Why online meetings are NO-NO

We’ve gone so far. Congratulations to us! After four years of hard work, eight challenging yet exciting semesters (including our practicum) and 1234567 stressful yet rewarding days of being OrCom students, I’m sure, we’ve been properly equipped with skills that we’ll need for work. Perhaps, with our extensive training, we learned more than enough and I’m really thankful for this. But despite all of these, I somehow really hate the reality that we’ve mastered the art of cramming.

We’ve been given numerous group assignments and projects ahead of time yet we usually do them a day or two before the deadline. To add to this, we’re bombarded with sabay-sabay and sunud-sunod requirements. Of course, wanting to graduate on time, we have to do something just to finish all of them. Because of our oh-so-busy schedules, we can’t even manage to have regular face-to-face meetings and we always resort to online meetings which I believe is a no-no for us if we want to be really productive.

 

Of Stories and Reputation

Stories, coming from people whom we know or at least those whom we think are credible, are powerful in subtle ways. Even if such stories circulating around seem like chismis or kwentong barbero, they tend to establish our mindsets and eventually influence our behavior especially if they’re told in a very believable way. Oh yes, this has something to do with the narrative paradigm.

The thing with the narrative paradigm is that it’s like an open book. It’s a collection of anecdotes about a particular person, group of people, brand, organization, etc. Such stories may come from anyone, preferably those who are directly related or affiliated with them. As they pile up, the reputation of person A, for example, is also established. But the thing is, the veracity of the stories may never be verified unless one will directly get to know this person or be assimilated with the organization. That’s why we need to be extra careful about how we behave online and offline.