By TERRENCE WIGGINS
You
come into a room with a hard wooden table. Once you begin to sit down, all you
see are stern faces prepared to spend more than an hour of their lives in the
chair. All the people in the room are pondering the things they could be doing.
Instead, they are stuck there with you. Everyone
sits and waits patiently as each person is given his or her time to speak. You
roll your thumbs, hoping that it will make time go faster. It doesn’t
seem to speed up, so sweat starts rolling down your brow. Your throat is dry.
This uncomfortable atmosphere makes you want to do nothing but plunge for the
door . . . or better yet, a nearby window.
What
scenario am I describing? I am talking about the meeting room, the conference
room or the boardroom—whatever you call the place where meetings may take
place.
Do
meetings get the job done? For some, it is a tradition. Planning an event? Call
a meeting. Want to listen to a report? Call a meeting. Want to see a
presentation? Call a meeting. Want to get out of the office, go somewhere fun
and goof off for a small amount of time on company’s money? Call a
retreat/conference. . . oops, I mean a meeting.
Meetings
are long, boring, unavoidable and sometimes unnecessary. However, some are
understandable—such as a company merger or a drastic event cannot happen
without meeting face to face. The problem is that, in the petty, little
meetings, everyone sits around a table, screaming about what they were doing
for the past week. In reality, the update is just an excuse on why your boss
never sees you at your desk doing work, or why you are never in your office
when someone needs you.
Other
unnecessary meetings include the old-fashioned lecture, “let’s
recap” meeting. This is where the head of the department wants to say
something to everyone at one time. These meetings are the worst of all. It is
the boss’s opportunity to push his or her team by spilling out a lot of
motivation techniques, such as, “You guys are simply the best,” or
“Our 2001 report said we did 25 percent better than the year 2000.”
Next time just tell your boss if he or she wants to really thank everyone for
all the hard work, he or she should just give the workers a bonus in their
paychecks instead of wasting their time.
With
new forms of technology, we do not need to be in the hassle of running from one
meeting to the next. Updates and
the good ol’ boss’ pats on the back can be done through e-mails,
voicemails, company news releases, bulletins, teleconferencing, web
conferencing and the other numerous ways which have opened our channels of
communication even further. In conclusion, there are 24 hours in a day.
Let’s not try to get stuck spending eight hours or more of that day in an
unnecessary meeting.