Meetings seem to be the bane of most businesses. And employees. And people. I judge this by what people tell me, and by my own experiences of slowly fading out as I sat through a meeting that had no reason to be.
Of course meetings are necessary. I find them useful to resolve conflicts or sign off on agreed-on things, but why do people schedule so many meetings?
I find meetings are usually held when other things don’t work. Meetings are treated as the duct tape of management. The greatest reason for these meetings is to tell people stuff, so meetings are often done because statuses and status reports aren’t clear or communicated.
Of course sometimes you don’t even need the status reports, but people make them anyway. Long, pointless, complex, unneeded, too short – we’ve all seen bad status reports.
Of course status reports are needed when simple communication isn’t enough. Sometimes that’s the truth – and sometimes people just communicate poorly.
So really – too many meetings are often due to people just not talking to each other.
– Steven Savage
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.
