Meetings should be great - they're opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Meetings should be like salt - a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.
Meetings get a bad rap, and deservedly so - most are disorganized and distracted. But they can be a critical tool for getting your team on the same page.
So, for me the town hall meetings are really an opportunity to engage in two-way dialogue with people, and they've been very helpful.
Corporate America is drowning in meetings. To make one thing clear, I am not against communication. Quick one-on-ones can be extremely effective. I am talking about those hour-long recurring meetings, devoid of a clear agenda, and attended by many. I dread them.
I hate having people sit in on meetings.
I think it's a really big deal to be able to meet people outside the context of something like a conference room or someplace where everything feels like it's formal talk.
The usefulness of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present.
The best meeting I ever went to was a meeting in France where the talk slots were 60 minutes long, but you were told to prepare a five-minute talk. It was absolutely great because the entire talk was a conversation between the speaker and the audience.
I don't like to spend time in endless meetings talking about stuff that isn't going to get anything done. I have meetings, but they're short, prompt and to the point.
I just find that people can waste a lot of time in meetings, so I try to restrict meetings to the minimum that they need to be. But I have lots of time in my day where I am available to have informal conversations, where I grab someone to talk, and people can just walk up to my desk and talk to me.