It doesn’t say anything about putting the item ON the agenda either.
A reminder, mind you, that would be sent on the very next business day. The OP has also indicated a reluctance to deal with searching through a couple of days worth of email to organize the agenda items.
The way a competent and effective worker responds to that is “Thank you, it will be on the agenda.” Perhaps a reminder to Melanie about the preferred process is reasonable, but nothing here should get in the way of that item making it on the agenda. It certainly shouldn’t require a coworker to send out a reminder email the next day.
Melanie didn’t read the OP. She received a polite and reasonable request for a reminder and responded rudely, and clearly indicated she had no intention of cooperating.
I disagree that the request was reasonable. The OP got information to act on, she should do the job she’d been hired to do, and update the agenda with it.
Yes, go ahead and remind the team to follow the process. Heck, if people don’t follow the process, send out an email telling them that off-cycle requests have gotten too frequent and will no longer be processed.
Don’t, out of the blue, ask someone to re-send you information on the next business day for processing. It’s silly, you have the information, just use it.
Again, a process has no inherent worth. A process is only as good as how it serves the users. If a process is not serving the user’s needs, you need a better process.
As a manager (or at least the manager of the agenda), your job is to figure out how to create the best agenda possible in the most efficient way. Your process sucks at that in at least two ways- it puts a burden on the users, and it risks missing valuable contributions that may come at non-standard times.
You are in charge. Stop whining and playing games, and make your organization work better.
But don’t you see that this is just the flip side of: Martha likes to send me IMs, Bob likes to stop me in the hallway, Jessica will silently leave me random post-its while I’m away from my desk, etc. etc.
I just don’t see what’s so reprehensible about the following:
“Hey, can you add this to the agenda?”
“Sure, but I’m in the middle of something else right now. Send me an email so I don’t forget.”
I think the thing that I’m assuming, and not unreasonably so, is that this is not her job and the whole of her job. It’s a duty she only handles sometimes, and I would imagine she has other duties she also needs to attend to, just like everyone else who shares the coordination duty. She may only be dealing with the agenda for one week a month or even less frequently.
In that case, I don’t think it’s very unreasonable to expect that the agenda coordinator for any given week will only be thinking about it and dealing with it during that week, and at other times they will be attending to their other, primary duties.
If meeting coordination was one of the OP’s primary duties and she handled it every week, then I would certainly expect that she be able to handle a flexible process. But given that the duty rotates, I’m comfortable with a rigid process that allows the team to plug any given person into the role. I just don’t see the desire to stick to a known process and the reluctance to set a precedent of going outside that process as a power play.
There are people who will always break the process, some just for the sake of doing so. The key is to be flexible and not tied down to a process in the first place.
Maybe Melanie had an appointment or some other reason why she wanted to get her idea in early. To me, email and messaging is so ubiquitous in today’s workplace that it seems rigid and inefficient to force people to use it in a certain way and that’s how I see this mandatory Monday email. “You will send me your ideas on this day at this time” seems inflexible and silly. Sure, you should send a reminder on Monday but I don’t buy that it is any more work to collect the ideas outside your specific timeframe.
Reprehensible, really? Could we possibly take the dramatics down a notch or so? And of course it’s the flip side. It’s the normal side where grown adults who are capable of working independently take the data as they are given it (note Alice in Wonderland’s post earlier) and work it into the needed agenda. Who cares how you get it, as long as you get it?
I guess I’m seeing this as an ego thing. You made the silly “I’m not your monkey!” statement earlier. That combined with how many people seem to be giving off an idea that more or less says “I’m in charge of this meeting, you will submit the info to me as directed because I say so.” which is really just obnoxious and more than a little childish.
Maybe it’s me but I like doing things as smoothly and easily as possible. To me asking someone to send me the same information a business day later implies that I am incapable of doing my job (which is also an ego thing, I guess) properly without having my hand held. Part of being a competent professional is the ability to get your job done without having people have to coddle you.
In your example you indicate that the OP is in the middle of something and needs her to shoot an email. That doesn’t fly. Unless the OP works at a super special place where IM messages self destruct in 10 minutes then guess what? If she’s in the middle of something that IM message will still be there when she’s done. All she has to do when she’s done being in the middle of something is to copy and paste the info Melanie gave her into her agenda file. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. No hand wringing, no additional information needs to be sent, no nothing. In less time than it took her to type out this petty complaint thread she could have been done with Melanie’s information and on to something else. Why make things harder than they have to be just for ego sake?
Perfectly said, IMHO. Rigid, inefficient, inflexible and silly are all words that fit.
I’m also seeing it as an ego thing, but on the other side. The process isn’t something the OP insisted people follow whenever she’s in charge, it’s something they’ve been doing for a while now. Maybe it doesn’t have the force of policy and is just something they’ve done as a custom, but I share the OP’s concern that it could get out of hand. The ego thing comes in where Melanie feels she’s above what everyone else has been doing without issue and that the OP should just bow to what she wants.
The monkey comment was made when I was in a sour mood. But I do think it’s not kosher for someone to just dump something in your lap and expect you to deal with it unless they’re your boss or your customer.
The first thing I think of when I think “smooth and easy” is an established, known-to-work procedure. Different minds.
Your excuses have grown tiresome. If it’s your job to make sure the team’s contributions get into the agenda, when someone contributes something, put it on the fucking agenda. Period. Don’t ask them to send you follow-ups to make sure you do it. Just do it your fucking self because it is *your * task. I don’t know what kind of head games you’re into, or what kind of quien-es-mas-macho ego-off you think it’s a good idea to get into, but this couldn’t be any simpler. You know, maybe if Melanie had delivered her request via spitball, I could see saying, “No, submit this shit in a different format.” But via IM? While you’re sitting at your desk, no less, with a godzillion different ways to ensure the information gets on the agenda? And you still think it’s okay to whine about the way it was submitted and think she’s the one who needs to set a reminder to make sure it gets in there? Good grief.
Well, I don’t see what’s so hard about sending an email when you’re clearly already right there at the computer, especially since emails come all nicely arranged for electronic filing and audit trails.
You don’t ask a person who has already given you the information you need to give it to you again on X date in Y format. The transaction is over. It’s now up to you to do your job.
No, it’s not rude. It’s stupid and insulting to ask for a reminder of something that you’ve just been told. “This is the reminder” is the perfect retort to a bureaucratic jobsworth.
So, you just show up at court on a random day and dump loads of files on the clerk’s desk and walk away? You’ve given them the information, now it’s their job?
It doesn’t matter what wild hypotheticals you come up with because they’re simply and clearly not applicable in this situation. If she was a clerk of courts receiving hundreds or thousands of pages of documents … If she was getting dozens of agenda items on her way to the restroom … but none of those things are true, so they’re simply not relevant. She got one instant message while she was sitting at her desk asking her to add an agenda item. She should just have done it. Period. No discussion.
