The Surprising Science of Meetings

by Steven G Rogelberg

  Takeaways

  1. It is possible, and certainly ideal, to have a meeting that creates synergistic outcomes. In a meeting with true synergy, the interactions among attendees yield ideas and solutions that individuals likely would not come up with on their own; in these meetings, the whole is greater than the parts.

  2. In order to achieve synergy, you can try unconventional methods, such as incorporating silence into meetings. Meetings with periods of silence, where employees are generating new ideas or forming their own opinion of ideas being presented, can be beneficial because they can counteract production blocking, groupthink, and social loafing.

  3. One technique for building effective silence into meetings is to include brainwriting. Brainwriting involves silently writing ideas around a particular topic before sharing them in meetings; research shows that it can produce more ideas and increase creativity. In order to introduce brainwriting, have attendees write down their thoughts and ideas in response to a prompt and then sort them, vote on them, or have a written discussion about them.

  4. Another technique that builds on silence within meetings is silent reading. The idea with this technique is to have employees respond to a new idea or initiative by silently reading the proposal instead of hearing a presentation; this can then be followed by a meaningful discussion. Silent reading can increase employees’ understanding and retention of the new idea, and it can save time by cutting out the presentation and decreasing pre-meeting preparation.

  5. Although the traditional meeting involves general discussion and taking turns speaking while going through an agenda, it is important to remember that silence can be golden. Although incorporating silence into every meeting is not necessary, it can be a good tool for managers and meeting facilitators to keep in mind.

  Chapter 10

  THE FOLLY OF THE REMOTE CALL-IN MEETING

  New technologies are having tremendous effects on our meetings. These technologies can be used to (1) make remote attendees present through video or other means (including virtual reality), (2) facilitate instantaneous transfer and discussion of content among attendees, and (3) promote simultaneous creation of new content. Despite these advances, the fundamental nature of the meeting remains unchanged. The core components of a meeting in the twenty-first century are essentially the same as the core components of a meeting back in the nineteenth century.

  That said, there is one technology-related meeting situation that does require a different way of running the meeting itself. This is the circumstance in which all, many, or some of the attendees are calling in to the meeting. I am not referring to video-based calling in—I mean the omnipresent practice of phoning in. Despite the constant advances in video-based technology, this type of meeting situation will not be going away any time soon. People are always on the move. They are often not located in the office or at a desk. Thus, participants are not only remote, they are attending a meeting absent visual cues (they cannot see others, and others cannot see them). This creates tremendous challenges.

  Remote Meetings Are Primed for Failure

  If you ask employees whether they think remote, audio-only meetings are effective, you will hear a chorus of “no.” And yet if you ask employees if they like attending meetings via phone, if given the opportunity, you will typically get a chorus of “yes.” How can these two positions be reconciled? Actually, our data speak to that. Employees like to attend meetings via phone so they can regain control of their time by multitasking and engaging in other work while the meeting is occurring. This horrible state of affairs (for organizations and leaders, at least) is not at all a surprise. Earlier I introduced the concept of social loafing—an individual’s reduction of effort when in a collective. There is strong evidence to suggest that the more anonymous individuals are, the more likely they are to social loaf. The luxury of not being seen is the perfect environment for anonymity. The remote attendees can just blend into the background. A few well-placed comments such as “I agree” or “tell me more” or “thank you” are all that are needed to appear engaged, while in reality the remote attendees are happily taking the opportunity to engage in other non-meeting work. Assuming each attendee invited to the meeting was truly needed, the lack of complete engagement by remote attendees is clearly counterproductive to the meeting.

  Let’s assume attendees are indeed motivated to engage in the meeting. In a remote, audio-only environment, truly engaging is actually quite difficult, especially with five or more attendees. Without visual cues, the meeting is potentially fraught with (1) people interrupting one another, (2) difficulty finding a communication rhythm and flow, and (3) potential misinterpretations of what was said when visual cues are not present (e.g., sarcasm and motives are harder to detect). On top of all this, background noise coupled with poor connection quality, if present, serves to further undermine the richness of communication and the ability of attendees to coordinate their communications.

