I am sure you read about the decision by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer that employees can no longer work from home. You have to be in the office or can leave the company. There has been a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of working remotely or in the office, so I don’t need to start another one here. Besides I personally believe there is no black or white answer. My current company is operates largely remotely, but the complete development staff is working side by side for optimal communication.
Managing a business is all about communication. People need to know what is going on and get an understanding of the bigger picture, so they can place their activities in the right context. Managing a business is NOT delegating a bunch of stand-alone tasks to a collection of individuals that don’t interact with each other. Good managers create an organism, something that by itself is capable of response to stimuli, growth and development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organism). A company is NOT a collection of individuals.
Face-to-face meetings have proven to be the most effective way to create this one entity where all members understand what is going on and what the big picture is. Our office environments have gone through a true revolution during the last 40 years, but interestingly top managers spend the same amount of time in meetings now as they did 40 years ago. According to an article on CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/26/opinion/fisman-yahoo/index.html), managers in the early 1970’s spent 80% of their time in face-to-face meetings. More recent studies by researchers at Harvard show that despite the IT revolution, top managers still spend 80% of their time in face-to-face meetings.
If you are a manager and spend a lot of time in meetings, make sure those meetings are effective. Of course MeetingKing can help from agenda preparation to task completion. Sign in now.
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