There are people, however, who love meetings. You will recognize them because they are the ones who organize them. Oh, wait, maybe you are one of them. Really? Are you the one who organizes meetings weekly, daily, with your employees just for the joy of meeting? Wow! Well, here are some situations which either you, as an organizer, or you, as a victim of the compulsive meeting organizer, should start to recognize. All those meetings that should have been just an email and, consequently, all the time that should have been spent on better things:
You want to tell your employees something.
Write an email. Seriously. Unless you want to tell them you are going to have a baby or that you want to pay them more for their jobs, and in which case what you should do is to invite them out for dinner and indeed celebrate, then send them an email.
You want your team to read an abstract or a document or something.
Well, send it attached in the email. If you are worried they won’t read it, maybe you need a different team, ha, ha. Nope, just mark urgent or important in the email.
You want to know your teams’ opinion about something
Ask them IN AN EMAIL. You can even ask them how many paragraphs you want their answer to be. Maybe one or two. Not one line, not a thousand.
You need quick updates from the last meeting
Everyone left your last meeting with tasks and deadlines for delivery. That was last week. You haven’t heard anything from them, so it’s time to meet again, right? Wrong. Just send them individual emails to get those updates. They’ll get the message.
You’ve got a lot to solve in your company but you don’t have a clear agenda.
You can’t call a meeting hoping something will happen without a plan or that a great idea will appear out of nowhere. You need a clear agenda for your meeting. You need to be sure that your team understands what needs to be accomplished. If you need help or ideas for your meeting strategy, send emails to the right people in your team, asking for help or ideas.
