Comment by SoftTalker

7 days ago

I think more generally nothing beats being able to communicate with a customer in the way the customer prefers. If that's email, that's what you do. If it's a phone call, that's what you do. But I think as time goes on the number of people preferring a phone call will continue to decline. Time will tell I guess.

For customer/client communications, absolutely.

Internally however, once I figure out someone is haphazard with meeting time and meanders around in meetings getting precious little if any action done, I take proactive measures.

When they request a meeting, I ask for the agenda and the outcomes they want to take out of the meeting. Most of the time, everything is hashed out in advance in async channels and the meeting is either highly abbreviated from the original invitation or cancelled altogether because it turns out, the rest of the invited attendees also weren't crisp on what the meeting organizer wanted.

The number of people who call for a meeting simply because they haven't organized their thoughts, asked the right people the right questions, and are simply waiting around for someone to tell them what the correct next step is...is thankfully not an alarming number, but nonetheless simply a personally idiosyncratic annoyance to me.