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September 5, 2018 04:40 pm

Ask Slashdot: Should We Hang Up on Conference Calls?

Make everyone stand. Work to an agenda. Don't let people go on endlessly. There are plenty of suggestions on how to run meetings so they are not a waste of time. People pay less attention to a bigger waste of time: the multi-participant conference call, argues a story on Financial Times. The story -- shared by an anonymous reader and which may be paywalled -- makes a case against the need for conference calls: You know the drill. An invitation arrives in your inbox with a date and time, a list of participants, numbers for dialling in from different countries and a sign-in code (followed by the pound or hash sign). I have had dozens of these invitations to conference calls, particularly those to discuss forthcoming panels and events. None of the calls has contributed much to the eventual event. I know this because my role is often to chair the eventual event. This is the first difference between a conference call and a face-to-face meeting: it is clear who is chairing the meeting, whereas it is seldom clear who is chairing the call. On conference calls, there is usually someone listed as the organiser, with their own sign-in code (followed by the pound or hash sign), but they are often not the most senior person on the call. The organiser, I can say from experience, is seldom the person who is going to be chairing the planned event. Usually, they are the person who organised the call. That may be a senior person; it may be their personal assistant. The call organiser may take the leading role in the call. It is hard to tell because -- unless you have met several times before -- it is difficult to know who is speaking at any time. Unlike in a face-to-face meeting, you cannot see people's faces. As participants "arrive" in the conference call, they usually say, "Hi, this is Diane", or are announced by a recorded voice like entrants to a 19th-century ball -- "Simon Oates has joined the call" -- but after that you have to listen keenly for any voice marker (an accent, a shouty tone) that will help you identify who is talking. That is if you can remember who is on the call in the first place. What do you think?

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Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

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