Category Archives: Efficiency

Meetings and Phone Calls

I don’t think that it is any sort of a big secret that I am not a great fan of meetings. I can remember way back into the dark ages when meetings were convened in order to reach a decision. Sometimes you counted the votes in an effort to achieve some sort of a democratic consensus in the hope that the combined input of all would result in the best decision and solution. Sometimes the votes were “weighed” where the boss’s vote weighed more than the sum total of everyone else’s vote combined. The point was that a decision got made.

Originally meetings were just that, a “meeting”. Webster’s Dictionary (one of my favorite books) defines the verb “meet” (as in to meet) as “to come into the presence of”. Meetings were defined as a physical presence event. They were held face to face. People came from all over to attend. Meetings were not taken lightly. You needed to be prepared. They were special times where the day to day grind was set aside, where reports were presented and decision were made. You looked people in the eye. Feedback was immediate and visible. Things got done.

This was back when everyone worked in a place called the office.

As time has passed we have virtualized our office. Technology now enables us to work in teams across time zones and around the world. This new approach has broadened our ability to work together, but it has also reduced our ability to have the physical presence that defined a meeting.

Instead we now have phone calls. When we have more than two people on a phone call it is termed a conference call. We seemed to have evolved to a place where we now consider conference calls to be “meetings”. As more time has passed it seems that these conference call – meetings have become more and more of an open discussion forum where the actual making of a decision and moving forward has taken a back seat to the ongoing discussion of the topic at hand.

I am convinced that at least part of the reason for the increasing ineffectiveness of meetings these days stems from the fact that telephone etiquette is different from meeting etiquette, and the ability and proclivity of people who are invited to the conference call – meeting to forward their invitation to the meeting to other people.

In short, technology advancements, virtual offices and the ability to invite ever increasing numbers of attendees to a meeting without the meeting initiator’s consent have conspired to cause the loss of control, purpose and value of a meeting.

In the past a meeting had a defined time. It started, had an agenda and it finished. Because of the effort involved for people to meet face to face it was a taken that there had better be progress, or resolution or a solution to the topic. The investment in time and people and travel made it imperative.

This is no longer the case with a conference call. On a conference call the only one really paying attention at any point in time is the person speaking. Because everyone else is usually busy and sitting at their desk, they are multi-tasking and doing something else while only partially attending the conference call – meeting. If nothing is accomplished at the meeting it is no great loss. It is easy to schedule another conference call and pick up where the last one left off.

The sense of purpose and requirement for conclusion is lost because it is no longer a meeting. It is a phone call.

A second contributory factor to the decline and fall of meeting effectiveness is the growing sense that it is alright for people who were invited to the meeting (now conference call) to invite other people to the conference call. What was once a manageable number of attendees, each with a specific role to play and deliverable to provide now seems to have blossomed into a search for consensus across anyone and everyone who could conceivably be associated with the meeting topic.

In the past when people actually met face to face this just didn’t happen. No one just “crashed” a meeting uninvited like some college fraternity party. In the time when you actually had to be at the meeting in order to attend it, it meant something to be there. You had to stop whatever else you were doing and go to the meeting. It was a very rare occasion where an incremental invitation was extended to someone who was not on the initial meeting invitation list.

It was even rarer when an incremental invitation was extended by anyone other than the person who called for, set up and owned the meeting.

Unfortunately this does not appear to be the case anymore.

Now I find with ever increasing numbers we have meeting attendees who are attending (actually dialing in to the conference bridge) who were not invited to the meeting. I see more and more electronic notifications that someone who was invited to the meeting has forwarded the meeting invitation to someone else.

When did it become okay to do this?

The only time that I could see this type of situation arise would be when an original meeting invitee can no longer attend and must delegate their responsibility with respect to the meeting to someone else. But here we have a one for one replacement, not an incremental attendee.

I liken the incremental invitation scenario to be similar to being invited to a friend’s house for a dinner party and arriving with several of your friends (who were not invited and the host may or may not know or have planned for) because you thought they would enjoy a dinner party and should be involved.

I have stated many times that I am probably old school in my approach to business. That does not mean that I will not embrace new technologies and business techniques. I will whole heartedly do so if I can see the value and improvement the new idea brings to the business. I understand the new virtual office and team structure. I see many of the benefits that it brings. I also see many of the detriments that it also brings.

