Reunion-mania has existed in many organizations. These are meetings, meetings, meetings, let’s call it what we want, which are called frequently, but which also extend to infinity and beyond. And what is worse, without getting anything productive from them. It is not uncommon then that videoconferencing is the new way to procrastinate in times of teleworking.
And it is that many have transferred these encounters to the virtual world and have discovered that they can have these encounters through videoconference with people who are distanced. Not already during the confinement, but now they extrapolate it to remote headquarters with which before they did not have this type of encounters. The downside is that the dynamics of time loss continues the same.
Firstly, because an agenda is not defined, a meeting minutes are not created, nor is it sent after the meeting with the agreements or decisions that have come out of that meeting. Therefore, no conclusion is reached, pending issues are not closed and a wheel is entered in which another meeting is convened to deal with these problems.
In the end this inevitably leads to widespread satiety . The feeling that time is being wasted and instead of turning it around, we have a stack of tasks on our desk. The bad thing is that videoconferences are even more prone to this type of situation.
I do not mean that it is not a tool that companies cannot extract juice from . But for this we cannot transfer the vices and bad habits of face-to-face company meetings. If we use it well, we will save many trips and a lot of time, otherwise it will be another thief of time in the company.
With video conferences my experience is that you have to be very strict. The moderator has a fundamental role, to give the floor, to cut when necessary, to manage time. It is essential that they be short in time, to be less than 15 minutes so that everyone gets to the point. And if possible, no more than 5 attendees. Better to call more video conferences with few people, than a long one, which includes many people and is eternal and useless.
