort in Switzerland and a picture of me drinking $500 whiskey. I'll be taking the whole summer off to take the family to Europe for eight weeks. We're only going to stay in 5-star places."

At the end they started playing Happy by Pharrell Williams and asked everyone to get up and dance to it because the company was doing so well. I should mention that everyone besides management couldn't have been more miserable. The hosts got upset and threw hissy fits when nobody got up and danced to it. I've never seen something so tone deaf in my life.

[Magnus the Magnificent]

Mandatory Safety-At-Work meeting that lasted about half a day.
I wrote the material that was presented by my boss.

[BlackoutCreature]

My office has created a numerical formula to evaluate our productivity. The problem is it only calculates data based on when we're using a Microsoft OneDrive or having a Team meeting. There are only three people in our unit, and we're all in cubicles right next to each other, and most of our work is done on websites or our dedicated server. But to get this number up so they can't complain about us slacking every day we have to set up a Teams meeting that we just sit on for an hour ignoring with our cameras and mics off and transferring random files from our usual server to a Microsoft OneDrive server.

[An Dog On An Skateboard]

Oct 17, 2022 17:13:04 GMT -5 King Devitt and the Woke Mob said:

When Blockbuster was slowly going under, our DL thought it would be a good idea to have a "morale boosting" meeting with the district where we all gathered early one Monday morning, and had some strange woman give us a pep talk and then played the entirety of Mariah Carey's "Hero".

It was f***ing awkward.

I should also mention that before our DL became DL with Blockbuster she was working for Mary Kay.......



(she was notoriously horrible at her job)

[Ultimo Gallos]

Long time ago I worked for the county. We had to have a once a week safety meeting.WWhere someone read a chapter out of the safety handbook. This handbook was made to work for all the jobs the county had.

So while I was working in a morgue,we had a chapter on chainsaw safety in the handbook. The time I got picked to read a chapter picked that one.

Pretty much we used the meeting as a 30 minute nap for everyone.

[SmashTV]

How to use a phone and office chair properly.

[tirtefaa]

My previous job had a guy who was a smooth talker to the company owner, so he would find ways to make himself look important to cover up for the fact that he wasn't very good at what he did. Quite simply put...he would try to point out how inefficient everyone else was to cover for the fact that he himself was inefficient. I was in management, so we would have daily meetings that should have gone well otherwise. We were profitable, we had a good crew for the most part, and we had the ability to get the results that we wanted if things got rough.

This wasn't good enough for the other guy though. Even if one metric looked good, he would point to something else that looked off and would ask us why we didn't notice it. To us, noticing something like that would require us to pull reports at our desk instead of being out working with our team, and if we did that, it would create another problem. It didn't matter what the issue was, and believe me, we patched up so many "problems" where it didn't even make a difference to the end result, all it did was make our crew miserable. The funny thing is everyone would go into the meetings with positivity and just be completely demoralized by the end of it, with the owner literally gritting her teeth because she was led to believe we were all goofing around.

I should note that this guy was notorious for just closing his door and watching videos on YouTube, and occasionally pulling some big report where he'd post the results in a chat and try to embarrass people. Then he'd take a 30 minute cigarette break. He would occasionally call an emergency meeting where he acted like he was the only one who cared while everyone else didn't do what they were supposed to. I couldn't outright fight him everytime because that would make me look like I was unwilling to be a team player, so I was strategic when I did so. The few times I fought against his changes, I was vindicated for seeing the flaws in his plan. Despite these completely blow up in his face, he still somehow held onto his position. Eventually he convinced the owner to shutdown our branch of the company and about 40 people lost their jobs. He's still with the company to this day.

[MC Blowfish]

Oct 18, 2022 8:35:16 GMT -5 G✇JI☈A said:

A boss at my old job came up with the bright idea for doing training meetings during lunch breaks so production would not be stopped.

Everyone thought this was bullshit, the lunch breaks were unpaid. So everyone basically ignored the training exercise, until he gave up on doing it again.

  Learn and Lunch or something like that.  I used to work at a place that did those.  Too many people would join them.

[The Legend of Groose]

Most of my work meetings are "Here's our new people, here's are numbers showing we're doing the best in the market." Even if part of me thinks the numbers might be altered to boost work morale. Kind of like WrestleMania attendance numbers.