There are many increases in productivity that can be directly traced to the new virtual structures. I think that there are also many decreases in productivity that have not been fully recognized yet in the new business processes that are resulting from these new structures. I think some of the loss of meeting productivity is one of them.

When we turn a business meeting into just one of several other telephone calls we start to devalue its purpose. We multi-task and no longer give it our full attention. When we start inviting, or allow others to invite more and more people to a meeting we are complicating the process and diffusing the focus, and again devaluing the meeting.

And all of this seems to be okay because if we don’t get anything done in this meeting, or on this call, we’ll just have another one. It is now so much easier to have a meeting, and so much easier to forward meeting invitations that allow us to bring more people than necessary together, that we no longer feel that the purpose, function and conclusion solution that were once the primary objectives of having a meeting to continue to be of primary importance.

In short, it appears that it is now so easy to attend a meeting, and we have so many people attending meetings, that we have devalued the purpose and objectives of having meetings. It seems as a result we are having more and more meetings attended by more and more people, and getting less and less done at each meeting.

What that means is the next time you get invited to a meeting, pay attention to the proceedings, insist that there be a definable outcome of the meeting, and don’t forward the invitation to anyone else for the meeting.

If we all did this we would all probably have fewer meetings to attend because we would get more done at the ones we actually went to.

Travel, Productivity, Cost Savings and Golf


As we continue to look for ways to keep our business’ costs down, one of the first things that get looked at is travel. Travel limitations, restrictions and freezes are all well known approaches to trying to reduce costs. I guess the success of these approaches depends on the goals that you are setting. If the idea is to bring down the hard dollar costs associated with your budget, then a true travel freeze can work, up to a point. However, there are not many businesses that can function properly or continue to grow without some amount of travel.


That leads us to travel limitations, restrictions and of course lowest cost airfare routing. This is where business and job productivity come into the travel and cost savings equation. I am going to use a hypothetical, if somewhat tongue in cheek example to help illustrate my point.


If I live in Dallas and I am asked to attend a meeting in Boston, I have several decisions to make. The first question is; do I need to go? If my boss has asked me to go, then the answer is easy; yes. If somebody else has asked, then I probably need to do a little more work to truly identify the need for my travel. Let’s assume my boss has asked me to go. For those of you that know me, the second question I always ask is; can I play golf there? Boston, March, probably not high on the golfing opportunity list.


Boston is approximately a four hour direct flight from Dallas. However, direct flights are usually more expensive. Most companies now require you to take a less expensive set of flight arrangements if available. I am now faced with the decision of either explaining why I have chosen the more expensive direct flight, or taking the less expensive connecting flight arrangements. Let’s assume that the president of the company is not currently available to authorize my more expensive direct flight travel arrangements, so I take the connecting flights.


This now brings up a couple more important points. The first is that in my 25-plus years of travel, I have never heard of an airline actually successfully keeping a traveler and their golf clubs together on connecting flights. They always get lost. Golf is definitely out in Boston.


Unless I decide to rent clubs.


The second point is that due to airline connecting schedules, what was initially a four hour flight is now a seven-plus hour set of flights. By selecting the connecting flights I have added 3-plus hours of travel time to each direction of my trip. That is the equivalent to adding almost the time of an entire round of golf each way. I have essentially added an entire day (two rounds of golf) to my trip. I will now also have one incremental day worth of meals associated with this trip, as well as potentially depending on connections, another night worth of lodging expenses.


This entire extra day of travel associated with going to this meeting is not spent being productive at my job, or playing golf. It is spent in airplanes and in airports. I am not going to get into the actual loaded hourly rate that is being paid or absorbed by the company while an extra day is spent traveling. What I am going to say is that it is my belief that the productivity value lost to the company by my (or anyone else) not being able to do productive work, as well as the incremental attracted costs (meals and lodging) for an incremental day due to travel are probably greater than the perceived savings difference between the cheaper connecting flights and the more expensive direct flights.


I am sure there will be instances where this lost productivity / airfare analysis will swing the other way and it will not make sense to fly direct. I do believe that in most instances it will be in the company’s best interest to get me or any other employee to our business destination and back home again, as quickly as possible in order to maximize the time where we can be productively working, and not sitting on airplanes and in airports. Besides, it’s hard to work on your putting in the airport. My putter has a tendency to set off the metal detectors, and people in the terminal don’t seem to pay attention and keep kicking my golf ball.

