Top management calls very frequent off-hours meetings

Question

We have daily meeting with our production manager during office hours. Most of the time the meetings are during office hours. We do not have any difficulties with that.

Sometimes our top management calls meetings out of office hours. This could be four to six times in a month or sometimes no meetings at all over three months. Generally we get mail for meeting ten to twenty hours before meeting start.

Out of office means beyond the hours of 9AM to 6 PM. For example, a meeting at 7PM or 11PM.

The Chairman/CEO, MD, CTO, marketing/business/sales team, production team (I am working in this team) - e.g. all of members of the office are asked to attend these meetings. Our whole team size is 15-20 persons. All our employees are annoyed by management calling up this type of meeting. We aren't paid for that we get fix salary. What can we do in this situation?

Answer 1

If I understand your correctly, you are being required to attend meetings outside your normal work hours?

If the people calling the meetings are peers or within 1 level of hierarchy of you, I personally send the meeting request back with a revised time indicating I can't make it at the orginally suggested time. If they continue to do this, I would have a chat with them about it.

If these are being called by managers who are very much senior to you, your options are limited. Generally people don't just reject the meeting requests from the CEO. If the person is someone who is open to discussion from subordinates, then go talk to him directly and point out this is causing a hardship on some employees who have after hours personal obligations and it is harming morale. If this person is not open to discussion or will not change even after a discussion, then you will have to keep having the meetings. Since the whole office is involved, is it possible that you could give them comp time off some other day to make up for the time spent outside the normal working hours?

Answer 2

In short: follow the chain of command. As HLGEM said in his comment, if they are your peers or your direct superiors you could e-mail and explain your situation, in particular including data from other employees. For example, "Jim has kids, Sue has to pick up her parents from the hospital, ...".

If senior management is more than two "levels" away from you then you have basically two options: * complain to your direct supervisor (line manager or boss) * report to HR

This might be solved amicably by coming in late (or leaving early) the day after this meeting; if you can show independence, take initiative (some call it leave by example) and leave early the next day.

Another approach is to bill the extra hours and demand compensation, but this requires dealing with HR and involves details from your contract.

Be aware that this might be a bad sign of an over-working culture in the company, where people are assumed to work late "for the good of the team". Such a situation will definitely skew the bottom line costs: if you're already working 110% of your working hours and this is assumed to be the baseline, what happens when there is an emergency and you actually need to pull in an all-night? Or, what happens to the cost estimates? For example, if your project's overhead for billing a customer is, say, 30% and a consultant comes in he/she will be expected to work more (and will cost more), thus lowering the profits.