Be on time for meetings

We recently had a team meeting where we discussed how important it is to be on time for meetings. A comment was made that "It's disrespectful to be late for meetings".

As a prime offender, I kept my mouth shut, but certainly had a few pointed questions I really wanted to ask. It's great to SAY we should all be on time for every meeting, and we should respect everyone's opinion, but DOING that is a little more problematic.
In the past, I personally had an average of about 3 hours of meetings per day. These were recurring, scheduled meetings, that I typically sat in and listened to other people talk. Truly there was probably about 2 hours of meetings per week that I actually had conversations and constructive/useful information that was communicated.

I actually think the problem should be turned around and we should make sure that meetings are useful. To me, a 1 way dissemination of information is best served by an email message. Meetings should be reserved for face to face interactive discussions. If you routinely have to say "we don't have time to talk about that right now" then you probably don't need a meeting because you don't want a discussion, you simply want to dispense with information or instructions.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Push versus pull deployment models

the myth of asynchronous JDBC

Installing virtualbox guest additions on Centos 7 minimal image