Who says face-to-face meetings are essential? Let’s do a balance sheet.
In favour is that it’s much easier to reach decisions: we can talk to people in different ways – formally, informally, at the flipchart, over lunch and so forth. And of course, it is great for team building.
But let’s look at the negative side. We may have an end of phase meeting in a project that needs to go ahead and the business cost of delaying it can be significant. So if we have to bring people from different places, there will be a delay setting up the meeting.
And then of course there are the costs of travel and maybe hotels flights and so on.
And then we also lose business efficiency because you can’t work as well while you’re traveling. Some people try to, but really you can’t work as efficiently while you’re moving around as you could in your office.
So the negative business effects of not holding the meeting on time are considerable.
If we took the old way of doing things and just came online, then we wouldn’t have very good meetings but these days there are so many tools to help us get those meetings right, that it doesn’t always make sense to hold a face to face meeting.
We can do the team building another time, whenever we get the opportunity. But we don’t need to tie the team building to the decision-making.
Thank you.
Dr. Deasún Ó Conchúir (pronounce) is a Collaboration Consultant at Scatterwork, which supports Project Solutions for Virtual Teams.
Email: deasun@gd.scatterwork.com
Tel: +41 79 692 4735 Talk to me
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