The conference call is one of the most familiar rituals of office life -- and one of the most hated.
ritual：典礼，宗教仪式
Abuses are rife. People on the line interrupt
others, zone out or multitask, forgetting to hit ‘mute‘ while talking to kids or
slurping drinks.
zone out：头昏脑涨，开小差 mute：静音键
slurp：啜食
Sales executive Erica Pearce has seen
teleconferences interrupted by home FedEx deliveries, crying children and the
sound of a co-worker vacuuming his house. ‘Nobody could hear,‘ she says of the
cleaning. As leader of the meeting, she said into the phone, ‘If you‘re
vacuuming, I appreciate that, and you‘re welcome to come to my house afterward.
But you need to be on mute.‘
Another conference call
ended when a participant put his line on hold, starting a stream of elevator
music, says Ms. Pearce of Scottsdale, Ariz., a global account executive for a
software company. Conference-call complaints are so widespread that a recent
comedy video showing how ridiculous conference-call behavior such as secretly
playing solitaire would look ‘in real life‘ has drawn more than 6 million
views.
But conference calls aren‘t going anywhere;
they are too useful for businesses dealing with far-flung workplaces, flexible
schedules and a clampdown on business-travel expenses. Time spent in audio
conferences in the U.S. is expected to grow 9.6% a year through 2017, according
to Wainhouse Research, a Boston market-research firm; about 65% of all
conferencing is still done by audio calls.
There are
ways to fix the problems. For instance, meeting leaders must set firmer ground
rules than they do for face-to-face meetings and tighter, more explicit agendas.
Leaders also have to work harder to get participants talking, both by asking
more questions and by listening more.
Many conference
calls are split between people in a conference room and others on a
muddy-sounding call-in line. This often makes remote participants ‘feel like
second-class citizens, like, ‘The cool kids are here,‘ ‘ says Laura Stack,
author of ‘Execution Is the Strategy.‘
She advises
leaders to have all participants say their names when they speak so remote
callers know what‘s going on. If someone cracks a joke and the room bursts into
laughter, the leader should ‘let the others know who said what and repeat the
joke,‘ says Ms. Stack, a Denver productivity consultant and
trainer.
One of the biggest problems with virtual
meetings is that it is hard for participants to build rapport with each other, a
hurdle cited by 75% of 3,301 businesspeople surveyed in 2012 by RW3, a New York
culture and leadership training company. The absence of nonverbal cues such as
facial expressions makes many people hesitant to speak up and makes it harder to
pay attention. In the survey, 71% of participants cited a lack of participation
by others as a problem with virtual meetings.
To build
relationships, Ms. Pearce takes time during the teleconferences she leads to
have participants who don‘t know each other introduce themselves, explain their
roles in the project at hand and tell what they want out of the meeting, she
says.
For teleconferences, agendas and goals should be
clearer and more explicit than for face-to-face meetings. ‘You need to script
them more tightly‘ to keep people‘s attention from wandering, says Daniel
Mittleman, an associate professor in computing and digital media at DePaul
University, Chicago. Teleconferences requiring interaction should be no larger
than seven to nine people, experts say.
Meeting
leaders should talk less than in face-to-face meetings and listen more, says
Paul Donehue, president of Paul Charles & Associates, a Londonderry, N.H.,
sales-management consulting firm. For a problem-solving teleconference, for
example, a leader might talk 40% of the time and listen 60%, compared with a
55%-to-45% ratio when meeting face-to-face for the same purpose, Mr. Donehue
says.
Leaders should spend as much time on preparing
questions to ask participants as on writing the agenda, Mr. Donehue says. He
advises leaders to use a form with spaces to note comments by individual
participants during the meeting. This helps leaders listen closely and hold
participants‘ attention by citing their earlier
input.
Managing conflicts is harder in
teleconferences. Not everyone can sense when a silent participant is frustrated
or angry. ‘There‘s sometimes a little passive-aggressiveness in that silence,‘
Ms. Stack says. ‘Some people just check out, thinking, ‘OK, you dummies, go
ahead and do that. I‘m going to sit here on mute.‘ ‘ She suggests posing a
question: ‘ ‘Jane, you‘re kind of quiet. What are your thoughts?‘ You sometimes
get an explosion,‘ but this can get important issues out in the open, Ms. Stack
says.
Participants can help meetings run more smoothly
by volunteering to serve as moderator, keeping people on-topic and sticking to
time limits. Divvying up moderating and note-taking duties can free meeting
leaders to participate and keep people engaged, Ms. Stack says. Some managers
encourage any participant to moderate, breaking in if a speaker wanders
off-topic and asking that everyone stick to the agenda, says Steven M. Smith,
senior consultant in Seattle for SolutionsIQ, a management consulting and
training firm.
Time-zone differences can irritate
people who have to rise at midnight to meet with colleagues in the U.S., says
Michael Schell, chief executive officer of RW3. ‘It‘s important to move the
meeting times around‘ to be fair, he says. Also, meetings should start promptly;
taking 10 minutes to get coffee might seem normal at 9 a.m. in New York, but it
can seem disrespectful to a colleague in Australia who got out of bed to join
the call, Mr. Schell says.
Videoconferencing can solve
some of the problems. The technology is increasingly inexpensive and easy to
use, and a growing number of applications, such as Vidyo and Blue Jeans Network,
can connect users on a variety of devices, including webcams, laptops, tablets
or smartphones, says David Coleman, founder and managing director of
Collaborative Strategies Inc., San Mateo, Calif.
The
technology can create other challenges, though. Mr. Smith says participants who
aren‘t tech-savvy often consume valuable meeting time getting used to unfamiliar
systems.
Videoconferencing also can make people
self-conscious. Many people avoid video, Ms. Stack says, because they don‘t want
to put on makeup or change their workout clothes. ‘I cannot tell you how many
times I‘ve heard people say, ‘I don‘t know what‘s wrong with my webcam. I can‘t
get it to work, so I‘m just going to be here in voice,‘‘ she
says.
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每日英语：Surviving a Conference Call
原文：http://www.cnblogs.com/yingying0907/p/3600922.html