Running a Meeting

Today I attended a meeting in Atlanta, GA. The meeting was to go over a new system that was being put out for a company that my company works for from time to time. The system was to help them keep track of the safety training of all of their contractors. The system tracks each contractors background checks, drug screens, and safety orientation. Sounds like a good idea right? Here is the problem, in todays world every company has their own system that contractors are required to use. All of these systems are complex databases that take a great deal of time to load all of your employees into.

I personally in my own job use 4 different databases that all do the same thing. It doesn't matter that my employees may have already had a background check, drug test, and safety orientation from one company 2 months ago. When we work for a different company we must do the process all over again.

I personally as a safety professional would like to see a national background, and drug test database that everyone was willing to accept. I doubt this will ever happen but it would be nice.

I was also surprised at how poorly the meeting was run. In this conference there were well over 100 people in the room. To my stunned surprise the person running the meeting asked each person in the room and introduce themselves with their name, title, company, and where they were from. The meeting was scheduled for around 2 hours, and it took me off guard that we wasted (in my opinion) almost a half hour listening to people introduce themselves. I personally couldn't tell you the name or company of anyone in that room.

I don't mean to rant but I do find it important that if you are going to have a meeting, that the meeting be as short as possible. In todays worked there are way to many meetings. Further more in these meetings a great deal of time is wasted. Why could we not just sit down and get right to why we were all there.