Editor’s note: The Women in Emergency Services (WiES) “Ask Laurie” column provides advice for those challenges that leave us stressed and overthinking in the workplace. In “Ask Laurie,” Laurie Thiel, the CEO of Mobile Medical Response in Michigan, hopes to encourage and coach all women proudly serving in EMS.
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QUESTION: Dear Laurie, my company wastes so much time in unproductive meetings. We have about 4-6 hours of standard weekly meetings, and no one wants to tell the CEO that some are a waste of time. Do you know how to address this professionally?
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Laurie Thiel: There’s a book, “Meetings: Do’s, Don’ts and Donuts,” by Sharon Lippincott. It’s still in print because I bought it a few months ago. It’s loaded with fabulous tips about effective meeting management and goes so far as to address if you should have a meeting at all and suggests some alternatives.
If not yourself, someone in those meetings must speak up. Maybe the CEO feels the same way, but has hesitated to change or doesn’t know what to do. No one has time to waste in unproductive meetings.
Another suggestion is to hold a companywide survey of meetings. I used to lead an every Monday at 9 a.m. meeting until I did a study and found out that the majority felt we could go bi-weekly, so I made the change.
