Collaborative Meetings

Our guest blogger is Gregg Whitt with Professional Personnel Associates in Clemson, South Carolina. Gregg is a longtime member of NPAworldwide, currently serving on the board of directors. Professional Personnel Associates provides recruitment services in the technical, engineering, manufacturing, professional, and management fields across the United States. Read his post about collaborative meetings below:

We’ve come a long way!

Remember back in the day when meetings were scheduled, flights booked, rooms reserved and required time away from the office? Today, electronic meetings enable us to fully engage in a meeting, with other locations, clients, network members, family and others all while remaining at our office or place of preference. The benefits of collaborative meetings are numerous…

Consider:

• A video conference among two or more people can be quickly set up
• Knowledge share for solutions no matter where participants are located
• Time of decision cycles can be reduced
• Change decisions can be effected simultaneously across the organization
• Travel time and EXPENSE reduced
• Feedback for information shared is exchanged in real time (This is highly important due to the time-value of information and the dependence of our efforts of having the right information, at the right time)
• Meetings can be recorded and retained for future reference
• CEOs and high-level personnel who need to be everywhere at once can participate from their physical space for quicker decisions necessitated by time-sensitive exchange
• New opportunities can be seized, not lost, by getting to the right decision makers wherever they are, whenever they are needed
• Meetings can be held prior to face-to-face meetings to share expectations among participants, affording a cost-effective, convenient, time-efficient way to properly prepare participants for the more formal face-to-face event

Not having the benefit of seeing the facial reactions from co-participants on a phone conference can have a few drawbacks. But well-moderated collaborative meetings provide a neutral ground to review agendas, sort out concerns and expectations, prior to out of office site travel and expense.

As we know, face-to-face meetings, allow us direct eye contact and voice inflection interpretation and video conferencing does not always provide that same dynamic. But in cases where many participates are required to attend, and locations are varied many times into other countries video conference is getting our high mark…for keeping us, our clients, candidates and business relevant and competitive. I am looking forward to the next step holograms where we can electronically sit in a conference room together…or maybe we already have this technology? If not, I feel certain that it is coming soon.