From "Emphasizing Form" to "Emphasizing Results": An Information Support Force Unit Rectifies Meeting Culture Through a Correct Outlook on Performance (政绩观)
**Xu Senior Engineer's "Time Ledger"**
■ Zhang Yingsheng | Information Support News reporter Ma Jing
"Senior Engineer Xu, heading to the calibration room again?"
"Yes, no meetings today — perfect time to run another test on that communications protocol."
At that moment, Senior Engineer Xu (徐高工) of a unit under the Information Support Force picked up his equipment bag and strode off toward a project site.
Earlier this year, the technical office where Senior Engineer Xu works took on the construction task for a key project. The project spans multiple technical directions and carries a heavy workload and a tight construction schedule.
As a technical backbone of the unit, Senior Engineer Xu volunteered to take on the task. His confidence came from the changes that had taken place since the unit began rectifying its meeting culture. He walked the reporter through his "time ledger":
"Over the past year, I attended more than 100 meetings of various kinds. On the busiest day, I sat through three meetings in a single day." Senior Engineer Xu counted on his fingers: project kickoff meetings, technical-plan review meetings, progress-report meetings, security-and-confidentiality meetings… These meetings ran from morning to night; sometimes one meeting had barely ended before the notice for the next one arrived.
"Attendance-for-attendance's-sake" (陪会) had once been a constant headache for Senior Engineer Xu. "If I didn't go, I worried people would think I wasn't taking things seriously. If I did go, the project fell behind." He shook his head helplessly.
On one occasion, a system debugging session had entered a critical phase and Senior Engineer Xu had to monitor the data the entire time. At 10 a.m. that day, he received a notice requiring all project personnel to attend a security meeting at 2 p.m. He had no choice but to halt the running equipment system and lead the project team to the meeting. The security meeting lasted nearly two hours. When it ended, they rushed back to the test site and restarted the system for analysis and testing. "The project schedule slipped again," Senior Engineer Xu said.
Even more wearing than "attendance-for-attendance's-sake" was "waiting for your turn" (等会).
Some meetings had unreasonable time allocations for agenda items and dragged on. If the earlier agenda items ran over, those waiting for later items had no choice but to sit idle. Sometimes Senior Engineer Xu would be called to a 3 p.m. meeting, only to wait until 4:30 before his agenda item came up.
"Waiting for your turn is the worst." Senior Engineer Xu recalled one meeting where the preceding agenda items consumed an hour and a half. "You can't leave, but you can't stay without feeling your time is being wasted." He told the reporter that if he had spent that hour and a half on actual work, he could have resolved a system algorithm optimization problem.
Then there was "grinding through meetings" (熬会) — another form of torment.
Some meetings were bloated and drawn out. Leaders' remarks followed the pattern of "three points nested within three points," and some participants' briefing materials ran excessively long. A meeting that could have ended in half an hour was stretched to two or three hours.
Preparing meeting materials, attending meetings, conveying and implementing decisions afterward… Senior Engineer Xu estimated roughly that, on average, at least one and a half days of his week were "consumed" by meetings, which significantly slowed the pace of project progress.
The change began with the unit's Party committee undertaking a profound reflection on its outlook on performance (政绩观).
"'Attendance-for-attendance's-sake,' 'waiting for your turn,' and 'grinding through meetings' look on the surface like a meeting-culture problem, but at their core they reflect a distorted outlook on performance (政绩观)." The unit's leadership stated bluntly: "Treating holding meetings as implementation, and treating the number of attendees and the length of meetings as a measure of how seriously something is taken — this is textbook formalism (形式主义)."
The unit's Party committee then solicited opinions widely from officers and soldiers and issued standards for organizing meetings, establishing rules and reforming work style at the level of specific details: cutting "attendance-for-attendance's-sake" by stipulating that personnel with no connection to the meeting's agenda items must not attend, with meeting notices specifying the exact positions required; eliminating "waiting for your turn" by compressing early-arrival time and establishing a timed-agenda system; ending "grinding through meetings" by imposing time limits on leaders' remarks and page limits on briefing materials, and encouraging participants to speak from memory and deliver substantive content.
This combination of measures quietly produced results.
The time freed up by streamlining meetings was channeled entirely by Senior Engineer Xu into project research and problem-solving. He opened his project log: Monday, completed unit testing of the project's core module; Tuesday, organized and advanced optimization of the technical plan; Wednesday, coordinated data interface with external partner units; Thursday and Friday, simultaneously advanced engineering construction and participated in education and study sessions.
Data show that, compared with the previous year, the unit's total number of meetings fell by 52 percent, and the average meeting duration was compressed to 40 minutes. At the same time, the development progress of the core module on the project Senior Engineer Xu is responsible for is running 10 percent ahead of schedule.
Standing before the test bench, Senior Engineer Xu watched the data flickering on the system screen, his expression satisfied: "Reducing the burden on the meeting room means fueling combat effectiveness (战斗力). No matter how you run this 'time ledger,' it comes out ahead."
