A meeting is basically an assembly of people for some purpose
.eg. a company board meeting or a town hall meeting; or for no purpose at all .eg.
a get together of friends for a drink or meeting of elected members of state in
the parliament. Then there are meetings which happen by chance .eg. friends
bumping into each other at the county fair and meetings which happen between
opponents .eg. clash of boxers in the ring or a football match.
In this blog, we will discuss about the meetings which happen
in a corporate setup. Am sure a large portion of you either work in a corporate
or own one, which means you most probably attend meetings or call them as the
case maybe. The rest of you are the lucky ones who don’t care a plug nickel
about login time and shifts.
People invest a lot of capital and time in setting up
companies, meticulous effort put in to build the best infrastructure,
recruiting the right people for various jobs and not leaving any stone unturned
to keep the machinery of logistics well oiled and running so that the money
tills keep clinking. Well, community initiatives, corporate governance and
social responsibility have all become part of the setup in the recent past, but
predominantly all corporates are profit and loss sheets in brick and mortar or
a cloud server, as is popularly the case these days. In the process of running
these corporates, it is but imperative to convene meetings.
These meetings maybe face to face meetings or through the
digital ether, namely telecons and videocons. The reasons maybe various –
performance is good, performance is bad, there is no performance at all,
Mrs.Shukla wore a pricey kanchipuram saree for the party yesterday night, the
kid next door is constipated, Trump got elected, today is Wednesday and so on.
How these topics actually concern our work and progress and whether they
actually turn out a fruitful result is not our concern, but meet, we have to!
It has come to a stage where convening meetings has become a psychosis to the
point of people not getting an assurance that things in a going concern are
actually going pretty well unless they hold meetings. We phone somebody up and
we are welcomed by an automated message informing us that they are in a
meeting. To share the blame, it goes both ways. We also occasionally do the
same to someone whose call we do not want to entertain.
So, are these meetings actually required? Especially in an
age where information is available on a real time basis, with Enterprise
Resource Planning systems assimilating, compiling and disgorging any
information, report or analysis we want about our enterprise. It is true that
human intervention and supervision is required in this system, but what I am
trying to emphasize here is the fact that CEOs /CXOs /COOs or managers at
whatever level of the corporate ladder they are, need call meetings only based
on exceptions. In simple words, they need convene meetings only when things are
out of order and not when everything is running smooth and slick.
Calling meetings based on exceptions has its own advantages. Firstly,
it saves time and resources as unfruitful congregations are avoided and only
meetings which culminate in demonstrative results are called. Secondly, it will
allow people to actually attend to their work without getting diverted into
wasteful meetings which most of the time turn into gallery tickets to an
uneventful elocution of statistics or discussion of matters where they
contribute nothing. Thirdly, we can use our time for better pursuits, which
does not mean going for a movie to the mall next door. It means refining areas
at work which were hitherto left unattended because of the zillion meetings,
thus enhancing efficiency and output for oneself and the company. Lastly, it
will allow us to finish our work better and attend the social meetings which we
talked about in the first paragraph above without being plagued by thoughts of
unfinished work or preparation for another slew of meetings the next day.
I summarize by saying that your entire working life should
not be about meetings. Rather, whatever meetings you do convene should be full
of life.
P.S: Any names referred above are purely for narrative
purposes only and do not represent anybody dead or alive. We can probably hold
a meeting to discuss that separately.
