It’s not that simple, for example I work with several different teams, some of the teams have recurring meetings that they expect me to attend to varying degrees. In one case I’m only needed about 25% of the time and even then only for 5-10% of the meeting, and 33% of the time the meeting is just cancelled a few hours in advance by the manager who runs it. But the manager for that team is kinda pointy-haired, so if I just stopped showing up he’d eventually talk with my manager and be like “we need a representative from your team at this meeting and X stopped showing up, what gives?”, my manager would know already that the meeting is useless for me, but the incentives are such that it’s easiest if I just go (because if I refuse he’d have to go himself and/or send someone less equipped to help).
The actual feedback my manager and I would both want to give is “this meeting is in practice just <other team’s manager> giving and getting a status update we don’t need to be present for, then asking us questions for his projects, we’d rather it be more collaborative or less frequent” but that would hurt that other manager’s feelings. And we need their buy in to help us with things sometimes. And probably we dominate meetings sometimes that the pointy haired guy (or members of his team) goes to anyway. It’s kinda aggro to just refuse to let him hold court and it might burn a bridge we need to be maintained…
I’ve seen the same thing happen with a TL or manager who tries to force a really inefficient process like 30-60m 10+ person standup every day. Yes to an extent status updates are necessary but in this other case the manager is even pointier haired and has no idea how to manage, his ICs are actually quite talented, this is just his way to hold court.
With anonymous meeting feedback you can have a better way of surfacing a signal that the meeting isn’t valuable to most attendees. And you avoid foisting the political risk on whoever is bravest enough to speak out. I know you might think all these failure modes I mentioned are just big company politics, but I think they can happen in basically any situation where there is a power imbalance (even a little startup with a ceo insisting on an excess of meetings with the 4 other employees).
The actual feedback my manager and I would both want to give is “this meeting is in practice just <other team’s manager> giving and getting a status update we don’t need to be present for, then asking us questions for his projects, we’d rather it be more collaborative or less frequent” but that would hurt that other manager’s feelings. And we need their buy in to help us with things sometimes. And probably we dominate meetings sometimes that the pointy haired guy (or members of his team) goes to anyway. It’s kinda aggro to just refuse to let him hold court and it might burn a bridge we need to be maintained…
I’ve seen the same thing happen with a TL or manager who tries to force a really inefficient process like 30-60m 10+ person standup every day. Yes to an extent status updates are necessary but in this other case the manager is even pointier haired and has no idea how to manage, his ICs are actually quite talented, this is just his way to hold court.
With anonymous meeting feedback you can have a better way of surfacing a signal that the meeting isn’t valuable to most attendees. And you avoid foisting the political risk on whoever is bravest enough to speak out. I know you might think all these failure modes I mentioned are just big company politics, but I think they can happen in basically any situation where there is a power imbalance (even a little startup with a ceo insisting on an excess of meetings with the 4 other employees).