Daily standups, weekly retros and weekly 1-on-1:s. Those are the ones that bother me the most, the micromanagement around planning, I can deal with. But the creepiness of these other vague "Hey, I'm your friend, we can just talk" type of meetings are too much for me. And this trap of "giving feedback" and whenever you do, you get punished and marked for no promotion, immediately, it's just loyalty checks masked as something else "this meeting is for you" uhmm, can I just go back to work please?
Stand-ups can be a drag. My last stand-ups were literally 3-5 minutes, which I attribute to everyone working on long-running project where we all either knew what "Today I'll be fooing the bar" meant or knew it wasn't important to know. And we were very good about mentioning but not discussing problems during that meeting; they'd be dealt with "off-line" (so to speak).
Retrospectives can also be good when they're focused on how to improve processes (including Agile's). If it's just a venting session, that can become demoralizing, even caustic. There's also value in not having certain people in the room, so they can't get defensive or cause people to clam up.
This is almost certainly due to poor facilitation. That is to say, whoever is facilitating this meeting is either afraid to push back or else thinks that this is how it should be.
Convince the 6 developers that they don't need more than 30s each during the "tech only" standup. Get the facilitator to aggressively chop long discussions (clarifying questions can be fine; discussions and debates are not). At least, move long discussions to the end of the standup so that people who aren't relevant and who don't care can leave.
Initially, my team's standups (I think 4 devs at the time) would be 15-20 minutes; we're now (6 devs) down to 10-15 minutes, probably 10s more than 15s.
I can't imagine there being much value from a daily, 30-minute, whole-team meeting with multiple stakeholders. Developers should perhaps talk to specific stakeholders... but those conversations should be focused on specific stories and probably should be done in much smaller groups. Heck, it would be fine to have 30 minutes of scheduled "office hours" time where specific developers can talk to specific stakeholders about specific stories.
Bring this up in retrospective. Point out that (nominally) 12.5% of every day (and likely more than that) is being spent on these meetings. Ask about what value people see in these long meetings and if there's a better way to achieve that value. Brainstorm other approaches and get the team to commit to experimentation.
Try, you know, actually standing up. On your feet. That's where the name comes from and it's to encourage people to be brief.
The central evil is letting anyone control the standup that isn't directly participating in the work output of the team.
Because then it's easy for that person to forget that stand-ups have no independent value -- their only value is in making the other work go faster. And should be calibrated to maximize that.
Which is why you get the "We standup because we have to standup" shops.
I knew one company where the standups were getting so bad, the managers solution was to have everybody in a plank position for the meeting. Meeting time got short real fast.
Dont go. Seriously. When they ask why just say 'I do not contribute and am in the way there'. One place I worked it took them 4 months to realize I was not in the 1-2 hour meeting every other day. It took them another year to realize most of the people on that call should not be there. The managers are confusing their status meetings with yours and now they are one in the same. That is why they are long and disorganized.
I knew a particular self-important PM that had follow up point-poker meetings that easily went into the three hour range. She was very useless, but it was almost like going to her own little tea-party with her little dolls that she fed fake tea.
Apologies for the gender connotations, but I have no better analogy. It was a little girl playing with her little dolls.
Oh man I feel for you. At the startup I'm currently at, it's all remote and we have daily stand-ups that are only 15 mins but usually they finish in 2. Not sure if it's useful or not since you could probably express the same info in a message but it's nice to see people I suppose.
I'm in a distributed team where the daily standups are optional. Almost everyone join every day and say it is good to see the others at least for a short while every day
I despised daily stands in person, but love them on a remote team.
We've decide to drop the status updates from standups to focus solely on discussing things of interest to the team - blockers, processes, issues, announcements, icebreakers, etc.
I'm going to be that guy: They say it is good to see others or they say what is expected of them? Is like the conversation yesterday about leaving interviews. You don't say Person was is shit and an asshole but you say a better opportunity came up. Heck, even during job interviews, you don't answer 'why work here' with 'money' but 'looking for a new challenge, or interesting work or whatnot'
As someone who enjoys sharing a similar sense of humour and outlook as the people I work with, I'm personally more than happy to spend 15 minutes goofing around before a day of knuckling down and getting shit done. YMMV
Yeah, and that feeling of someone oversharing something both irrelevant and boring, while you already have an overfull short term memory from your own work, AND being forced to pretend to pay attention, it's just so painful.