1. Is the meeting even necessary?
“I don’t just meet for the sake of meeting,” says Dawn Cascio, director of food and nutrition at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, N.J. Though she has regular daily, weekly and monthly meetings, Cascio will sometimes cancel a morning management meeting and send quick email updates instead.
Cascio will never scrap an all-staff meeting, though. “It just shows that management is involved and engaged and cares about what’s going on,” she says. Susan Malesa, director of dining services for Chartwells at Menasha Joint School District in Wisconsin, agrees. Some operators might find it too expensive to bring the staff together, but “I really feel like that’s money well spent,” she says.