On Seinfeld, when George didn’t want to hear what Jerry was trying to tell him, he would throw his hand up and say ‘Talk to the hand, Jerry!’. What he was really trying to say was shut the hell up, you’re killin’ me, I’ve heard it all before! This is exactly my sentiment when forced to sit through a meeting on a topic upon which I have sat before.

In my past life (for those who know me, no, not that one), I worked for the same company for six years.  And every year around the same time I would be scheduled to attend a meeting on performance appraisals. Why we do them, how to write them, how to deliver them and how not to get the company sued by screwing up any of the former. I would sit in the room with my co-workers and listen to the same consultant tell the same stories, and follow the same agenda we had all listened to for the last oh-so-many years. And I use the phrase ‘listened to’ because there was no ‘learned from’.

This is a fatal flaw that organizations perpetuate. I am certainly not discounting the importance of being trained on performance appraisals. My issue is with how this training was delivered. For first time attendees, great, it should be a required course. In subsequent years, for those who are still on the farm, I would recommend a pre-training assessment to validate that the previous training stuck. It’s easy to do a quick online quiz and develop your mandatory attendance list from the results. Every meeting is not for every available person. Consider the content and the competency of the attendee.

Lack of employee productivity costs businesses millions of dollars each year. How we did things last year may not work again this year. Make the effort, get out of the recycle-the-meeting rut, and create a compelling learning experience for the right people. Then perhaps the only ‘hand’ you’ll get is the clapping kind.