Meeting experiences by Awa Diallo

As a student we are always subjects to meetings and group work, school assignment are generally performed in teams and the team efficiency usually reflect on the grade the team gets. in the retail industry, where I used to work, we would have a meeting every morning to talk about the previous day performances, the budget and expectations for the day. At the end beginning of each week, there would also be a meeting that outlines the previous week performances, and point the expected revenues and general numbers for the coming week. Usually, those meetings always last for around ten minutes, and are only informative about the numbers we need to be aware of.

At some point, people were not really interested in those meetings anymore, as we could see the numbers in the staff canteen, and there was not really news every week. So people would just sit and listen and not participate, or they would come in late because they feel like the meeting could be missed and that it was not really important. One day, the top manager realised that he needed to put the importance of those meetings back at the point they were. Therefore, he decided to include short award ceremony to the team meetings, for example the team member that would have performed the best the day before would get a free drink from him at lunch, and depending the amount, he would get a free whole lunch.  The excitement that came out of that new strategy was not really from the reward side of it, but more from the acknowledgment of your performances in front of everyone. From then, weekly and daily team meetings meant something else, not just a listing of the important numbers for the store, but also the way personal performances are recognized and rewarded.

I think the way this meeting has been managed was very well done. Indeed, the management team knew how to involve workers by using incentives instead of punishment. As a motivational factor, it was very effective for them to use a reward strategy in order to increase workers commitment to their duties. In fact, an increase in sales has been observed couple of weeks later.

I also had a not so bad experience during an internship in Senegal. I was responsible for implementing new disciplinary rules for the workers, and culturally the Senegalese is not a much disciplined person. Therefore it was a challenge for me, a young girl, who had the age of their daughter to tell them that they had to perform one way and not the other. I was leading a meeting where I had to present my program to the unit’s chiefs, around 10 men. When I started the presentation, they were asking questions to make me uncomfortable, there was particularly one that everyone followed, and he was not the meanest but was not especially welcoming as well. During the meeting I called all the strength in my body and reprimanded him in front of everyone else, I was not really proud of that action, but then it allowed me to gain others respect. Indeed, the understood that I was not afraid of them, that I was there to do my job and I had the intention to do it properly.

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