Posted by Written by: Florian Wierzchowski
You probably already know that one of the most important things in a company is good communication. Good communication ensures that you and your employees know what is going on, what problems are occurring in the company, including in other sections, and how this affects the company and its operations.
One way to improve day-to-day communication in the company is to hold regular meetings of the top management – board of directors, directors, key managers, independent experts – called operatives. These meetings should be held at least once a week – preferably at the beginning of the week – Tuesday morning seems to be the best day. The Monday after the weekend does not yet have the right focus for it, Wednesday is the middle of the week, and the closer we get to the weekend, the desirability of the meeting is lost. And Fridays are really quite a bad start – people are already thinking about the weekend from the morning, the closure of current affairs and the focus on the company’s problems is lost. The aim of the operative meeting is to verbally exchange information among the top management.
The course of the operative is as follows – each participant takes it in turn to briefly report on recent events, current problems, as well as upcoming events or problems. In the debriefing forum, each participant may ask additional questions of the speakers or signal certain other problems. The time of the operative should not exceed one hour, so moderation is necessary to prevent the meeting from turning into a discussion forum. One person moderates the meeting – usually either the chairman of the board or his deputy. The moderator’s job is to keep an eye on the time and oversee the smooth running of the meeting. Current issues are discussed as briefly and succinctly as possible, without going into detail. Any discussions that may have arisen during the meeting should take place after the meeting between those directly involved. Conducting operational meetings is a kind of panacea for functionally organised structures, where operating in so-called functional silos is not conducive to exchanging information and understanding the context of current activities, and sometimes even questioning the actions of other organisational units, precisely because of a lack of understanding of the context.
The meeting is intended to be used for the rapid exchange of current information while providing participants with the opportunity to ask questions, respond and sometimes even solve certain problems quickly. Therefore, a feature of an operative is the face-to-face meeting of participants in one place at one time and therefore cannot be carried out as an exchange of emails with information. Of course, nowadays it is possible to conduct an operative remotely with the help of Teams, Zoom or other means of direct communication.
I strongly recommend that every organisation, no matter how large or small, hold regular in-services. They will allow the organisation to function more efficiently thanks to better internal communication, through mutual understanding of each other’s problems and the context of activities. An additional advantage is that the degree of teamwork and support from the participants in the organisation is increased, thanks to the creation of an atmosphere of mutual understanding of problems and understanding of the current context by all the key people in charge of the whole and parts of the company.