highlander's picture Submitted by highlander on
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Career Management

 Hello!

 

I'm a manager in a manufacturing facility, and am about to roll out a weekly staff meeting for my group.  I understand and completely agree that all of my directs should attend, but the directs are spread out across the three production shifts.

 

Here's the breakdown:

1st shift - 6 directs (1 engineer and 5 technicians)

2nd shift - 1 technician

3rd shift - 1 technician

There is some overlap between each shift for informational hand-offs.

 

Do I schedule it for the same time of day so that most people can always attend (while one of the off-shift directs never does)?  Sounds like a good way to alienate somebody.

Do I schedule it for the same time of day (same as above) and have the off-shift direct call-in (when they'd normally be sleeping)?  Or come in very early or stay very late?  As above, don't want this to become a distraction from the meeting itself.

Do I alternate the time each week, from early to late in the day?  This could work, but I imagine it could become confusing.

 

I'm sure lots of people have already dealt with this with directs distributed around the world in different time zones.  What do you think - what is the most effective scenario?  Thank you very much for guidance!

 

 

lmoorhead's picture
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Submitted by lmoorhead on Wednesday April 6th, 2011 6:32 pm

I haven't dealt with quite this situation as we aren't true shifts, but we do have a team dispersed between California and India, so due to the time zone difference there is no time when everyone is in the office.

I hven't found a perfect solution, unfortunately.  The route we've chosen is the second option you outlined above - basically, we hold the call early in the morning in California, which is late night in India.  We leverage the parking lot heavily, so that we can let folks off the phone rather than sitting through down-in-the-weeds discussions that don't pertain to them.  

The first option, to your point, leaves people out of the conversation and there may be important communication that gets missed.  I actually tried alternating times, which seemed like it would be more fair.  It created so much confusion that there was almost always someone who wasn't on the call because they got the time messed up somehow.  It was also really problematic for people to arrange their personal schedules as well - it created confusion all around.  I ended up going with effectiveness over fairness.  We talked about switching every six months or so, but everyone decided they had things pretty well worked out and wanted to leave it as is.  I have it as an agenda item once a quarter, when we do www/tala, to ask about the timing of the meeting.  I also check in with people in our 1:1 as well to make sure their schedules are manageable.  (It's not just the team meeting, the nature of the work requires a fair amount of collaboration so everyone has frequent late night/early morning meetings.)

By the way, I happened to ask a similar question recently, to a roomful of my peers and nobody seemed to have an answer so if you come up with a solution that seems to work, please do share!

highlander's picture
Submitted by highlander on Thursday April 7th, 2011 10:37 pm

Thanks for your advice, lmoorhead.  I agree that you've probably found the best of all the imperfect options - I'm going in that direction, too.  And for what it's worth, I do feel better knowing that others are out there with similar conundrums - and still getting the job done effectively.

 

 

There may be an upside to your "it's-early-for-me-and-late-for-you" situation.  I'll bet that it REALLY reinforces starting and ending the meeting on time.

 

Thanks again!

lowengkiat's picture
Submitted by lowengkiat on Sunday March 4th, 2012 10:22 pm

 Hi,

I am also faced with the same challenge with my own team.

At the moment, I have a team of 100+ staff (a simple organization structure where I have 6 direct report and each of them has about 16-17 direct reports).

Our team provides 24 X 7 production support and the team deliver this through 3 shifts

Shift A: 7am - 4pm

Shift B: 3pm - 11pm

Shift C: 10pm-8am

I find it extremely difficult to have face-to-face communication to all of the staff. (taking into consideration some of the staff are on weekday off since they worked on weekend shift).

Any suggestions?

At the moment, I have to conduct multiple briefing across 1-2 weeks at around 3pm to ensure everyone gets the message from me and also have an opportunity to share their concern / questions with me.

Thanks