Pitfalls in Busines

As a Small Business Banking Specialist I had to attend a twenty minute daily huddle with the purpose of setting the sales goal for the day. We would need to attend conference calls meeting throughout the day for thirty minutes to report sales. In addition, one hour weekly meeting to access how close or behind I was in regards to the quarterly goal. Thereafter we would have another one hour monthly meeting, to congratulate those that were on track and humiliate those that were struggling to meet the expectations. Then we would need to have a one hour quarterly meeting, to discuss the payout depending if the sales goal was met and set new expectation for the new quarter. Lastly, one hour meeting two times a year to talk about how the company / market were at and give thanks for our input. All the meeting equals to an approximate two working days one hour and ten minutes spent in meetings regarding sales.

The purpose of these meetings was to improve sales productivity and client satisfaction. These meetings brought a lot of stress to the employees, but on the contrary not higher productivity. At times many of the employees, due to pressure would report false numbers during the conference calls and even seek out unethical solutions, like force sealing products that were not beneficial to the customer in order to meet the target. Ironically, because of this, the company may have lost a great amount of money, business opportunities and even hurt the client satisfaction as their associates were not doing what they do best, helping the clients. Instead the employees were also worried about the next meeting and what they needed in order to be ready.

In the article Pitfalls in Meetings and How to Avoid Them, the author speaks about the different problems with meetings today. The first problem he mentions is lack of clarity in the meeting’s purpose. “The regular get together becomes more important than the original purpose” Edwar Prewitt uses Kiser explanation. “What I...