Finding a time for the meeting when all members are available! In many cases, the time and effort that goes into such planning is more taxing than the meeting itself. The level of incompetence around issues of this sort is staggering.
-
Pages
-
Categories
- books
- Canada
- contest
- cryptic
- dialogues
- disarray
- dork
- economics
- fun
- gender
- help wanted
- meta
- misadventures
- music
- online wonders
- personal
- politics
- procrastination
- professional
- religion
- science
- sports
- students
- teaching
- too much information
- travel
- Uncategorized
- what does this have to do w/ org theory?
- work and family
- writing
-
Archives
11 Comments
Word.
If by “incompetence” you are referring to the staff trying to herd the faculty cats, I suspect you are looking in the wrong place. Trying to get schedules out of faculty is one of the worst jobs for staff, a nightmare that has them chewing nails and screaming in frustration. People give you availability slots, then change their minds. They refuse to respond to requests for availability. They announce that their writing time is sacred, and the different members on the committee “reserve” different sacred times, so that there is literally zero overlap in the schedules. Then you try to point this out to people and get some resolution, and start over. Then you finally schedule a meeting, only to have someone announce that they “forgot” a conflict.
OW - Why would I be referring to the staff only? Did I say anything to imply that? I have enough experience to know that it’s all that you describe. And judging from your note, you agree, it’s a very frustrating process. It’s incompetence all around. (You should feel lucky if at your end the staff are super competent and have nothing to do with the related inadequacies.)
If faculty cannot find a time to meet, they might come to realize they didn’t need to meet in the first place.
At our campus, Wednesdays 2:30-5:00 is reserved for meetings, and everyone knows it. No courses may be scheduled then. If people have other things to do and have to miss the meeting, that’s their good fortune.
As the number in the group grows larger, the chances of finding a time when they can all meet gets very small. But is what goes on at the meeting really so important that absolutely everyone has to attend?
Doodle, yo. It changed the way we schedule meetings around my lab.
Comparable to what Jay Livingston says, one morning a week is reserved for meetings in our department, no classes are scheduled then, and people are not supposed to make other non-important commitments at that time. If there’s a regular meeting time, there shouldn’t be any problem with scheduling.
CD: Sorry I misinterpreted the tone of your remark. My bad.
@5 & 7: we also have a regular meeting slot, but there are a surprising number of people who report unavailability for that, too, and even try to get folks to change regularly scheduled meetings to work around their schedules.
In attempts to schedule (pretty small and rare) things, I use mypunchbowl.com.
Yet another reason just to skip the damned meetings. I had a great meeting today–on the phone, 15 minutes. That’s all it takes 95% of the time. We could’ve called a big meeting with 8 people involved to discuss the issue that would’ve lasted an hour and a half–12 person-hours wasted plus all of the time of frustration of scheduling the darn meeting, traveling to the location, and reprocessing it afterward. Instead, we got the exact same result from 30 person minutes.
NU has a thing called meeting maker. If everyone keeps their calendars on it, it will check the calendars and find a time when all the people have blank spots.
Outlook has a function like this too — it is called meeting request. I can send a meeting request to someone and it will check their calendar, if the time is available it asks them if they accept the meeting. If so, emails are automatically generated and the info is automatically downloaded into your outlook calendar.
Now the only task is getting all your colleagues to agree on a calendaring system.