Everyone Hates Meetings
The day after my grandmother, Martha, died, I went to work. I only went for a couple hours, and only for one thing, a baker meeting at Jinja.
Bakers are what we call caregivers who come together to focus on something that needs to happen in the organization. This particular meeting(and delicious lunch) was to discuss our next step in caregiver autonomy: client huddles.
I did it because I was excited. There were seven caregivers who thought huddles might work! We had a team, we were going to try. I could set my grief aside for two hours and do this thing, with these wonderful people. The soothing balm of meaningful work.
Huddles are meetings where caregivers discuss the people they support, share resources, and contribute to each other’s caregiving teams. We’d been developing this approach as part of building our self-governance structure.
These seven bakers had all been at Biscochito for a long time. Some of them had cared for Martha. They were already leaders in the organization, coming together to test and refine our plan. The bakers facilitated huddles for 50 caregivers, then met after each session to integrate feedback.
The huddles themselves were magic. To a person, each caregiver said how much they appreciated having their voices amplified and concerns met with support. They went to significant lengths to call in if they couldn’t be there in person. But we support a lot of people, and caregivers were having to attend multiple meetings. While everyone liked supporting each other, meeting fatigue set in fast and hard.
Within weeks, the bakers were dropping out. Too many meetings, too much talking, too far outside their usual work. They still wanted things to work, but they couldn’t tolerate the meetings. I listened to their actions and their words: they loved the substance but not the frequency.
Happy to have been there, but tired of meetings and talking, our weekly Monday lunch at Jinja had dwindled from a party of 10 to a group of 5 with only two remaining caregiver bakers. There I sat with Jessica Chavez, enthusiastic and pregnant, and Geidy Melara with her meticulously color-coded three-ring binder.
Jessica rubbed her belly and said loudly that she simply couldn’t keep calling people, and that they would have to figure it out and that this was just too many meetings. I wasn’t sure if her exasperated sigh was due to the baby prepping for his exit from her belly, or the never-ending logistics.
“It’s too much,” they said. The scheduling was too much, the meetings were too many. But the substance? Everyone liked it. Actually, they loved it.
So I did the easy thing. I listened. I accepted everything I heard as a gift. I took their feedback and spent the day in front of a whiteboard coming up with a scalable plan. I simplified processes, reduced touchpoints, and created something that could actually work for busy caregivers managing real lives and real work, and it must be said, unwilling to have busy work replace the real work of caregiving.
The result? Everyone likes it.
I’m remembering to be easy as we do this work. We’ve built such strong relationships over the past several years together that we already have the connection and collaboration we’re trying to formalize. We’re putting this effort into changing the way we work because we love our actual work. It’s beautiful work that we won’t let meetings get in the way of. So as we implement huddles on this lighter schedule, we’ll enthusiastically participate in what supports the work, but won’t let process overshadow purpose.
This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on July 15, 2025, under Business Different.
