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I really like what you've suggested so far for weekly staff meetings. I'm a new manager (in an IT group) with only a few months under my belt. I started doing O3s from the first week and that's been working great. I'm planning on starting the staff meetings now but I'm already hearing grumblings about a long meeting and all sorts of "dilbert" type attitudes.

I got the same sort of reactions with the O3s and I've since heard feedback from every one of my directs that they love them. Just like the one on ones, I fully expect everyone will love staff meetings once we get into them. Since you both have such a wonderful way with words I was hoping you may have some suggestions on how to concisely introduce the staff meeting idea to everyone. I'd love it if my peer managers and directs would just listen to manager tools but that's not likely to happen over night. :)

Looking forward to part 2 of 2!

rikt's picture

I manage engineers in multiple data centers, what I have found is that the O3s my directs use to communicate with them are preferred over larger staff meetings. Technical people can be the most frustrating employees to deal with, usually they come from environments that has made them jaded and skeptical of everything! Since we constantly communicate, I usually keep my staff meetings a total of two hours, but we include food in them. Heavy content is limited to about 45 minutes of the total time together. We do these staff meetings every six weeks, since every engineer works shift work, some never see the opposite AM shift, so these meetings are vital to over all team development.

With my directs, I constantly preach that they need to communicate as if all of our engineers had ADD. Keep everything short and to the point and ALWAYS explain whey we are making the decisions we make. So typically smaller meetings never exceed 30 minutes, just like the O3's. We have learned we can keep their attention for 30 minutes, and all will work hard to get maximum efficiency from this time together. AKA, there is an end in site.

We have Spring and Fall polls, the spring employee poll just went out, this is how our company measures just how happy our employees and managers are. It should be interesting, as I aggressively started our O3's and regular meetings, e-mails and weekly "fireside chats" last September.

kf4lnq's picture

[quote="rikt"]I manage engineers in multiple data centers, what I have found is that the O3s my directs use to communicate with them are preferred over larger staff meetings.[/quote]

The O3s are powerful indeed however I'm hearing the "I don't feel like I'm in the loop" from some folks. I think weekly staff meetings can solve that issue and I think a little group pressure is a great motivator. The staff meeting podcasts were excellent and I'm sold. Now I'm just trying to figure out how to get them rolling and get everyone on board.