Meeting culture is connected to work style, and work style bears on combat effectiveness. Today, many technical backbones like Senior Engineer Xu have left behind the constant rush from one meeting to the next. With more time to go down to the research and development front lines, keep close watch on technical problems, and break through critical bottlenecks, the unit's research atmosphere of fighting toward and preparing for war has grown ever stronger.
---
**Cutting Into "Attendance-for-Attendance's-Sake, Waiting for Your Turn, and Grinding Through Meetings"**
— A News Investigation into How an Information Support Force Unit Rectifies Meeting Culture Through a Correct Outlook on Performance (政绩观)
■ Gao Jiwei, Peng Fang | Information Support News reporters Ma Jing, Guo Qilong
*A unit of the Information Support Force conducts hands-on training with a certain type of equipment. Photo by Jin Cai.*
"Backbone personnel fall out and assemble — meeting at 0900. All others continue training on the range as planned." On the training ground of a unit under the Information Support Force, Cheng Kong Platoon Commander Xu Xudong checked the time, saw that ten minutes remained before the assembly time specified in the meeting notice, and calmly issued the order, leading the backbone personnel toward the meeting room.
The meeting started on time and deployment was efficient… After it was dismissed, Xu Xudong immediately led the backbone personnel back to the training ground to continue training.
"Meetings no longer eat up time, and the training schedule won't be thrown into disarray anymore." Xu Xudong told the reporter that under current regulations, personnel are required to arrive no more than ten minutes before a meeting begins; the range of attendees is strictly controlled, with only units and individuals closely related to the meeting's agenda items invited; cascading layers of attendance-for-attendance's-sake are prohibited; and officers and soldiers are no longer plagued by "attendance-for-attendance's-sake, waiting for your turn, and grinding through meetings."
There was a time when arrival times were pushed earlier and earlier at each level, and waiting time was piled on at every tier. This not only sapped the energy and morale of officers and soldiers but also encroached on their training time, leaving everyone exhausted.
After conducting in-depth research, the unit's Party committee reached a unanimous conclusion: to cut into formalism (形式主义), meeting standards must shift from "emphasizing form" (重形式) to "emphasizing results" (重实效), and more energy must be directed toward training soldiers and preparing for war.
Work style is connected to combat effectiveness, and the outlook on performance (政绩观) bears on the cause of strengthening the military. True performance is not written in meeting minutes — it is reflected in the results of solving difficult problems and improving combat effectiveness.
This is the unit's sharp inward-facing self-examination, striking directly at entrenched problems.
**The Predicament — Combat Effectiveness "Stolen" by the Meeting Room**
When the unit was first established, all manner of work was tangled and unsettled. Many staff officers developed a fixed mindset: no meeting means no attention; no document means no action. As a result, meetings grew more and more numerous, longer and longer.
A set of figures, cold and glaring: in one year, the unit organized nearly 300 meetings of various kinds; some sections attended as many as four or five meetings in a single week; the same group of people rushed between different meeting rooms, repeatedly convening to deliberate on the same matter; large meetings spawned smaller meetings, with higher-level meetings followed immediately by unit-level meetings… Layer upon layer of meetings, layer upon layer of relaying — and in the end, the substance of those meetings never reached the ground.
"Soaking in meeting rooms by day, catching up on work by night." One officer summed up the helplessness everyone felt. More troubling still, many meetings deliberated on problems without reaching decisions.
One discussion meeting on a production plan for a certain information product was convened three times in succession. "Three meetings, totaling six or seven hours combined — and yet the final plan, compared with the original, had been adjusted by only a single minor point." A technical officer complained.
Where exactly was the problem? At a special democratic life meeting (民主生活会) at the start of the year, the unit's leadership stated it plainly: "We're busy with meetings every day — what problems have we actually solved? Meetings are lively and bustling, but has combat effectiveness actually improved in any concrete way?"
The Party committee members were jolted into awareness: behind meeting culture lies work style, and at the root of work style is the outlook on performance (政绩观). Treating meetings as implementation and documents as achievements — it looks like busy, productive work, but it is in fact hollow formalism (形式主义) that wastes resources.
From that point on, an ideological storm over "what constitutes true performance" swept rapidly through the unit.
**Breaking Through — "Three Gates" to Block Formalism**
The problem had been identified. Where should the knife fall?
The unit's Party committee moved with force: all meetings must pass through "three gates" — application by the functional group, coordination by the section, and approval by the department leadership. At each gate, three questions must be answered directly: Why must this meeting be held? Can it be replaced by another method? What problem is the meeting meant to solve?
On one occasion, a functional section applied to convene a work-deployment meeting, citing only a single sentence as justification: "To convey a notice and deploy work."
After departmental review, the section received this feedback: "The matters covered by this notice can be handled through a written document, a phone call, or on-site coordination. Please explain why a meeting is indispensable."
The meeting was ultimately cancelled, to the approval of officers and soldiers throughout the unit.
On another occasion, a functional group applied to organize an experience-sharing meeting, citing "sharing good practices" as the reason. It failed to clear even the first gate at the approval stage: What is being shared? Who is the audience? What is the expected outcome? In the end, the exchange meeting was replaced by a compiled bulletin, eliminating the need for everyone to travel back and forth through multiple layers. The "three gates" blocked not only the number of meetings but also the inertia of formalism (形式主义).
