When Meetings are the Main Output, White-collar Work Gets Redefined

Strategic plans on Word documents, business analyses on spreadsheets, colorful PowerPoint presentations...my image of white-collar work, based on the various past jobs I've had, had always been associated with written materials. Plenty of internal and external communications, through phone calls and meetings, certainly did take place, but ultimately, the results were reflected in written form, to be submitted to the higher-ups as email attachments, easily digestible and transmittable to a wider audience both inside and outside the company.

Even when jobs required non-written output, my past work was ultimately responsible for creating standardized operating procedures down to the individual level. Whether running shops in rural Tanzania or packing products in a Filipino warehouse, conceiving the procedures were a collective effort requiring brainstorming, compromises, and training, but when the decisions were made, each person was left to fulfill their respective role in the overall process. Meetings, when they did happen, were supposed to be a part of getting to the results, not the results themselves.

That past focus on individual work, after meetings conclude, makes it all the more interesting for me to get used to the job of an educational consultant. Unlike my past jobs, the daily deliverable of my work at Crimson Education is essentially doing well in meetings. Having clear agendas, being able to implement the agendas well, responding to concerns and questions during meetings with clarity based on critical thinking, and finally summarizing the content of the meetings into clear points to ensure there are deliverables. Doing meetings as the output has redefined my definition of day-to-day work.

These meetings have also started to redefine what is white-collar work in my mind. My past work has taught me that meetings are where we get specific directions so that we can execute those directions after the meetings end. My work as an educational consultant also involves meetings, but the post-meeting execution is mostly down to the students that I meet. With so many meetings with so many different students lined up back to back, it is practically impossible for the consultant to do meaningful work on behalf of the student after the meeting, beyond typing up some session notes to share.

The centrality of the meetings themselves also redefines the relationship between the client and the service provider. In practically all of my previous jobs, my clients provided the instructions, and I, the service provider, was to provide the desired output based on the instructions. It felt logical. After all, outsourcing work that they were either too busy to do themselves or did not have sufficient skills to do, is the whole reason the client would hire service providers. But for the educational consultant, the clients (i.e. the students applying to universities in the future) are being paid to be told what to do. 

With the meetings being so central to the service of the educational consultant, a new skill set becomes more significant. My past jobs only required me to be a good listener who could ask precise follow-up questions during meetings. After all, if the purpose of the meeting is mainly for the sake of gathering instructions and relevant information, dynamic thinking can be done in the alone-time after the meetings. But if the purpose of the meeting is to provide instructions on the spot, then more real-time critical thinking is required. The change in purpose needs to be accompanied by a change in how and what to say.

At the same time, this so-called "active listening" can only be done by displaying a genuine interest in the clients themselves. The client is no longer just someone outsourcing work. They are instead paying money to be understood and gauged on the spot in their capabilities of implementing the right tasks to apply to top universities in the future. In these educational consultation meetings, what is more important than what the clients say about who they are, is evaluated through the consultant's past experience based on what the client has not been able to communicate without prompting in detail.

As white-collar work meetings are redefined in the world of educational consulting, these meetings also need to be done in moderation. Their centrality to the paid-for output means that each is more significant, making a day packed with multiple meetings with multiple people more dangerous to the goal of consistently delivering high-quality work. Over-meeting people in a short time naturally reduces attention to each meeting and person. Less attention means less ability to discern what is unsaid and provide relevant advice tailored to each person's situation.