Day-to-day life in any office is full of unexpected events and urgent issues that arise with no previous warning and demand our immediate action. Many of us react by scheduling an emergency meeting to address the issue. Today we tell you why that is not the best solution.
Avoid impromptu meetings
First, impromptu meetings are not good for your organization. For a meeting to be truly productive, it must be scheduled in advance to allow attendees to prepare their speech and, most of all, to set an agenda with the objectives and issues to be dealt with. Impromptu meetings, no matter how urgent they seem, interrupt the planning of employees and are not focused on decision making.
Find the right person
If something urgent has suddenly come up, the most important thing to do is to make a decision. How to act then? The first thing you must do if a problem really requires your attention is to find the right person to tackle it. Look for that person and talk to him or her, tell them what’s happening. A last-minute meeting will only delay action and decision-making. In other words, convening an emergency meeting only postpones the solution.
A simple phone call
Often, “meetingitis” is the excuse to distract oneself from the real conversation that should be taking place. Reflect on this for a moment and ask yourself whether you can get the answer to your question with a simple phone call instead of by convening a meeting and taking time away from colleagues or employees. Ask yourself if it’s not laziness what’s moving you to preferring a meeting, instead of talking directly with the person or making a decision.
Indeed, there are many things you should do before sending a meeting request and borrowing the time of others. For example, you can start by thinking about who should attend it, and if you can solve it by speaking with one person rather than the whole staff in the office, so much the better. If so, reject the idea of ??a meeting and go talk to that particular person. You will have saved a lot of time for yourself and you will have not made others waste it.
Use tools to keep track of the projects
There are other situations which, even if not urgent, too often lead to unnecessary meetings. Simply keeping track of the projects we have on the table. There exist tools that allow the sharing of tasks, information and materials for work teams to be constantly organized. Through these tools, managers can supervise what’s being done or what each member has done without calling for one meeting after another. That does not mean that the team leader is inaccessible for the rest of the team, but that the leader cares about the productivity of the organization.
On which occasions do you think conversations are more important than meetings?
