Meetings - what meetings!

We arrive about 15 minutes late. The receptionist looks confused - she was not expecting us and then shows us to a small but functional conference room. The four of us sit down. A woman enters, nods a greeting and sits down. The receptionist returns with some bottles of water and glasses followed by another woman carrying the same. Both leave then the second woman returns with more glasses. She goes again. We sit in silence, the seated woman looks at her hands.

Ten minutes pass and a man arrives, he shakes hands with us all and takes a seat opposite. A few words are exchanged and he rises and leaves the room. A further ten minutes pass in silence and two more women arrive and sit at the end of the room with the first woman. The one wearing glasses immediately gets up again and leaves the room. Another ten minutes and the man returns, more words are exchanged then we wait in silence. It is now fifty minutes after the meeting start time.

The woman with glasses returns and a brief discussion takes place after which one of the other women leaves and returns five minutes later with a second man who sits opposite us. Another woman follows him in a few minutes later and sits away from the table, despite there being many seats.

A discussion has started, but the first man is not engaged, he is underlining sentences in a document. He finishes and leaves the room again, as he does so he tells the woman seated away from the table to come to the table, she does so and takes his seat.

Its now one hour after the meeting start time and we appear to be getting down to business when the woman with glasses leaves again, apparently to get something, and we sit in silence again. She returns with a ledger. Five minutes later the man returns and moves the other woman out of his seat, the woman with glasses leaves the room again and the man talks for five minutes after which another new woman enters the room and sits down, followed a few minutes later by the woman with glasses. The new woman is wearing a face mask and a blue hairnet, she looks like someone who does things and she appears to be the person who knows because she talks almost continuously, answering questions and emphasising points. The first man leaves the room again and the second man follows a few minutes later when his mobile starts ringing. Its now an hour and a quarter after the meeting start time and it feels like progress is starting to be made, though one woman appears to be asleep. The woman with the face mask is reading from the ledger using the glasses of the woman who was wearing glasses, she has her eyes screwed up also trying to read the ledger. The woman with the face mask begins to talk animatedly, the woman who was wearing glasses reclaims her glasses and the woman with the face mask, clearly emotional, gets out a tissue and begins to dab her eyes.

After an hour and a half the group has come alive and everyone is talking over one another. At one hour forty-five after the start time the first man returns to hear the outcomes of the discussion and the meeting closes.

That situation is not made up, it really happened and it is not untypical of meetings in Vietnam. In eight months I’ve only been to one or two which actually started on time, 15 minutes late is pretty good, many start half an hour late. Comings and goings are also normal as is answering your phone. More often than not people answer their mobiles at the table. At one meeting recently I counted - literally half the people in the room were on their phones at the same time. Some cover their mouth with their hand so they can talk louder, others bend over and shout under the table. The most amusing example though was the guy doing simultaneous translation at a big meeting. We were all sitting with our headphones listening to him translating a Vietnamese speaker when his phone rang. He answered it without turning his microphone off and treated the English speaking part of the audience to a Vietnamese telephone conversation whilst the speaker carried on oblivious. We’ll never know what we missed, or what we heard for that matter.

The fact is meeting culture is not the same here, big events are organised at very short notice so preparation is inevitably poor and late start plus overrunning is normal, partly due to the fact that any official meeting always has speeches to open it and close it, sometimes the speeches go on for a long time. There’s a general rule that the more important the meeting the longer the speeches and the more people who make speeches. Maybe that’s why so many people are late for meetings. It’s the vicious circle – the speeches can’t start because the people have not arrived and the people have not arrived because they don’t want to listen to the speeches.

At the other end of the day most people leave early, so it’s tough if you’re at the end of the agenda. That’s happened to me twice – in both cases groups of 25 to 30 people had shrunk to 10 or less before we got to the last items on the agenda. Shrinkage is exaggerated by the 2 to 3 hour lunch breaks which accompany full day meetings organised by the Vietnamese. This is to allow people to rest or go home and eat with the family. What actually happens is that most people stop for any lunch which might be on offer and then, faced with maybe two hours to fill, they decide it would be better to go back to work. On full day meetings afternoon sessions are always significantly less well attended than morning sessions.

I’m not sure I’ll get used to it, I still turn my phone off when I go into a meeting and I still try to be there for the official start time, but then I miss stuff when I get distracted by observing the antics of latecomers, people answering phones and people sneaking off.