Faculty meetings

[jerseyjay]

Mondays are meeting days at my university. There are no classes Monday afternoon. One Monday a month has a dean's meeting with the chairs followed by department meetings. Another Monday has university Senate meetings. Another Monday has union meetings. One Monday tends to be used by committees. I think that student clubs also tend to meet on Mondays.

One meeting a month seems to work okay.

[Stockmann]

The whole Department's faculty meeting has happened a handful of times in the past 5-ish years - there is no regular whole Department meeting, so they've only been held when it was felt there was an urgent matter to discuss. Now this is a large Department, and there is no statutory reason for an all-Department meeting - no binding votes or statutory reasons to need the minutes. There are smaller meetings consisting of faculty holding certain positions that are more frequent, and these are much more frequent (some of them weekly) but they are only for specific committees or faculty appointed or elected to certain positions, and they at least nominally do hold binding votes on some issues. There are mechanisms in place for consulting faculty on certain matters, but don't involve meetings as such. Information, as such, is sent out via email and using the department's whatsapp group - this I feel is much better than informational meetings. Overall, I think the whole approach works well - unless you need to formally submit the minutes somewhere for statutory reasons, I don't feel there's a reason to gather all the department's faculty more than once or twice a year at most.
At my previous employer, meetings were a regular Sartrean torture ("Hell is other people") - insults, screaming matches, etc were a regular occurrence, and their duration tended to be somewhere between a cricket match and eternal damnation. So I've become convinced that decision-making is best left to committees elected or appointed for a specific purpose, or to a suitable Chair, information-sharing is best done by email, and consulting faculty is best done by polling them or asking them to submit their opinion in writing or make an appointment with the actual decision-makers (I've done the latter myself, both individually and jointly with a few colleagues on multiple occasions). If department-wide meetings need to be held, I think they should be held only when actually necessary, and then whoever chairs them needs to run a tight ship and keep them on topic and on schedule. One of the problems at my previous employer was that faculty meetings always had a miscellaneous matters point, allowing anyone to argue and pontificate about anything.

[fizzycist]

Communication is important and bringing people together coalesces teams.

I have always liked my faculty meetings, mostly because I mostly like my chairs and fellow faculty.

If the meetings are torture it is a sign of a bad environment and maybe the meetings aren't your only problem.

We do ours 1-2 times per month, feels about right.

[Stockmann]

Communication is important and bringing people together coalesces teams.

I have always liked my faculty meetings, mostly because I mostly like my chairs and fellow faculty.

If the meetings are torture it is a sign of a bad environment and maybe the meetings aren't your only problem.

We do ours 1-2 times per month, feels about right.

At my previous employer there was definitely a toxic work environment and bad meetings were partly a symptom. But they tended to make things worse, and the high frequency (at least once a week) was a big part of the problem.
At my current employer, we have a kitchenette which I think is a much better way of coalescing the department than meetings - it fosters people regularly meeting informally. We also have a couple of Department-wide socials per year.

[history_grrrl]

We usually meet every 1-2 months, when we have a reason to meet: vote on sabbatical applications, approve next year's curriculum, revise our procedures, or what have you. Most other stuff we just get via email. We have various committees that do stuff between meetings. It works pretty well. We don't have meetings just for the sake of having meetings, but no meetings and no communication simply would not fly. OP's department has a bigger problem with the chair, not just the meetings. Occasionally in the past, we have had chairs that couldn't bother to meet or communicate, but fortunately those days are behind us.

[pgher]

We meet once a month during the academic year, none during the summer. Possibly a retreat in August. If there isn't enough business to justify a meeting, it gets cancelled, but that rarely happens. Meetings are scheduled for 1.5 hrs; there was a time when they routinely went late, but no longer. Some of the people who like to hear themselves talk left.

We went for a stretch with only occasional meetings, and it was not good. Lots of stuff was festering, not being discussed.