Meeting interuptions 2

[PeaveyPhones]

So I'm sitting there talking to my boss and someone comes to the door. As soon as I take a breath this guy butts in with "hey you know that PC I was working on. blah, blah, blah..." this goes on for about 10 minutes. I'm stuck there twittling my thumbs because my boss entertains the question. The young man that interupted does not know any better, but my boss does. We talked about it. He sez it's the corporate culture (at this paticular company) and he does not want to be seen as going contrary to that culture. I say too bad. Sit everyone in our department down and very nicely lay doen the ground rules. Like if you come to an office to see someone and they are busy, and aren't we all, in a meeting or just doing some other work, get persission to interupt. The person being interuppted should have right(?) to say "yeh come on in" or "Can I get back with you in 10 minutes".

What do ya'll think?

Richard

 

[waterfrontlynnie]

I let all my colleagues know that when my office door is closed I am not to be interrupted. If my door is open then they are free to come in. If I am in a meeting with someone the receptionist/secretary is told to hold all calls and she does. The first thing I do in a meeting is tell everyone to turn off all pages, cells etc. before I start. I wait until this is done before I begin. I always have an agenda for a meeting so people know when it starts and when it finishes and I keep everyone on "track" so the meeting is finished when I said it would. People know that I mean what I say and this has worked for me now for over 5 years. When I go in to the office in the morning my secretary holds all my calls for the first 2 hours and tells clients I am tied up and will return calls between such and such a time. This works for me and allows me to be in control of my productivity and time.

 

[hilfy]

I take my cell phone to meetings because one of my daughters has some chronic medical problems and her school needs to be able to contact me at any time. I turn it to silent so that it just vibrates. If it rings and I recognize the number as being the school or her doctor's office, I say, "Excuse me", go out of the room, and then answer the call. If I know that there may be problems on a given day, I'll try to sit close to the door. My boss knows the situation and doesn't have any problems with me handling it this way.

There are several people in my group that are involved in customer support and making sure we meet our SLA with our users. These folks always leave their pagers on (usually on vibrate) in meetings because they need to immediately take care of any issues that might affect the application up-time. We all know the situation and it's not a problem.

I do have an issue with people who aren't courteous cell phone and pager users. I think the issue is really one of common courtesy, which generally seems to be lacking in our instant gratification society.

-Dell