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Are you
lonely?
Do you
hate making decisions?
Would
you rather talk than get things done?
Why not SCHEDULE
A MEETING?
You can:
·
Meet
other people
·
Doze
off in familiar surroundings
·
Postpone
decisions
·
Take
copious amounts of useless notes
·
Feel
important
·
Impress
and/or bore your colleagues
Do all
this on company time!
MEETINGS—The
Socially Acceptable Alternative to Working
(Federal
Public Service Information)
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I have
to admit that I find this hysterically funny, mostly because it’s true. So many
meetings are unproductive excuses to waste time. I prefer to avoid them as much
as possible, unless there is a specific agenda, they are infrequent, and they
last no longer than one hour. In my experience, only about twenty-five percent
of workplace meetings actually end up being productive, in the sense that a question
is asked/answered or a problem discussed/solved. Too often, meetings end with
the agreement to schedule yet another meeting to discuss things further. To be
fair, meetings are only as successful as the planning that goes into them.
Workplaces
schedule meetings to discuss all sorts of things: who is entitled to an office
and/or a higher salary, budget priorities, project planning, end-of-year
meetings to discuss employee performance. The list is endless. Meeting leaders
have to know when to rein in a discussion, when to tell those who enjoy
digressing to cut it out, when to sum up what has been discussed and when to end
a meeting. The worst types of meetings in my experience are those that are
called to discuss how to proceed with large unwieldy projects that are too big
for their own good. Meaning, too many people are involved in planning them and
planning how other people are going to do the work; meanwhile, there are too
few hands to do the work. In other words, too many chiefs and not enough Indians.
Those types of projects inevitably ‘require’ progress reports. Is the project
going somewhere? Has there been progression? The answer is often no, more
times than not. These types of waste-of-time projects and associated meetings were
more common a decade ago, and were tedious.
Workplaces
these days are often complicated places, top-heavy with administrators who love
meetings, or so it seems. It also seems to me that leaders spend most of their
time going to meetings; that seems to be part of the job description. I often wonder
how they stay awake, how they are able to follow the threads of discussions and
how they are able to switch gears and go from one meeting to another. And then
there are the meetings to discuss problems (e.g. with personnel) that are
fruitless because the problems cannot be solved no matter how much they are
discussed. Other times decisions are reversed because they were not good ones
in the first place. Ironically, workplaces have become unstable environments in
constant flux; the one constant is that you can look forward to a meeting being
scheduled for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Count on it.
