Meetings, Meetings, Meetings.

This week has been a week full of meetings.

Monday afternoon was the Vonne Ageing Well sub-group meeting and on Wednesday I attended a breakfast seminar at County Hall (there were pastries, coffee and fruit!!).

On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I had catch-up meetings with some of the recipients of the SPLW small grants fund and on Friday it was the Central Durham Link Worker Network Meeting at Lanchester Road Hospital. (This was really well attended — 20 people!). It was good to host the meeting and lead discussions as well as being a great opportunity to do some face-to-face networking.

At the end of the session, I asked for feedback from the group. Did they find the regular link worker meetings valuable? The answer was a resounding yes! One of the attendees approached me at the end of the meeting to say how useful and positive the meetings were and that she (and others) would really miss them if they didn’t take place. They love the opportunity to meet professionals in a similar role, to share what’s positive, what’s going well (or not so well) and find out about new projects.

On Friday afternoon we had a Health & Wellbeing catch-up on Teams and afterwards, I found myself thinking about the habitual topic: ‘Teams versus in-person’ meetings.

Teams meetings are convenient; they save time and petrol but there is always a greater feeling of achievement and closure when I meet someone face to face. At the end of a Teams meeting, I sometimes get a sense of anti-climax — that I haven’t quite asked everything I wanted to ask or found out everything I intended to (despite making notes beforehand).

An in-person meeting is much more beneficial for relationship-building Communication feels better; there is a rapport that cannot be built across a (often glitchy) screen; there are fewer distractions; non-verbal clues are more obvious and of course, there is the chance you will be offered coffee and pastries 😊

I look forward to next week with more meetings arranged. Fingers crossed there will be some sweet treats!