Is your online meets affecting your efficiency and output ??

Nowadays, the day starts with the Digital Era, where we have an almost fixed schedule of attending meetings on an online platform like MS teams or Zoom, where the status of almost everything is discussed along with the target dates along with the responsible persons. This meeting has a major difference in comparison of board rooms or cabin meetings where the persons who are attending the meetings are fully devoted to the person present there and they were also limited numbers of fillers who are affecting conversations, by the body language and facial expression people used to judge the intent and concluding in a faster manner. Though this meets has a video-enabled option but still, technology has a long way to go in India, where internet speed is ranked as 129th in mobile internet and 65th for fixed broadband ( Resource https://gadgets.ndtv.com/telecom/news/india-ookla-global-speedtest-index-rank-mobile-internet-fixed-broadband-download-upload-speeds-december-2020-2355483_).

Further what it has been observed in many meetings that managers who used to take the updates from subordinates just by dialing the numbers and just by walking few steps are taking hours for daily status updates and what further observed is no major developments are happening between the two meets and again the hours are spent by entire team on listening to the mangers and seniors again and again.

What has been further observed that at many times these online meets have diverted their entire topic and reached no conclusion, it was also happening in the case of personal meets but still topic was somewhere kept in the mind. Many executives have this complain that half of the day they have attended meetings and post completion of the same they have asked for their deliverables and their response was much expected as where was the time ?? and they were not wrong as well because most of the time they have devotes is on attending this meeting, because of this either they have to stretch there working hours or either the delivery of assignment gets delayed, you also have heard this from many people that work got increased in this WFH culture, the point is work is not increased their time got increased because most of the times they were attending these meetings and attending calls and couldn’t complete there given time and this issue is not specific to any particular department such as finance this is happening with almost every department. Further, there are many employees’ feelings that they attended the meeting however they have contributed nothing in the meeting and they could have devoted this time on something else which is more productive.

What is the solution:- Now above we have discussed the problem that these online meetings are affecting our efficiency and reducing the output, this meeting shouldn’t be on regular basis just for taking updates, updates should be getting done in an offline manner and only needs to be discussed with the people where improvement is required. Further needless points need to be avoided in such meetings, further one person should work as a coordinator other than the leader, who will take notes/ minutes and circulate such notes post-meeting. Further, someone also needs to ensure that the meeting should go in desired directions, in this covid situation where we are working from home meetings should go on toward more efficiency and not just to get the status which could have been done offline.