Staff Meetings

Staff Meetings. Oh what joy they can be. I used to think that they were useful until the last few years, but I decided we were going to have one to see if we can clear some things up at my work. We decided on a time and location and made sure everyone signed and knew that they had to be there. Out of my twelve staff members, one never showed and two were more than 15 minutes late. I'm not sure how you can conduct a meeting when some of your people aren't there, but we went on. I then realized that my direct supervisor and I had a list of things to talk about and as we were talking about them some of my staff decided they would turn the "open forum" into nothing more than a bitch session. Everyone wanted to tattle tail on one another and so forth. I finally got frustrated and told them that we were all adults and if you couldn't act like an adult at work and now then you might as well put your two weeks notice in and move on. I believe staff meetings would be efficient if and only if people take what is discussed out of the meeting and put it into their every day work. This meeting was a week ago and I have yet to see any improvements in the issues we discussed at the meeting. Once again, I believe they are useless.