‘Blasted’ at the Big Meeting

My third day at SNEF began with a 2 hours meeting, where various department managers presented their latest progress updates & achieved Key Performance Indicator (KPI) targets till date. Reason being that end March is the closing of the financial year, something widely known, accepted & adhered to by almost every company, big or small.

Our Executive Director, whom every department reports to, was present at the meeting to keep abreast with every department’s latest updates. This meeting was quite an eye-opener for me, as I got to listen & view first-hand, about what are the other roles & KPI of the other departments at SNEF. Although I do not understand everything that was mentioned (some things are departmental lingo), it did give me a greater understanding & appreciation for how SNEF operates.

Strangely, my department ‘Projects’ took the longest duration for our presentation because there were so many things to be mentioned, lots of queries from other department staff, comments from our boss & corrections to our PowerPoint slides.

It must have been tough on my supervisor to handle all this bombardment, as the rest of us are still very new to be able to respond together with him. But I know that we will pick up & soon be able to stand our ground as a department, coz I can see that we are interested in our work & want to do it well. It sure wasn’t fun to get ‘blasted’ by other departments… but it was a good learning point for me. At least we got several issues straightened out during this unintended thrashing out session at the meeting.

My department colleagues & I went for a late lunch because we had to stay back for another separate briefing with the consultants from the Singapore Business Federation (SBF). It was quite an experience trying to explain things to them & them trying to explain things to us. Reason is because these consultants are in their 40s & older, whereas my department comprises entirely of staff of relatively the same age range, mid 20s to early 30s.

It’s weird watching this discussion go on, with the consultants speaking to us in [slow] English & speaking among themselves in dialect, usually Cantonese. As for us, we spoke [fast] English… with two of the three consultants requesting for us to slow down, coz they can’t keep up with what we are saying. One consultant (he looks like he’s in this late 40s) even said that he can’t understand what we are saying, coz he’s old & we are talking too fast.

Hmm… It’s weird, coz my department wasn’t intentionally speaking at a fast pace, although I could observe that our responses were quick because all of us could think fast. I really don’t know what to think about this situation… or whether to consider this happening as something good or bad. But they are the consultants assigned to us, as & when we need their assistance, so we have to learn to work with them. There are pros & cons, I would say…

The rapport among my colleagues was much better during lunch today & we managed to chat about more casual matters, apart from just work itself. It was also great that our broken down lift was working again… & this time, the other two lifts which were previously under repair, were now working too! Yeah! Now we have three lifts, instead of just one!

The afternoon went quite well, with more discussion among my colleagues about the next steps to be done. I kind of like the rapport built up so far… Furthermore, my supervisor praised me for good phrasing of English, when I showed him my latest draft of the project reference paper that I have been working on. Yeah! Thank God for helping me with this… plus, perhaps my reading of books & typing Blog entries have really improved my command of English writing.

The work day ended with a short chat among my supervisor, another colleague & I. It’s always heart-warming to chat a little bit about how we feel that things are running in our department, before we end of the day. This is not something formal that we intended, but it kind of naturally evolved into an occasional casual feedback session on certain work days.