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Kimiya Shokoohi is a writer and filmmaker based in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia.
There’s an etiquette and an art to conducting work meetings properly – as well as certain workplace rituals to avoid. Namely, the impromptu meeting.
The obvious solution: scheduling meetings ahead of time.
Jennifer Farmer, a Chicago-based public relations expert and author of the book “First and Only: A Black Woman’s Guide to Thriving at Work,” advises scheduling meetings in advance, in order to encourage more productive and effective conversations that are devoid of personal sensitivities. Doing so provides time to create guidelines for items that are to be discussed, giving all parties clarity on how and what to prepare.
“I don’t think impromptu meetings are very kind,” Farmer said.
“There are times when there is a crisis and it’s all hands on deck, but sometimes there is a person that feels their schedule is more important and feels they can dictate,” she said. “People have a right to know what they are meeting for and to prepare for the meeting.”
An impromptu one-on-one meeting may call into question the validity of the meeting’s purpose. Such scenarios could include discussions about a performance issue, a lecture about a perceived workplace gaffe, or some other variety of bad news. Farmer said that even in situations where a supervisor may be getting angry, employees can stay calm, excuse themselves and request to meet at a later time. This course of action reclaims respect and makes clear that there is no room for verbal abuse.
“Someone has to stay calm and level-headed,” Farmer said.
What I’m reading around the web
Corporate leaders are responsible for ensuring offices are comfortable for their employees, and increasingly it is in our collective best interest to provide those conditions in environmentally sound ways. With temperatures having broken records across Canada’s West Coast this summer, I examined the wind-catching engineering designed into Iranian buildings. You can read more about “the ancient Persian way to keep cool” at BBC Future.
In “The Great Resignation: how employers drove workers to quit,” Kate Morgan explores how workers are making decisions to resign based on how their employers have treated them, or failed to treat them. “The early days of the pandemic reminded us that people are not machines,” Alison Omens, chief strategy officer of the research firm JUST Capital, told Morgan.
In “How to Get Your Intuition Back (When It’s Hijacked by Life)” Judi Ketteler explores research that suggests depressed people struggle with intuitive decision-making. The problem comes down to what Carina Remmers, a clinical psychologist at the Free University of Berlin, calls “conflicting motivations.”
Opinion from Globe Careers
The three sources of burnout and how to tackle them Burnout is a combination of three distinct symptoms: exhaustion, in which mental or physical resources are depleted; cynical detachment, in which social connectedness erodes; and a reduced sense of efficacy, when the value you place in yourself has diminished. Knowing which one you’re suffering from can help you and your organization determine the best way to recover.
More from the section
I think my pay and role should be higher after my company’s restructuring In this week’s NinetoFive advice column, a reader whose pay and title were unchanged after a massive restructuring asks what they can do to get the title and salary they feel they deserve.
A step-by-step guide for mastering the informational meeting when job seeking The job interview gets you the job. But the informational meeting gets you the job interview, says Peter Caven in The Globe’s Leadership Lab.
Leadership Lab is a series where executives, experts and writers share their views and advice about the world of work. You can find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.
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