Tom Temin Commentary

Seven things I hate about conference calls

No one seems to find a better alternative to this persistent analog throwback, says Federal Drive host Tom Temin.

Tom Temin@tteminWFED

November 4, 2015 4:31 am

< a min read

1. Arrangement headaches

One thing about email and text messaging, annoying as they might be, that conference calls lack is asynchronicity. True, people might worry or get mad if you don’t answer an email right away. But you can get time to think, do other more pressing things, or gather information before answering an email. Phone calls exist in real time, so they force people to sync up. Except sometime they don’t. Getting three or four busy people to line up their schedules for a conference call is like trying to thread five needles in a row. The holes rarely line up, so there’s a whole prequel of emails before a call, and a long tail of after-action to email what we talked about. Huh? Sometimes the leader has to have two conference calls to accommodate.

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Tom Temin

Tom Temin is host of the Federal Drive and has been providing insight on federal technology and management issues for more than 30 years.

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