If you’ve worked in an office for more than about two weeks, you understand what a purposeless business meeting can do to an office.  If you’ve got one per week, you know how it can interrupt the flow of your work.  If you have a collection of them, you know how effectively they can drain your morale, productivity, and the will to live.  It’s that experience that has convinced many professionals to dodge meetings whenever possible.

But here’s one meeting you shouldn’t dodge: a face-to-face meeting with senior officials at the agency you oversee.  Glenn Fine, the Acting IG at the US Department of Defense, stressed the importance of office visits at this year’s AIG conference in Texas, stating he often meets with high-level executives at his agency.  These meetings lead to better understanding from agency officials, and a higher likelihood that they will implement your recommendations faithfully.

Just how much more effective are in-person meetings?  A recent study detailed in the Harvard Business Review found that an in-person request was 34 times more likely to be granted than the same request in an email.  And while a part of this may have to do with how much more convincing you can be in person, some of it can simply be chalked up to whether the recipient even processes the request.  According to INC Magazine, 69% of people admit to browsing social media during audio conference calls.  And, of course, emails can be ignored even more easily than phone calls.

An in-person conversation will earn you more attention from agency executives, and allow both them and you to read each other’s body language, an essential part of understanding where each of you are coming from emotionally.  It will make your requests easier to remember, associate them with a human request rather than a checklist, and allow you to build critical rapport.  So while many office meetings should have probably been cancelled years ago, this isn’t one of them!

To learn how CMTS can help your investigative agency close cases more quickly, call us at 909.600.5102 or email us at Team_CMTS@WingSwept.com.