The question is:
Where is the balance between work and personal interaction? Are you utilizing automated meeting processes?
What are your priorities at work?
Do you put in the best effort for your employer?
Or build a career even if everything you do doesn’t really suit everyone else?
Or enjoy human interaction?
Of course, we can have all of those but if we prioritize the wrong one, then we don’t get the best balance.
A colleague of mine used to say work is a lot of people busy enjoying human interaction and then they have some technical issues scattered around the edge.
So let’s work for efficiency and prioritize the human interaction where it’s really needed. Of course it’s needed but it doesn’t have to be embedded in every single interaction. Repetitive work can take far less effort by using the tools available and everyone will appreciate that.
So here’s an example for meetings:
Use Wiki documents, or documents where everyone can log in at once, so you can collect comments from participants during the meeting. Google Sheets is an example, but there are also mind maps where everyone can log in at once. Or drawing applications, where everyone can draw on the sheet at once, and so on.
That is far better than having a document that you type up and then send around as an attachment.
To select meeting times, it is far easier to use a poll which takes into account people’s time zones and say: here are some times; which of these suits you? And they just click and that’s it.
It is very very simple and it takes far less effort than phoning and emailing.
If you have for example to prepare the same documents every time, for example an End of Phase meeting for projects, then you can set up a workflow to remind you what to do.
This is much easier than pencil and paper because once its it setup, then you complete something and you click it and it says: this is the next action.
So let’s enjoy the work but don’t let it prevent you from making useful improvements in how the work is done.
By the way, don’t underestimate the need for training the rest of the team. Sometimes I’m surprised at how resistant people are to using new technology.
So if you have any project issues to discuss, please connect with me.
I look forward to hearing from 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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