Meetings as an Effective Means of Controlling Fluctuation

Introduction

Welcome to the wondrous labyrinth of corporate management, where meetings are not just a tool for communication, but a subtle lever of power to increase turnover in the company in the most creative ways. Almost every day we read in the press how companies are being forced to cut staff and lay off staff due to the shortage of skilled workers. In such situations, employees often behave antisocially and uncooperatively in the interests of the company. Here you'll learn how to slowly but surely drive your employees crazy with a constant stream of meetings. This not only saves expensive severance payments and negotiations with the works council, but also unpleasant conversations. This is a tried and tested procedure that is used intuitively in many places. Of course, as a manager, you strive for the highest level of mastery in this topic.

Step 1: The Marathon Meeting

Start with the classic marathon meeting. These meetings should ideally have no clear agenda (or one so cluttered that no one really understands it) and last several hours. Of course, breaks are unnecessary because only the tough ones come into the garden. The aim is to test the physical and psychological endurance of your employees.

Step 2: The Spontaneous Meeting

Do you have productive employees on your team? Call impromptu meetings when you are sure your employees are busy with an important task. The trick is to catch the perfect moment when the interruption causes maximum damage to productivity and morale.

Step 3: The Timely Cancellation

Unfortunately, the meetings you organize also take up your own time. To optimize your own effort, cancellation and postponement are possible. Schedule a meeting and reschedule it. On time means one minute before the start. In this way, you have ensured - without any significant effort of your own - that your employees have planned the time and, if possible, prepared themselves. To achieve the greatest impact, you can repeat the timely postponement 2 to 3 times and then cancel the meeting entirely.

Step 4: The Right Waiting Time

Nothing says “your time is worth nothing” like making your employees wait. This is why you should almost always arrive late to a meeting that you have organized. As a bonus, you also demonstrate your own importance. To ensure that misguided employees do not misinterpret this as poor time management and a lack of organizational talent on your part, it is essential to explain in detail that even more important people absolutely needed you at that exact time to seek your advice on a topic that was neither important nor urgent is. For maximum success, you need to vary the waiting time. Reliability could lead to a dangerous sense of security among your employees. That's why you sometimes have to show up on time. 

Step 5: The Echo Meeting

This is the repetition of the same meeting, day after day, without ever achieving any result. Discuss the same points over and over again and be careful not to make decisions. This promotes despair and slowly but surely makes your employees doubt the usefulness of their work.

Step 6: The Right Preparation

There is no proper preparation. Preparing for meetings means effort for you and saves your employee's time. So don't prepare for meetings. Instead, think about what is insignificant enough not to arouse interest among your employees until during the meeting. Take your time and take long breaks.

Step 7: The Reading

If you find it difficult to drag out meetings without any preparation, you can resort to reading. You create a list of points once and vary it only slightly from meeting to meeting. You can then read this list out loud in every meeting. Topics that are far in the future are best suited for such a list. If an item is actually completed, you are welcome to leave it on the list for a while and point out in detail that you could have actually removed the item.

Step 8: The Irrelevance Meeting

Consider scheduling meetings that have absolutely nothing to do with the work of most people in attendance. This creates confusion and frustration as your employees are puzzled as to why they even need to participate. A cleverly staged irrelevance meeting can work wonders and perfectly promote resignation.

Step 9: The Call

As soon as you have the impression that your employees have noticed that the meetings have no content, you need to change your strategy. Otherwise, your employees could start to fill the time in the meetings somehow. You can remedy this by suddenly starting to query the status of individual employees. Of course, you don't do this regularly, but purely by chance and just as randomly, you ask employees to unpreparedly present complex topics that are uninteresting to all other participants. Another option here is to have employees prepare presentations and then drag out the meeting for which the presentation is planned so that the presentation has to be postponed - if possible, several times.

Step 10: The Short Meeting

After a while, your employees will understand that your meetings have no substance and drag on forever. This is the right time for the short meeting. Right at the beginning you announce that there won't be many topics this time. You will immediately feel the relief among your employees. Afterwards, extend the meeting even more than usual. Take short breaks in your presentation. This gives your employees the impression that the meeting is about to end. Start the next endless series of unimportant points with the sentence "I still have one point.".

Step 11: The Invitation

Appropriate titles in the invitation and perhaps even a description of the planned content could pique interest among your employees and even lead them to prepare. Therefore, you should always choose a title for your meetings that is as cryptic and misleading as possible and definitely avoid details.

Step 12: The Troublemakers

Even if you have followed the previous steps conscientiously, there will always be unreasonable and uncooperative employees who try to make constructive suggestions or bring up interesting topics in your meetings and thus sabotage you. A quick response is required when making suggestions. The quicker you react, the more effective the conditioning. If the suggestion involves an unpleasant and uninteresting task, immediately assign it to the troublemaker. However, if you have the impression that the troublemaker might be interested in the task, postpone it until later.

Conclusion

Meetings are a powerful tool in the modern working world. Use them wisely to not only inform and coordinate your employees, but also to strategically demoralize them until they voluntarily leave. Remember, the key to success lies in the details and of course the frequency of your meetings.

Every manager knows that his importance depends on the number of his subordinate employees. The naive observer will now think that the manager is reducing his own importance with this method. The opposite is the case. The method described has the strongest effect on productive and motivated employees. These will be the first to show insight and either leave voluntarily or adapt and become unproductive and demotivated. In any case, you will first reap the recognition of your higher powers. After a short time, you explain to them the size and importance of your area and show that this can only be achieved with more employees and you will get more employees than before. As every gardener knows, regular pruning stimulates growth. Just growth through reduction.

Good luck with your creative meeting marathon!