This is the scene: you're at work, there's a meeting and you're sitting with your colleagues. Probably your boss is talking, probably someone is taking notes, probably some decisions are being made or something is being discussed so that a decision can be made. More than likely it's boring but necessary.
If this is a scene you recognize then you don't work in Sweden. I just sat in a staff room for the last hour and a half and for a good hour chunk of it a group of people were having their weekly möte (meeting). This consisted of them discussing the blue/black gold/yellow dress for 45 minutes (nej men! Jag ser blå! Nej men du ser guld! Men titta här det är blå! Men titta där det är guld! Ååååååh neeeeeeeej ooooooh aaaaaaajj vad konstigt! Etc etc 45 minutes later.)
Now I'm about to leave the room and there are two more meetings happening, consisting of two groups of three women drinking coffee and gossiping. "Maybe they're not meetings" you protest. Then why do these peoples' timetables have a big MEETING written on them?
I myself have been in many a möte. They last around 3 hours, although a good 45 mins of this consists of chatting and drinking tea/coffee, or on a really good day cake and tea. The other 2h15 mins is people telling me things they could have emailed me, and people complaining about things that never change, never will change and no amount of complaining can change. Occasionally there will be a show of hands to vote on an issue that we never hear about ever again. More than once the phrase "vi får återkomma till det här senare" (we'll come back to this later) is used to dismiss an issue without resolution, rest assured we never återkomma to it senare.
Sometimes we have meetings about meetings. The topic of the meeting will be "what shall we discuss at the next meeting" or "how do you think the last meeting went". The interesting thing about my meetings is that I work exclusively with foreigners, with the exception of the Swedish management. My group are all English, and when asked to give feedback we always write that we want concrete direction from the management rather than an endless stream of dialogue about what the focus of the next meeting should be, but I suspect we're fighting a losing battle against a long-established and well known phenomenon. Also, being English, we don't really want the status quo to change, we just want to complain. I love 45 minutes of tea and cake and several hours' opportunity to complain about the way things are.
It does make things take longer though, this ample opportunity to sit and chat. Masters degrees take two years instead of one, waiting for a doctors or dentists appointment takes ages not because of overcrowding but because of work/life balance, kids don't learn to read and write until they're 7 because they have to have time to play and chill out and students carry on being students until they're about 80 years old.
Maybe I'm making too big of a leap between having a directionless approach to meetings and having a keen sense of work/life balance and maybe I've never seen how focussed workers in the private sector are during their meetings but I'm still willing to bet they have a decent spread at the Fika table.
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| The room is set up for hosting a meeting |
