Meetings

Meetings are about more than just time. Time is money but making good use of employee time is important to keep them feeling engaged, productive and like they are a useful and valued part of the team.

While the office or department head may find a meeting necessary and useful, those who are expected to attend may not always agree. Its important to weigh the overall usefulness of every meeting and the impacts it will have on employee productivity.

Design Meetings Carefully

“The only thing worse than wasting your employees time, is giving them a reason to believe the leaders working above them are incompetent or careless.”

Part of gauging the overall necessity for a certain meeting to be held, comes down to good overall management and involvement. In order to properly manage a team you must be fully aware of each team members competencies, strengths and weaknesses. While you may feel bringing in a respected speaker on a certain topic will help your team grow, it is important to ensure a member of the team is not already qualified to be leading the meeting. When employees are present in a meeting that is covering topics on which they are knowledgeable or even have expert experience in, it is possible for them to feel undervalued and not recognized for what they are capable of. Furthermore if the person leading the meeting happens to be the employees supervisor, and is clearly less knowledgeable on the topic it is easy for employees to lose faith in the leadership.

Do Not Waste Time

It is common for management to desire there employees be competent and well versed in certain office tools and software. Perhaps you want to ensure the team is using Excel to its full potential with formula's and macro's. A proprietary software or SAP system may have been recently instated or is a common tool of your office, make sure the cost of time in the meeting is proportional to the experience gained. Be sure that your employees require a refresher on Excel before scheduling a 1 hour meeting. Further do not schedule a 1 hour meeting when 30 minutes will do, nor let a 30 minute meeting on proper email structure run on to an hour or more due to time wasting comments or questions. While its important to address employees comments, questions and input staying on topic and within the timeline is more important. It is more then likely a well constructed email training would be adequate to ensure your employees are aware of the features and strengths of a given software.

Time Management is Every Members Responsibility

“Leaders work hard to gain the respect and admiration of subordinates, while losing that respect can happen in a matter of seconds..”

Wasting employee time on a mandatory meeting is a good way for a team to lose confidence in the person responsible. Especially when the meeting is ill deserved or covers topics your team is already proficient in. If the presenter of a meeting is less competent in the topic then your actual team, the consequences can be far from trivial.