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Situation true for most of us now a days...
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Rising Star
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You can be working on other things that are billable. You know, like most projects?
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Congratulations
Sorry, but meetings are not the only chargeable time. Perhaps you should clarify your role and your deliverables with your manager?
As for “optics”, imagine if you were the client and every meeting needed 5+ firm people. 1) that sounds exhausting. 2) wouldn’t you ask yourself who was producing work? Meetings aren’t output. The “optics” are demonstrating value.
How are those even remotely related?
Chief
Actually Op you did say just that. You said (I'm paraphrasing) that it's hard to meet utilization when you can't be on the client calls. While it's usually optimal to be able to join client calls to get experience and learn, a lot of clients aren't interested in paying $200/hr for junior consultants to learn.
Obviously I’m missing the details here, but from a philosophical pov, I don’t see a problem with your situation. Consulting/ professional services is a people business. Situations like this happen. This is part of the reason why utilization targets aren’t like 90%+.
“I must attend a meeting so I meet my utilization metric” could be seen as a pretty selfish mindset. Literally doesn’t serve anyone but you, unless you have a critical role.
A more constructive response is to understand why the “optics” are stacked against you, and what can be addressed to avoid this in the future. Most likely the answer is: “be better or become more senior so you’re indispensable to the meeting.”
The “stay informed” part can be covered by meeting notes, recordings, task assignment, etc
The learning aspect is a good point - and you should talk to your leads about that, but they aren’t going to add you to every meeting just to “learn”. You’ll want to be more targeted in what you are trying to learn so they can have you shadow the right meetings.
If you really want to hear the content and your team is worried about optics, ask to shadow dial-in next time
Unless your team is reviewing every hour in detail that you're entering as billable, I don't see how this matters. I'm sure you have some other client work that you can work on in the meantime.
Rising Star
Based on their responses I can see why OP was excluded based on “optics”
Rising Star
Did you ask to be included in the call? What was their response?
I understand where you’re coming from with being excluded from calls. But, the reason behind you not being on the call shouldn’t be for metrics but to learn / stay connected as you described above. Setup recap meetings with the people on the call, engage, ask questions, learn and eventually you’ll not only be invited but running those meetings.
Rising Star
What is it that you’ve done that would make it important to the client for you to be on the call? If you don’t have a great answer to that, then spend the client call time doing something else useful and try to figure out how to make your presence more important for the next one.
Pro
If your project is fixed fee, there is zero chance that whether you’re on a call or not impacts how many hours you can charge.
Part of your learning can and should be how engagements are priced and managed; talking to your lead about it (from a place of curiosity) would likely be edifying.
hope your LinkedIn up to date.
Pro
As an aside, makes me feel a bit fortunate to have started out when calls were just regular telephony calls and you could dial in beforehand to listen in and no one would know you were there.