If you’re part of a workforce, you’ll understand when I say meetings are bad. How to make it better or avoid it becoming worser? By removing the uncertainity from the equation.
Case 1: A message from your spouse
It’s a busy weekday. You’re in a middle of a task which should be completed in next few hours. Your phone beeps. There is a message from your spouse.
We need to talk. Come home soon.
You’re calling back. The call goes unanswered. You’d be thinking what could be the topic of discussion. You may practise Yoga, meditations and so on. But you’ll be panicking now. Wondering what could be the reason. You lost all your focus in your work. You finish the work, unknown to you quite a number of mistakes (or bugs) are injected in the deliverable.
While nearing the home, your hearbeats raising like a ticker in a bull market. The topic thats waiting for you could be about shopping, or vacation trip for next month or the discovery of your infidelity. Whatever the reason could be, the tensed moment is unwarranted.
Case 2: HR calling you to have a in-person discussion
Below is the extract from the book - The Phoenix Project.
Laura is VP of HR. Author is part of senior IT team.
“Good morning, Laura,” I say with forced cheer. “What can I do for you?”
She responds, “When will you be in hte office? I’d like to meet as soon as possible.”
I hate vague request to meet. I only do that when I’m trying to schedule a time to chew someone out. Or fire them.
Wait. Laura calling because someone wants to fire me? Was there an outage I didn’t respons to quickly enough? As an IT Operations guy, the career-ending outage is the joke my peers and I tell one another daily.
The author is overthinking the implication of meeting from someone higher up in the corporate ladder. This is not a fictional situation but very very common scenario faced by you and me.
What’s common between the both? Uncertainity.
We as a human gets uncomfortable going through the uncertain situation. Robert Frost wrote a poem on the uncertain situation. This is not started at Mr. Frost’s era. going back millennia, almost every civilization was trying to predict the future, just to avoid uncertainity.
How to avoid the situation? Or make the meetings better?
There are countless situations where we unknowlingly push the recepient into certainity.
- When you are calling a person, if he is unable to answer leave a message on the context of the call.
- When you ping someone in your workplace, don’t leave the conversation with
hi <name>, mention the question or the reason behind contacting the individual. - If you’re setting up a meeting, properly explain what the agenda is. Also, listdown the agenda in the invite. This makes the recepient to do some homework before joining the call.
Informing the reason behind the communication in an professional place is a win-win for the involved parties. The organiser project he is a no non-sense guy. With revealing the agenda, you’re giving ample time for the participant to prepare on the topic of interest. We frown at a meeting invite because of some people’s tendency to take the discussion away from the intended topic and hijacking everyone’s time. With proper agenda in place, the Organiser and the Participants are forced to go around the topic instead of tangentially veering into the unknown void.
For each of us time is the costliest and unrecoverable resource. No one likes to flush it in the drain doing not-so-worthy things. Expecting returns on investment is natural. Be sensible and show how spending the time interacting with you is worth the effort.
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Page last updated on: 2024-11-06 09:30:05 +0530 +0530Git commit: a98b4d9