Are Meetings Backfiring?

Before I became a university professor, where I have worked for over twenty years, I was a training manager in the hospitality industry for nearly two decades. During those forty+ years, I have attended and/or led literally hundreds of meetings. Some of these were good, some were awful, and most fell between good and awful. Most, however, were too long and for most of them, the information was not geared to everyone in attendance.

Why do we have so many meetings in both the private and public sectors? Of course, the obvious answer is so that everyone hears the same information at the same time, which is thought to reduce confusion and keep the grapevine on track. Sounds like a great idea until we break it down a bit.

In the hospitality industry, for example, some people work in kitchen, while some work in the front of the house, or FOH (food servers, bussers, hosts/hostesses, cocktail servers, bartenders). Very often the issues that needed to be addressed with the kitchen staff have little or nothing to do with the FOH staff. The converse was often true, as well. As we leaders rose up the ladder, many of our meetings had to do with poorly performing units while other information was aimed strictly at the units making great sales and were meeting or exceeding profit expectations. Yet, in most cases, everyone was expected to attend the same meetings.

Similarly, universities and colleges rely quite heavily on non-benefited, part-time adjunct faculty to teach a number of, if not most, courses, while full-time professors can focus more time on their research and service to the university or college. All-faculty meetings often are geared toward the career-path, full-time academics who will, in all likelihood, rise up the academic ladder from assistant to associate to full professor or beyond. In general, adjunct faculty have no such career path and are often on one-semester or single-year contracts that may or may not be renewed for subsequent semesters, based on student enrollment or other factors. For many, the adjunct position is a position through which to earn a?paycheck until they can land a full-time position at another college or university.

This is not to say that all educators should be on long-term contracts. The idea here is that adjunct instructors often derive little or no benefit from meetings that are geared toward full-time faculty and can feel some resentment that they have to listen to information focused on tenure-track. secure careers that those adjuncts don’t have. Adjuncts probably don’t need to hear about potential salary increases for full-time faculty when those adjuncts have no ability to reap similar increases. When extra money becomes available for university-provided travel funds, which also may or may not include adjunct faculty members, those increases may be announced and discussed at all-faculty meetings, further isolating the part-timer from the full-timers.

We know that one of the very best ways for a leader to train or impart information is in one-to-one interactions, dealing with each stakeholder as an individual rather than just another fish in an ocean of similar, but different, species. This is often not viable when university-wide or hospitality-wide changes or other information needs to be disseminated for everyone to know. Yes, there can be a need for everyone to hear the same information at the same time in order to avoid confusion. If we must have meetings, we can create the general habit of inviting only those who are affected by that information. We can still have, and often need to have some meetings, but those should be focused on specific audiences and their frequency reduced. Only when changes or updates that affect everyone should we invite everyone.

This specialization of meetings can increase camaraderie among those who benefit when others don’t. Due to the commonality of department members or work groups, those meetings can be brief and reduce the time everyone has to sit in a meeting room, some listening to a lot of information that does not affect them and probably never will. Discussing changes in insurance plans in the restaurant business all-employee meeting is generally an exercise in ridiculousness. This business has one of the highest employee turnover rates in the U.S. Most employees will never work at a company long enough or have the full-time status to qualify for that benefit. Why not have a small meeting with only benefits-eligible employees invited to attend?

I have been to umpteen meetings in my life that had little or nothing to do with me and nothing to do with my specific role. I have had to attend meetings in which the managers of poorly performing units were brow-beaten while those of us who had responsibility for high-achieving units had to sit through those inquisitions. Not fair to them; not fair to us. Meet with them one-to-one. Reserve meetings for information that applies to and interests everyone in attendance. Reserve meetings for the overarching stuff. We shouldn’t waste other people’s time sitting through meetings that don’t apply to them.

Too many meetings can reduce productivity. They can also devolve into complaint sessions. One department slamming another department. One college within the university complaining about another. The larger the meeting, the more difficult it can be to control the content and the atmosphere.

Instead of scheduling a meeting every time we have something to tell people, we can use internal email or other messaging systems. We can have specific people, who will be affected by what needs to be said, attend while others can continue to work at their jobs. Rather than having restaurant employees who got off work at midnight having to attend a meeting at eight am the next day (so we are not having a meeting while we have guests/customers in the building), then needing to return to work again that night, we can be cognizant of that difficulty, and it could be avoided by meeting in small groups.

The area between the kitchen and the dining room in many restaurants is often called the “alley” or “server alley.” The alley is a great location for a brief pre-shift meeting to pass along key information. A side benefit of an “alley rally” is to announce any specials or features for that shift. Pre-shift meetings can also be effective with kitchen staffs. Similarly, as leaders, we can meet with small groups of employees for brief periods of time, so we don’t excessively disrupt their productivity. In these ways, we can reduce the need for larger meetings and can discuss less information that is unrelated to many in attendance. To paraphrase an old Chinese proverb, the persona who moved the mountain did so one stone at a time.

Many of us already are required to attend multiple meetings that are often scheduled too frequently. Wouldn’t it be nice if people came to the meetings WE scheduled and actively listened because they knew that what was going to be discussed applied directly to them? We, too, should attend meeting that others schedule, and we should actively listen because we are confident that those meetings are only held in certain circumstances and ?the information imparted actually apply to us. Meetings need to be concise and applicable to every attendee, reducing the number of mass-meetings needed.

#meetings #toomanymeetings #organizations #professor #adjunctfaculty #productivity #wastingtime #losttime