Quiet Fridays Are Here At Last
NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk: Agencywide Quiet Fridays are Here!
“With much of the NASA workforce currently teleworking, gone – for now – are the days of the casual collaborations and conversations that happen in hallways or office pop-ins. In their place, many of us are seeing a significant increase in more formal, scheduled meetings. In an effort to help employees maintain a balance of communication, collaboration, and individual productivity, NASA is implementing an agencywide “Quiet Friday” program effective Friday, Sept. 25.”
Did they have to have meetings to decide when they should not have meetings? Seriously, part of the pressure for meetings is the inability to simply let people use their initiative and get things done.
Personal empowerment is a popular notion, Dr. W. It is sometimes difficult to see, though, how this would work.
We are basically moving meetings ‘up’ the project timeline, aren’t we? What I mean: each team member pays a part in the team goals. And the team benefits when members understand the role they play as a team progresses towards a particular outcome.
Perhaps you are saying that the occurrence of team meetings on the project timeline should be shifted left or right? Once a goal is established, assigned to person or team with commensurate ability, that coordination meetings should be fewer?
Oh, hell! I’ve never worked at a place like NASA, or anyplace where I’d be small part of a big project. I’m not even sure about posting this comment…except to gain some insight into (as I read Keith) control efforts by management.
Large organizations (being large) involve their own person-person, person-system, and system-system dynamics. One person can get some things done. Two people can accomplish more, plus synergy can happen. Again with three. But somewhere up the ramp, the mere existence of multiple interfaces & interactions introduces potential problems & inefficiencies (and I’m not even going near personality clashes, etc). My father often said that when you have a job, you have to learn two jobs: the work itself…and then the organization.
The first thing persons in any organization must accept is that ‘the organization’ is made up of human beings, and human beings haven’t actually changed much for about 200,000 or so years.
Some at NASA do not acknowledge this. Since they are ‘NASA’ (the super-cool agency with slick emblems & patches that does amazing novel things…it’s ROCKET SCIENCE, for heaven’s sake) they are ‘different’. Since they are ‘different’, they obviously have to invent their own ways of doing (& fixing) things (including how to hold meetings). So they invest time & effort (sometimes forming Tiger Teams) to come up with and implement ‘what works for them’.
SOMETIMES, there’s a kid or two on the Tiger Team who recognize the problem with the Emperor’s new wardrobe…i.e., they re-discover that the solutions to their difficulties already exist and are tried & true…because other humans had figured them out already, based on what was already known about…human beings.
Sometimes.
I gather from your previous comments that when you have meetings it is typically for you to ask clients what they want or tell them what you propose, so everyone is there because they want to be there. NASA meetings often are scheduled events where various people, sometimes everyone in a department, present their conclusions or progress, each is often irrelevant to the others and the meetings can last hours. Email fails at this role in part because everyone gets so much email it is difficult to keep up with it. Meetings are ideal for purposes of discussion involving the entire group, less useful for training or reporting.
My pre-k kid gets nap time, I guess NASA leaders needed their nap. Thank God for SpaceX, maybe they don’t need their naps. NASA, get to work, SLS is how far over budget but you need a quiet day? So sad that taxpayers foot this bill as well so these civil servants can take Fridays off without oversight.
It’s not about a Friday off, some NASA people get inundated with one meeting after another. As Homer Hickam wrote there are times when need a block of time to
focus on a job. There are times when I get “on a roll” as if all the brain cells line up in perfect harmony to work on a specific task. A meeting (which doesn’t really need to be on a Friday) can break that choreography.
No one is talking about taking a day off. This is about minimizing the number of meetings in order to give people time and space to think, collaborate, and be creative. I know the pressure to grab an empty spot on someone’s calendar to get my little meeting in. Requiring people to think really hard about just how critical your topic is once in awhile is a very good thing. I’d like to see this approach adopted more widely.
It is always fun to read comments from people with fake names like this.
Other than the fact that this isn’t a day off (which others have noted), the memo starts by noting a problem. It look like people at NASA have noticed the interactions which can’t be easily replaced with virtual meetings. The informal and unstructured discussions people have with each other outside scheduled meetings with agendas. The impression I get from the memo’s first paragraph is that people are trying to make up for that by scheduling _more_ meetings. Which isn’t going to be a substitute for those less formal hallway conversations or knocking on someone’s door. In fact, adding more meetings likely to reduce productivity. So the new policy makes sense to me. It simply says that, every other Friday, there will be no meetings (except time and mission critical ones.) That gives people a full work day out of every ten when they can actually _work_ as opposed to attend meetings.
I am wondering, given the age of the average NASA manage, if they are into texting to any extent. It’s how that type of interaction often takes place in the virtual world. I even do it with colleagues during virtual meetings when I have a quick question to ask and I don’t want to distract the whole meeting with it.