More on Communications…Not More Communications

We have all been in the position where we have a great deal of information to disseminate to a significant number of people. What do we do? We write the “Mother of all Memos” – MoaM, (please pardon the allusion to a wayward military comment in the coining of a new communications phrase) and then put it to a distribution that rivals Santa’s Naughty / Nice list. We now have all the information communicated to all the people. Our job is done here, right? I don’t think so.




On the surface this may seem to be the best way for us to communicate, but it reality it isn’t. It may be efficient for the sender (one memo typed and sent) but is it efficient communications? 




Efficient communications is providing the appropriate information to the appropriate audience, at the right time. That means only the information that is needed then, not all the information you have. Does everyone on that massive distribution list need to know everything that is contained in the body of the MoaM? Better yet, will everyone on that distribution list even read the entire memo in an effort to glean the specific pieces of information that they need from it? We would all like to think that everything that we write (including this Blog article) is of such importance that everyone will read it in its entirety, print it out, high-light it, then annotate it and keep it close by where they can often refer to it.




Right.




Efficient communications would call for us to create several shorter memos, with significantly shorter distribution lists where the information in each memo is appropriate for the specific audience and does not contain information that is not needed by that audience. It may be a little more work on the sender’s part but it will more efficiently communicate the information…and it will probably also cut down on the enormous number of the dreaded one-line “reply all” message chains that invariably follow the use of the MoaM.




Effective communications is providing the right information in the right format for the appropriate audience. This means sending emails, right? In the past this has certainly been the case, but is really the most effective method?




As matrix organizations, teaming and collaboration have proliferated, specific communities of interest have been created. Communications capabilities have also been developed in this area. Where email is a One-to-Many, or a Many-to-Many form of communications, new capabilities such as SharePoint (my apologies to both my Mac and PC friends for using a Microsoft example) allows an accessible network location to be created where there is now a Many-to-One communications structure (many people accessing a single information location). This new(er) type of communications format might provide a more effective way to provide the right information to the right audience.




For me the only issue that arises with the creation of SharePoints for communication and information exchange is that it is not a “Push” form of communications. Email allows us the “Push” the information out to the desired recipients and participants. Once it is sent we are reasonbly sure that the desired recipients have it. SharePoint usually requires the desired participants to access the site and “Pull” the information down from it.




It’s a small difference, but in the hectic world in which we are all now working, it is just another activity that we must take the initiative on to accomplish. Emails come to us. They require an action. Even if you choose to do nothing, it was an active decision to do nothing based on the email. If we must go to a location to find out what we must / need to do, it might just be easier to not go, and as a result not have to make a decision regarding what does or doesn’t need to get done.




Now the decision to do / not do anything can be based upon whether or not we have decided to go get the information to act on, not what the information is itself may be.




It used to be just writing a big, long memo and sending it to everyone. Now we need to look at what is efficient (what information for which audience), and what is effective (what format “Push/Pull”, for which audience) will be the best to achieve the objectives.



On the other hand, it might not be such a bad idea to just pick up the phone and call……

No More “Work Arounds” – Enforce Change

We have all been in the position where an unexpected issue arises. It can be a product capability shortfall, or a process application mismatch, or just about anything in between.  Our first impulse is to find a “work around”. Something quick and dirty that will get the job done and allow us to move on. We have all done it.


 


The problem with this approach is that it requires two “fixes”: the initial “work around” and then the revisit of the issue to put in the correct long term change. The “work around” allows us to stay with the existing process or capability, when by the very nature of the need, we are seeing that we need to change. In today’s short resource, profitability and resource challenged environment, the “work around” has become too expensive.


 


The normal issue with a “work around” is that since it is working, we never seem to get around to implementing the correct long term solution. Change doesn’t (need) to occur and the “quick and dirty (re: inefficient) becomes the accepted process. It becomes the standard by default and gets (re)coded into the process going forward. The quick and dirty has solved a short term need, but has not generated the needed change to achieve long term efficiency and profitability.


 


In today’s economy when you encounter an issue, more often then not the correct course of action is to implement the long term fix – make the change. It may take a little longer than the quick and dirty fix to the existing system, but the end result is a cleaner, longer term solution. The business also ends up stronger, more efficient and more profitable.