In a recent article in TechRepublic, Suzanne Thornberry covered an interesting topic dealing with how the IT leaders are doing the balancing act of communicating with their team and keeping the costs of holding meetings down. Why didn't these leaders wake up to this earlier?
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There are usually too many staff meetings or too few of them. It has been one of many amusing observations that I have made on my various assignments. Almost all the organizations that I have been with have found it a challenge to get a handle over staff meetings and implement a system that keeps the number, time and participants for the meetings to a productive and profitable level.
At times they paint a humorous picture, and at times they cause great pains to all involved. People know that they need meetings, but they also feel burdened by them. Management realizes that conducting meetings is costly but it hasn't been able to develop a reporting/accounting system that could help ascertain the efficacy--or ROI--of meetings.
Too Many Challenges
Meetings consume too much staff time, which usually gets buried under different department's budget and does not show up in any management reports as a cost of conducting the meetings.
Meetings also have a very strong impact on the morale of the team members. If meetings are held too often and the outcome does not help people complete their work, then they may feel that their time is wasted. On the other hand, if too few meetings are conducted, then your staff may feel neglected, uninformed and uninvolved. If there are too many attendees, then people may feel insignificant. If the right people do not attend the meeting, then other attendees would not achieve anything.
Another challenge is that different managers need to have two-way communication with (usually) the same group of staff members. The challenge is to coordinate the schedule of not only the staff but also the managers to ensure that common meetings that could be attended by all interested parties are held.
Yet another complexity is that, apart from staff meetings for basic communication between the managers and staff, managers also need to be involved in strategy formulation and--at times--other working meetings.
An interesting twist for IT departments is that, apart from staff meetings, it also needs to conduct a number of technical reviews and operational meetings. At times they are the only avenues for the passing of information from one team to another.
What To Do?
The big question facing most organizations these days is what to do with so many different types of meetings.
The TechRepublic article mentions that a number of IT executives are rethinking the approach for once-a-week staff meetings. They are conducting it less often or are doing more one-on-one meetings. Some managers are holding staff meetings once in two weeks. Some are holding it as operational meetings in which team members are more involved, as compared to in-staff meetings in which few people speak. Some include other items like celebrating small victories to making the meeting more lively and interesting.
Many IT leaders are leaning more toward one-on-one meetings where individual members are allotted a fixed time to discuss specific items in an informal setting. One-on-one meetings also present opportunities to discuss many personal or the so-called "softer" issues, too.
Then there is that big question of how to keep the meetings more productive. Meetings that digress from their objectives or where people are not clear about the agenda or if the agenda is not followed are a huge waste of time. People are slowly realizing that they need to publish the meeting's agenda in advance and stick to it more strictly.
Virtual Environment to the Rescue?
Many IT managers have found that operating out of a virtual environment has been a good way to balance the need to have the meetings and keep the cost down. Many times different attendees for meetings are in different locations and conducting meetings in virtual realm reduces time-constraints and distance issues. It also reduces the dependence upon real-time meetings, too.
But managing teams in the virtual domain requires a slightly different set of skills, something that today's managers cannot live without. Some of the ways that these virtual methods could be used to maintain two-way communications for either information dispersion or to conduct working meetings include:
The bottom line is that despite the need to cut the cost and not waste people's time, one cannot afford to completely eliminate meetings (or perhaps "the need for information sharing and dissipation" is a better phrase). And, the only way it could be achieved is through meetings--either the old-fashioned group ones or one-on-one or in virtual-realms or off-line modes. But there is no denying the fact that the need for communication and the cost for that communication have to be balanced out. There are various ways to do it; how you do it is up to you. And, believe it or not it has a strong impact on the success of your team and its financial viability.
Strategic and results-oriented, Sunil has more than 15 years of experience in management and IT consulting. An entrepreneurial consultant, he had founded a business-to-business eCommerce company. Sunil has provided consulting services to large and small firms in the
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