Once again it sounds like what NASA needs are some expert consultants to teach them about best practices when working remotely.
And that’s why the turnover at SpaceX is the way it is.
We used to define office “quiet time” at NASA as “After 5 PM.” Or later. Or the weekends. I used to sneak into the office and get tons of work done on Sunday afternoons. Most of the time, plenty of my co-workers were in there, too, doing the same thing. We’d ignore each other, knowing why we were in there, to knock out the pesky little chores of management or review proposals or answer letters or read and comment on flight documentation that were boring but needed to get done and took some uninterrupted time. This was well before 9/11, of course, when breaking into a building on the weekend out at MSFC (a credit card or pen knife pushed against the lock would do it) was a matter of sneaky fun, not requiring the death penalty. To my old-fashioned mind, I suspect that a “quiet Friday” without meetings for stay-at-home NASA employees actually means mostly a paid holiday as who will know if you’re working or not? I get where they’re coming from on this, however. Nobody disliked unnecessary meetings with lots of players more than me but “unnecessary” often proved invaluable when I picked up a tidbit from some esoteric, droning presentation that – shazam! – I knew nothing about and paid off later. My worry now is that NASA employees feel as if their work/life balance is as important as getting the job done and management supports that through these little “soft” policies that seem harmless but psychologically encourage a tad bit of sloth and being paid good money for doing nothing. There is, of course, a time for NASA people working toward that hard Artemis deadline of 2024 and all the other things to have a balance of life and work. It’s called “retirement.”
As someone who worked remotely for years one of the changes needed in the mindset for remote work is going from inputs (hours worked) to output produced in measuring productivity.
Also NASA should consider replacing some of the synchronized zoom meetings with time framed discussion board “meetings” like online universities use.
I agree on this point, the traditional meeting format is often inefficient as one spends too much time listening to nonrelevant matters and yet there is often no time to even make a comment. A better format might actually be this one, although it requires active participation.
Mr Hickham, what’s wrong with people thinking that work/life balance is as important as getting the job done? Especially at this time when many of us are dealing with online instruction for our children?
i can’t speak for everyone, but busting my ass at work should earn me the right to have a good work/life balance. Given how I’ve seen divorces and other dysfunctional family issues occur because folks were putting too much time in at the office while neglecting their families, I’d encourage a good work/life balance.
I was being a little tongue in cheek there. Nobody ever accused Homer Hickam (not Hickham, btw) at NASA of not having a good work/life balance. I was off to Honduras twice a year to look for pirate treasure or wreck diving off Hatteras or writing articles or running trails or scuba instruction, etc., etc. and so forth, and my management was fully on board with my craziness as long as I got the job done which I did. So it was when I spoke at SpaceX, I told my youthful audience, who worked at a place that even had places to sleep, to “go home.” Elon may have not liked that but I pointed out the graveyard here in Huntsville is filled with dead, young engineers who worked/smoked/drank themselves to death during Apollo and the courthouse filled with filing cabinets listing divorces and the debris of broken families from that era. But we got to the moon on time. Was it worth it? In general and historically, yes. But, specifically, beneath those tombstones and in those filing cabinets, no.
It’s an interesting point you raise. I firmly believe a work/life balance is as important as getting the job done. That doesn’t mean the job is low priority, just that balance matters. My job is not my life, but I recognize that’s a generational difference between yours and mine.
Having a quiet Friday will allow me to actually get work done instead of looking at a list of double-stacked meetings. That, ultimately, is the hassle: every little thing has its own standing meetings that take an hour no matter how unimportant. If we’re worried that valuable employees will take the day off because they don’t have any meetings, well, that employee probably isn’t too useful anyway.
There also isn’t any law that says a meeting has to take an hour, or that it has to run for its full, scheduled length. If you can get through the agenda sooner, and there isn’t anything left to discuss, a meeting can end early. Unfortunately, some people don’t see it that way (or don’t act that way), and meetings tend to last for the whole hour (or scheduled duration.) That makes them especially counterproductive.
Indeed Mr. Hickam, Indeed. “Quiet” Friday added to the list of “No travel” Sunday (before pandemic). Review meetings at contractor facilities started on Tuesday, Why?, because NASA CS’s weren’t traveling on Sunday. BUT any review meeting at a home NASA Center began bright and early on Monday morning! I recommend people read “Angle of Attack, Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon”, by Mike Gray. Not even “Quiet” Sunday’s! Two most common things among engineers and management: Divorces & Heart Attacks.
As an old boss once told me many years ago on a big project, “If 24-7 is not enough time to get it done, then you’re going to have to start working evenings and weekends”
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