A cure for acute meetingitis
In companies, employees spend hours in meetings every day. And yet, half of them are useless... Faced with this acute meeting syndrome, there is a remedy: the debate of ideas!
Companies are concerned about the loss of meaning among employees. Faced with new challenges such as digital transformation and the arrival of a young generation that does not recognise itself in large hierarchical structures, companies are seeking to reenchant work.
Internal meetings are probably the most symbolic of this loss of meaning. Employees, who attend dozens of meetings a week with sometimes (often?) dubious results, no longer even participate and end up hiding in silence or disinterest. This is the syndrome of acute meetingitis.
Well-known symptoms
- Meetings that last an hour when they can be done in as little as 15 minutes
- Meetings without a clearagenda
- Meetings where no one listens to each other while computers are open and phones are on the table
- Meetings that digressendlessly
- Meetings where it is known that the decision has already been takenin advance...
What remedy?
Meetings have become a torture, whereas they are a wonderful tool for collective intelligence. And the use of Power Point does not help the impoverishment and formatting of thought... However, all employees want to express their convictions freely, confront their ideas with those of others and participate in the decisions taken.
This is all the more true today as, in the face of future challenges, issues need to be debated in order to make informed strategic choices. So how can we make these meetings moments of dialogue?
An agenda and battles
As Nicolas Bouzou and Julia de Funès state in their book "La comédie (in) humaine", companies must focus on the fundamentals: thought and language. To do this, they can organise debates on ideas, which would pit two teams of five employees against each other in a friendly manner, for example.
To do this, you must first know what the main topic is, the issue being discussed (the agenda!). Socrates and Plato emphasised that without this preliminary step, the opinions of the participants in the debate will go in all directions.
To avoid this, employees must be able to express their views clearly and argue logically. Yet, how many employees do not dare to express the substance of their thoughts for fear of other people's judgement or simply because it is difficult to put forward a logical argument?
The rule is simple: everyone has to speak in turn for only a few minutes. Then, by listening carefully to all the opinions, the collaborators go beyond them by confronting their arguments to reach a "true idea" (true idea, not in absolute terms but at the time and in the particular situation).
As Plato also said: "To dialogue is to give one's reasons and to accept those of others". Here, employees should not speak out on behalf of their reputation or, worse, their position in the hierarchy, but on behalf of their ideas, which are what are being judged.
Learning to argue
At the end of such a confrontation of arguments, the employees will not leave frustrated. They will have defended their convictions, listened to the contradictions and together reached an idea that is even richer than the sum of individual opinions. This is why it is necessary to (re)teach employees to argue, to actively listen to others and to debate within the company!