No, no mentions of Maslow’s law of the instrument. If you follow this blog, you know I’m meeting averse. It was interesting, then, to get two meeting requests in the last couple of weeks using an online scheduling app called Doodle. One request was from an external contact. The other came from inside the house. It highlighted for me the obstacles that management sometimes place in the way of staff using the right tool.
Find Efficiency
The first meeting request came from an external person. This was for a conference call involving 5 or 6 people. If there’s anything worse than the actual meeting, it is the process of scheduling it by email.
“Are you free …”
Answer
“Oh, sorry, Jolly isn’t free then, are you free …”
Answer
“Oh sorry -“
[Drop kick the computer]
The benefit of a utility like Doodle is that you can choose a set of available dates and send all the participants a link. You can also do it yourself; here’s an example using a simple Google Docs spreadsheet. COUNTIF(range, “<>”) to auto-tally the dates works the same in Excel.
This worked out great. Using a web-based scheduler for an external group:
- removes a staff person from trying to wrangle the dates
- it enables each participant to respond at their own pace (asynchronous)
- it removes the need to continually round-robin communications
I would add another, though this may be inconsistent:
- when you see what other people have indicated, if there is a clear preference but it’s not your preferred choice, you might still select it to conform with the group.
It creates a bit of transparency in the process.
The process for using a web-based scheduling tool works the same for internal staff. The question is, why would you?
Work Arounds and Hierarchy
We have used group scheduling at all of the companies I have worked at. It’s sometimes not great – like Lotus Notes – but it usually allows you to schedule meetings and see participant availability. Which is why I was surprised to get a Doodle request for a staff person who uses Outlook and Microsoft Exchange at the same company as me.
For a moment I considered completing the Doodle request but there were more than 20 possible date/time options. To complete it, I would have to open my Outlook calendar and compare availability. In other words, I would have to do the same thing you do with Outlook’s Scheduling Assistant.
I ended up suggesting to the staff person that they use the Outlook scheduling tool and that my calendar was up to date. Those turned out to be the magic words. The meeting was immediately created in Outlook based on the calendar.
But the staff person’s response struck me: they use Doodle because they can’t be sure that meeting participants are using the Outlook calendar. In fact, she had been unable to rely on the Outlook scheduling function for this very reason.
I’m a director in a rigidly hierarchical organization. The reality is that administrative staff, given the option of being rebuffed if my Outlook calendar isn’t up to date, or just getting a response using a web-scheduler, would choose the latter. As I mentioned to the staff person, they were more gracious than I am – I can push back (or schedule using Outlook and assume the participant calendars are up to date). Non-management staff may not feel comfortable making that assumption.
Using a System is Leadership
When we invest in systems, we are making an organizational commitment to using them. We or our subject matter expert staff make decisions based on improving how we work, how we deliver services. If we purchase a system and it doesn’t work, we should get rid of it. If we purchase a system and require staff to use it but allow managers to opt out, we’re setting a bad leadership example.
Small things like this can have an outsized impact on staff. If we provide them a tool, and ask them to use it, we should give them certainty that using the tool will be effective. When we fail to use the tool, we create inefficiencies because our staff still need to get their work done. The meeting has to be arranged!
A larger example of this is information governance. If we adopt systems to manage our information, like SharePoint, we should have a structure that creates certainty about everyone using the same thing. Otherwise, why are we doing it?
I was revisiting SharePoint with a team yesterday and was gratified to find that they are using it. Because they are, a project I’m working on can move forward. The larger concern is that many teams are not using SharePoint and there is no corporate leadership to encourage them to do so. It means my staff can’t have certainty about which tools they can use to achieve their work goals.
It’s worth taking a look at the systems that you have adopted – technologies often, although I think it applies to processes too – and make sure they are being effectively used. If they aren’t, and it’s because you’ve allowed adoption to be opt-in and so are not able to realize the efficiency or business objective, you have choices. Get rid of the process or product, or bring everyone onboard. Our staff shouldn’t have to use their creativity to develop workarounds for poor leadership.