The Joy of (Fewer) Meetings
Meetings. Everybody loves them — right?
What’s that? You don’t like meetings? No one likes meetings, you say? Then why are we seemingly addicted to meetings in the workplace?
It’s a cliché by now — the group of sad sacks clustered around a conference table. Some of them are half-buried behind stacks of files they’ve brought along “just in case.” Others tap away on the desktop surface with a furious finger as they check their watches or view the mounting emails and voicemails on their portable devices. Still others slump in their seats like shell-shock victims, having given up any hope of getting any work done ever again. Then, inevitably, one of the desk-tappers will voice the famous cry: “Who called this meeting?”
Some meetings are good, of course. I’m always more than happy to hold an initial client consultation face to face, if only to reassure the client that I’m a real human being. It’s good for me too, because I can get a real sense of who my client is, his corporate culture, the tone the business uses when identifying itself, and so on. “Face time” is even more important when networking with referrals partners. How can you feel really secure about recommending someone’s products are services to a trusted client or friend unless you’ve had a real conversation with that businessperson?
But once my writing business started branching into other cities and states, I found that I no longer had that option with every client. For better or worse, I would have to substitute phone conferences and email correspondence for live, in-person meetings. Unless my clients were willing to spring for travel expenses to these various territories, there was a very good chance that I would never see them face-to-face. So I tried it — and it worked fine! I’ve found that good relationships with clients can be forged purely over the phone, and in one case I was assigned to write 50 articles by a realtor I never spoke to at all — the entire project was conducted by email. It went quite well, too.
This little lesson opened my eyes to some inefficiency in my business practices. My desire to be “accessible” had me running off to meetings at the drop of my clients’ hats, even when the meetings were unnecessary. On more than one occasion, a client demanded a meeting with me just so he could hand me a hardcopy with some scribbled notes on it and spend about one minute discussing them with me. I never suggested that he scan the hardcopy and email it with accompanying comments, because that would be “unsociable” of me. Well, nobody’s paying me to be sociable, so I’ve drawn a much firmer line about meetings now. The first one’s still free, sure, and so are phone conferences. But for additional in-person meetings, the meter starts running.
I predict that I’ll be asked to attend fewer meetings in the future.
Even when I’m not subjected to meeting overkill myself, I may still get hit with the fallout. I can always tell my “corporate sector” clients from the others because they seem to eat and breathe meetings, and not necessarily with me. I’ll submit a draft to my point of contact at those institutions and get 4 or 5 sets of notes back, none of which necessarily agree with the others. This is rewriting by committee, and it doesn’t work. I have to insist that all these disparate comments be filtered through one person, ideally my point of contact, with the inconsistencies removed, so that I can know what I’m being asked to do; otherwise, I might as well be sitting at the conference table of doom, listening to people ask, “Who called this meeting?”
Not me, that’s who!
