A great piece of advice from one of our coaches, Bill Leahy:
If communication is an issue in your organization do this simple self-assessment. Even if you believe it isn’t, do it anyways you may be surprised by what you observe. The assessment is based on various meeting etiquette articles I found online. What led me to googling meeting etiquette is continuous reports from my students indicating the top reasons maintenance organizations struggle to achieve reliability goals are communication and time.
Naturally, I ask what non-value adding activities eat up your time? The unanimous response; meetings. Here’s the rub. Meetings are a vital communication tool. It is the only time that all the players are in a room together. This has tons of inherent communicative value. How is it a powerful communication tool wastes our time and we still don’t know what is going on? Then I started paying attention and became mindful of the meeting and created this assessment.
After the assessment share the results with your team at your next meeting. This is a great catalyst for change. You don’t have to call anyone out and it is easy to frame it as a way to get better. I bet you will find people receptive to the idea of meeting etiquette. Your meetings will be more effective and eventually get shorter. Giving a bit of that precious time back to your team is a good incentive for culture change. The reason they have their computers and phones out, show up late and leave early, don’t follow up, or pay attention is because they believe the meeting has no value. Make it worth their while.
