Remote first CX and time management

[Anonymous]

I’ve been at a remote first company for 5 years, so joined during Covid, and it feels like we have way too many “culture” activities not directly related to supporting clients. This is a team that has little turnover, and most of us have been here since 2022 at least so not a lot of “get to know you needed” - also most everyone is in their thirties. Small ish company - around 300 people total and a 40 person Client Success team.

Were required to have internal calls before every client call to discuss what were going to talk about on external calls, and with 10-15 client calls a week
And different project teams, we end up with 6-7 other internal calls just for those. We also have multiple team meetings, town halls, webinars, and “culture calls”, mentorship pairings were required to attend each week and the time isn’t well used at all in those meetings. I understood wanting lots of calls during Covid when people were stuck at home and many of us didn’t have families yet, but people are busy and are over putting in 60 hours a week when the work could be done easily in 40 hrs if time was spent better

Is this par for the course for Customer Success? My manager also wants this to change but our leadership team isn’t open to feedback - and punishes those who share.

[Anonymous]

Are your coworkers based out of DC? If not they’re probably less stressed about every second of their day being allocated

[Anonymous]

What is CX

[Anonymous]

No this isn't normal for CX. My team has one 25 min review call each week--I run it stand up style. For cross functional projects, I require pre reads and an agenda. Most of my communication is done via slack. Mentorship is an optional program--I put that under career development. Town Halls are quarterly. Webinars I run through our LLM to get the highlights. We don't have culture calls.

My one suggestion is to document the number of hours you are spending NOT on client activities. Track it for a week or even a month. Sometimes leadership just needs to see hard data.

[Anonymous]

OP here- thank you for validating, it doesn’t seem normal to me either but based on the reddit CS groups I’m in, I’ve heard of people having a similar experience. It wasn’t like this bad they did layoffs and we got new leadership, but when we raise these concerns they tell us to “manage our time better”. We also used to log time against clients, which they got rid of