Friday, April 30, 2010

M.E.E.T.I.N.G.S.: Also known as Making Everyone Eschew The Important & Necessary Good Stuff . . .

30 April 2010

I'm writing this as I wait for my hubby to get home from . . . wait for it . . . a meeting.  Meetings are the absolute antithesis of and anathema to productivity.  How do I know this . . . well, aside from the seven years I spent in Nursing Management (three as a Night Supervisor, and four as an ER Nurse Manager), I also have common sense. 

As a manager, I HATED meetings . . . I couldn't get anything done that mattered (i.e. schedules, payroll, chart review, and god-forbid, patient contact) for all the time I spent in meetings.  I attended QA meetings, Policy & Procedure meetings, Critical Care Committe meetings, ED Section meetings, Nursing Management Team meetings, Hazmat Response Team meetings, Educator Team meetings, and more, most of them so trivial I can't even remember them anymore.  I even held monthly staff meetings.  During my time as a Nurse Manager, I managed 55-60 FTE's and an annual department budget of around $15-18 million.  Really, meetings are the what kept me from managing them better, lol.

That's where common sense comes in . . .  I learned to define productivity as basically the end product divided by the resources and man-hours required to attain that product . .  . In my case it was good Emergency Department care . . . for my husband, it's selling insurance.

My husband is a commission sales guy.  Albeit, he's a district manager for his company, but in the end, he makes his living from commission on what he and his team sell. 

And this is where common sense leaves the building.  The company he works for (a Fortune 200 insurance company, by the way) requires his presence at more meetings than you can shake a stick at. 

Meetings . . . also known as "Making Everyone Eschew The Important & Necessary Good Stuff" . . . and at my house, that important and necessary good stuff is also called 'earning a living'.  The yahoos that run his company are so totally divorced from reality that they've forgotten that little gem.  He's so busy running all over Texas to meetings, he can't get out in the field to work. 

They'll  probably hold a meeting to talk about it . . .

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