Meeting invite for 8am meeting sent at 9pm the night before

[Anonymous]

This just happened. Is this reasonable? Barely any acknowledgment of how ridiculous it is from my boss. I missed the 8-8:30am meeting that was scheduled at 9pm last night because I don’t check my email late at night and I drop my daughter off at school, so I get online at about 8:30/8:45.

The explanation was that there’s an immediate deadline, but this project has been ongoing, so I fail to understand why the invite couldn’t have been sent out at least during the workday yesterday.

[Anonymous]

What time are you supposed to start working?

[Anonymous]

That's frustrating, OP.

I've learned that while I'm pouring my morning cup of coffee to quickly check my work calendar to see what meetings I have that day. Doing that at 6am means I can see if anything popped up after I got offline the night before. My boss is one who often works at 10pm so this could totally happen to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What time are you supposed to start working?

The expectation communicated has been that it’s flexible and that as long as we get our work done we can set our hours. I’ve normally done 8:30/8:45-4:30/4:45.

[Anonymous]

I start work at 8:30, and I don't check my work phone after hours, so no, to me it's not reasonable. I'm doing domestic tasks at 8.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:That's frustrating, OP.

I've learned that while I'm pouring my morning cup of coffee to quickly check my work calendar to see what meetings I have that day. Doing that at 6am means I can see if anything popped up after I got offline the night before. My boss is one who often works at 10pm so this could totally happen to me.

I can’t just adjust last minute though, since I have to drop off my daughter. If I had known even during the day yesterday, I could have made arrangements.

[Anonymous]

Where I work, I would get or send a quick text "Sorry for the late notice but can you meet at 8:00 to talk about time-sensitive widgets?"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Where I work, I would get or send a quick text "Sorry for the late notice but can you meet at 8:00 to talk about time-sensitive widgets?"

Right. There was nothing. Just an email invite that you’d only see if you were checking email after 9pm or before 8am.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That's frustrating, OP.

I've learned that while I'm pouring my morning cup of coffee to quickly check my work calendar to see what meetings I have that day. Doing that at 6am means I can see if anything popped up after I got offline the night before. My boss is one who often works at 10pm so this could totally happen to me.

I can’t just adjust last minute though, since I have to drop off my daughter. If I had known even during the day yesterday, I could have made arrangements.

I hear you but at least you could have declined the meeting rather than not knowing about it at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That's frustrating, OP.

I've learned that while I'm pouring my morning cup of coffee to quickly check my work calendar to see what meetings I have that day. Doing that at 6am means I can see if anything popped up after I got offline the night before. My boss is one who often works at 10pm so this could totally happen to me.

I can’t just adjust last minute though, since I have to drop off my daughter. If I had known even during the day yesterday, I could have made arrangements.

NP. In that case at least you could have responded to the meeting invite with a "I will not be online until 8:30" so they didn't expect you. I do however think it's extremely unreasonable to expect everyone to check their work email between 9PM and 8AM. There are absolutely days where I don't do that and in your situation, I would expect the meeting organizer to at least slack the participants to give us a head's up so we were aware of the last-minute scheduling.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What time are you supposed to start working?

The expectation communicated has been that it’s flexible and that as long as we get our work done we can set our hours. I’ve normally done 8:30/8:45-4:30/4:45.

If your boss knows this, then he was wrong.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That's frustrating, OP.

I've learned that while I'm pouring my morning cup of coffee to quickly check my work calendar to see what meetings I have that day. Doing that at 6am means I can see if anything popped up after I got offline the night before. My boss is one who often works at 10pm so this could totally happen to me.

I can’t just adjust last minute though, since I have to drop off my daughter. If I had known even during the day yesterday, I could have made arrangements.

I hear you but at least you could have declined the meeting rather than not knowing about it at all.

Fair enough. I guess I now need to be one of those people who is checking email at all hours. So much for work-life balance!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That's frustrating, OP.

I've learned that while I'm pouring my morning cup of coffee to quickly check my work calendar to see what meetings I have that day. Doing that at 6am means I can see if anything popped up after I got offline the night before. My boss is one who often works at 10pm so this could totally happen to me.

I can’t just adjust last minute though, since I have to drop off my daughter. If I had known even during the day yesterday, I could have made arrangements.

NP. In that case at least you could have responded to the meeting invite with a "I will not be online until 8:30" so they didn't expect you. I do however think it's extremely unreasonable to expect everyone to check their work email between 9PM and 8AM. There are absolutely days where I don't do that and in your situation, I would expect the meeting organizer to at least slack the participants to give us a head's up so we were aware of the last-minute scheduling.

The meeting organizer is in Singapore and doesn’t care about the time difference. But yeah — my boss, who saw the invite last night, needed to send a text telling us about it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What time are you supposed to start working?

The expectation communicated has been that it’s flexible and that as long as we get our work done we can set our hours. I’ve normally done 8:30/8:45-4:30/4:45.

If your boss knows this, then he was wrong.

He absolutely knows it.

[Anonymous]

It’s a sign of (best case) disorganized and dysfunctional management or worst case a toxic approach to employees time. 8:00 is not a reasonable meeting time outside a genuine emergency, and an emergency is announced by phone call not outlook invite.