Beyond tightening the gatekeeping, the unit's Party committee also "operated" on meetings themselves: cutting attendance-for-attendance's-sake, barring all unrelated personnel from the meeting room; eliminating boilerplate language, with opening remarks going straight to the point; strictly prohibiting reading verbatim from scripts, with participants required to report from memory.
The change was on display at one combat-readiness and training deliberation meeting (议战议训会). That meeting, originally scheduled for two hours, was ultimately compressed to 70 minutes.
Before the meeting, all relevant materials were distributed to participants in advance. During the meeting, grassroots units no longer reported one by one; staff organs were allotted no more than five minutes to comment on any single item; everyone spoke only to problems and only to countermeasures.
"The following problems have been exposed in recent research and attack projects: first, operators are not sufficiently proficient with the new system; second, attention to detail in information products is not sufficiently precise…" Five minutes, three problems, five countermeasures — Section Chief Zhao of the Information Support Section (信息保障科) was crisp and to the point.
Other sections followed in turn. When one speaker ran over time, the moderator cut in directly: "Time is up. Please get to the key points."
Walking out of the meeting room when it ended, several grassroots commanders were visibly moved: "Today's meeting wasn't long, but I feel clear-headed — I know exactly what to do when I get back."
Behind the shorter meeting duration was a palpable shift toward a pragmatic work style (务实之风).
**The Change — Returning the Time Saved to the Battlefield**
Meeting time had been reduced. Where would the time saved be spent?
The unit's Party committee had a clear answer: return it to the project front lines, return it to the problem-solving sites, return it to wherever officers and soldiers need it most.
Soon, a "front-line work method" (一线工作法) was rolled out: staff sections were required to go down to the grassroots regularly, to coordinate problems and resolve contradictions on site, replacing the old practice of convening layer upon layer of meetings to study and discuss issues.
Operations and Training Section Chief Huang (黄科长) felt this deeply. In the past, organizing a single exercise or training event meant a section affairs meeting, a deployment meeting, a progress meeting, a summary meeting… by the time the rounds of meetings were done, more than half a month had passed, with nearly five training days consumed by meeting-material preparation alone.
For one exercise preparation this year, Section Chief Huang decided to do things differently.
He first distributed a draft plan to grassroots units to solicit opinions, forgoing a collective meeting to discuss the plan. Over two days, he received 23 items of feedback and replied to each one individually.
When the exercise concluded, he also did not convene a meeting. Instead, he wrote a brief summary and distributed it to all units. The final figures showed that preparation time for this exercise was reduced by 40 percent compared with before. Grassroots officers and soldiers said: "The problems were identified precisely, the guidance measures were actionable, and the summary was all substance."
"Before, I always felt that work couldn't move forward without meetings. Now I realize that most things don't require meetings at all." Section Chief Huang reflected: "Sitting in a meeting room making decisions off the top of your head will never match going deep into the grassroots to find answers."
Similar transformations took place among more and more staff officers.
Support Section Assistant Wei (魏助理) found that after meetings were streamlined, he had more time to solve practical problems at the grassroots level. Last month, when a unit reported that its shower facilities were aging, he went directly to the site to inspect, coordinated and submitted the approval request the same day, and the problem was resolved three days later.
Shifting from "meeting room" to "battlefield," the most direct feeling among officers and soldiers could be summed up in a single word: real (实). No longer swept along by layer upon layer of meetings, no longer running around for useless materials, officers and soldiers are channeling more energy into training soldiers and preparing for war. "This is what soldiers should look like. This is the kind of performance the force needs most." A technical office officer put it this way.
**Sustaining the Gains — Hold Fast to the Outlook on Performance (政绩观), Persevere Without Letting Up**
Improving meeting culture is easy; sustaining the improvement over the long term is hard. The unit's Party committee recognized this clearly: without holding fast to the outlook on performance (政绩观) as the fundamental issue, the meetings cut today could rebound tomorrow in a different form.
"We are not at odds with meetings — we are at odds with formalism (形式主义)." The unit's political commissar emphasized. To that end, they have maintained sustained effort: incorporating the cultivation of a correct outlook on performance (政绩观) as a regular component of study and education, with constant self-comparison and reflection on every matter.
"In the past, evaluations looked at 'traces' (痕); now they look at 'results' (绩)." One section chief admitted candidly that in the past, in order to produce a good year-end summary, everything had to be turned into a meeting and every matter had to generate a document. Now, leadership asks only three questions: Was the problem solved? Is the grassroots satisfied? Has combat effectiveness improved?
Once the baton of evaluation shifted, the weathervane of work shifted immediately. Not long ago, the unit launched an examination-style professional assessment. The assessment team went directly into the technical offices to observe operations, ask about procedures, and test adaptability. The final data showed that the excellent-rating rate in the professional assessment rose by 12 percentage points year-on-year.
True performance is on the exercise and training ground, and in the hearts of officers and soldiers. The unit's political commissar stated frankly: the shift from "meeting room" to "battlefield" looks on the surface like a change in physical space, but in reality it is a path of reshaping ideological work style (思想作风). And on that path, they are walking with ever-greater resolve.