Always look for the good and encourage your staff to improve and things will naturally get better. Criticism also create resentment and edification enhance morale and performance!

Today, I called a departmental meeting which is long overdue. My department is supposed to hold a monthly meeting and submit the minutes and report. My department has not been submitting the minutes as we did not help a formal meeting where all the staff sit and discussed various issue. My department is a small department with fews person and I hold discussion with different staff at different time when necessary to resolve the matter before it gets out of hand.I for once believe that meeting is necessary but not necessary in formal way and not too often.

Regular meeting is becoming a integral part of every organisation and many organisations are obssessed with meeting; starting with

BOD meeting,
Senior managment meeting,
Product development
Marketing and sales meeting
Credit control down to individual unit meeting etc, etc, you name it they got it. With so many meeting, is the senior management aware that their staff have to prepare for their report before they go into the meeting room? And if the meeting is not conducted in a proper way, more often than not, it become a witch hunting for the wrong doer instead of addressing the issues that need to be solved.

How many senior managers really read through the piles of reports that their subordinates take days to compiled and advise or offer assistance to improve their performance? How many praise their subordinates for a job well done in meeting instead of focusing on the things not done? How many practices prising in public, reprimand in private? Basic human motivation.

With more meetings came more reports and with today information technology's advancement, it is interesting to see that many orgnasation spend millions of dollars in Knowledge and Data Management programs, their senior managers still resort to asking their subordinates to fill up pages of form manually or keying in the template forms in their PC so that they can access and check how they perform. Isn't it ironic?

So starting today, merge your formal meeting with report and minutes into once a month and monitor you staff performance through their supervisor and control with your millions dollars software. Cut the report to a single page and have a standing meeting so that people will not deal too much on unnecessary issues. Time can be use for more productive way to increase the revenue for the company rather than finding excuses, reasons to defend on the thing not done which many managers always focus on.

Always look for the good and encourage your staff to improve and things will naturally get better. Criticism also create resentment and edification enhance morale and performance!