  Overall, the social loafing and communication challenges just described necessitate fundamental changes in how we lead this common type of meeting. In the rest of this chapter we will discuss special considerations associated with meetings for which some or all attendees are dialing in. The solutions consist of ways to facilitate these meetings and alternative ways to structure meetings of this type (e.g., interval meetings).1

  Facilitating a Messy Audio Situation

  One way to make these types of meetings effective starts with an attempt to get attendees to ditch the telephone for a video-based approach. Upon scheduling the meeting, I suggest asking attendees, if at all possible, to join the meeting in a video-based way (e.g., WebEx, Google Hangout, Skype). Adding in the visual cues works to counteract many of the potential communication and social-loafing problems noted earlier. However, the video-based solution may still not be possible given attendees’ travel schedules, access to technology, and the like. Thus, effectively facilitating a meeting that is either fully or partially attended via audio will require extra thought and work. A set of facilitation tips can help with this daunting task (they are mostly relevant to video-based meetings as well). The following pre-, during-, and post-meeting advice is meant to serve as an add-on and complement to the lessons from earlier chapters in the book.

  Pre-Meeting Tips

  • Consider “banning” the mute button. While not always possible, it is certainly reasonable to ask participants to find a quiet space where they can fully attend the meeting, thus mitigating the need for a mute button. When someone is on mute, multitasking becomes almost a foregone conclusion.

  • Have the phone conference line open early so participants can be sure everything is working properly. Create a norm of everyone checking in prior to the official start time. Lateness is particularly problematic in this meeting modality.

  • Choose agenda items carefully given modality limitations. Most notably, recognize that the ability to have meaningful discussion is hampered when the meeting modality is less rich (e.g., lacks visual cues).

  During-Meeting Tips

  • Take attendance—call roll. Sensitize everyone to the voices of all attendees. Create accountability for being there on time.

  • Have a rule that everyone identifies themselves before speaking (e.g., “This is Gordon, my thoughts are . . .”).

  • Ask attendees for permission to serve as the meeting “taskmaster,” which entails being firm about keeping the conversation on track and calling on different people when appropriate. Attendees will most always agree to this, as all know how dysfunctional these types of meetings can be.

  • Use people’s names as much as possible throughout the discussion. Actively manage conversation flow. Draw remote attendees in (e.g., “Sasha, share your thoughts”). Be an active “air traffic control” facilitator. Keep a tally to be sure all are contributing, as it is easy to lose track in this modality.

  • During the meeting, try to direct questions and comments to specific individuals. If only some of your attendees ar
e remote and others are sitting together, actively bring them into the discussion throughout the meeting.

  • Have Instant Messenger or related technology in place, not for folks to engage in side conversations but for attendees to notify you during the meeting if they want to speak or to indicate, for example, if you missed something.

  • Without visual cues, it is important that you and others speak at a slightly slower speed with occasional pauses. This allows for greater comprehension.

  • If you are using a video-based platform like WebEx or Zoom, leverage the technology to enhance the meeting. Use its full functionality to share the screen, present content, create content in real time, and conduct quizzes or tallies if possible.

  Post-Meeting Tips

  • Ask attendees periodically for suggestions on how to improve the meeting (things to stop, start, or continue doing).

  • Look for future opportunities for attendee face time with one another as a way to build trust, foster connections, promote empathy, learn about others, and understand humor styles. This practice can pay dividends for future meetings.

  Alternative Structures

  If the audio-only meeting is small (around two to four people), strong facilitation should be enough to mitigate against common modality problem areas and challenges. However, as meeting size increases, the need for more substantive structural intervention increases with it. Thus, let’s look at an alternative framework for these types of meetings—one that operates under the assumption that remote meeting success (especially when the group is larger in size) is promoted by keeping the meetings short and focused and recognizing that this type of meeting medium must be augmented with other activities to truly produce optimal outcomes. I will illustrate these principles, and their corresponding best practices, by sharing a story of a manager at Siemens—I will call her Sandy—who leads a team of twelve remote employees.

  Use Subteams

  Sandy keeps most of her phone meetings to around fifteen minutes in length. These meetings are generally used to communicate information about particular issues, lay out problems that need to be addressed, announce strategies, and, at times, do early-stage brainstorming (e.g., generating initial ideas and thoughts). What she does not use the meetings for is decision-making, problem-solving, or any substantive activity involving discussion. When decision-making needs to occur, she does that in one of two ways. The first option is to create three subteams, each with four people. These subteams discuss the problem at hand, generate potential ideas, and draft preliminary solutions. They also decide on a representative to represent the subteam. The subteam is small enough that all are able to be engaged (subteams often rotate membership over time). Later, the representatives of the various subteams, along with Sandy, meet to discuss the problem and come to a decision, which is then explained to all the others. This process is akin to representative democracy. All are involved to some extent in the process but meeting sizes are greatly reduced (four or fewer people), resulting in high levels of participation and involvement. The process avoids many of the communication and coordination challenges associated with large audio meetings (e.g., it’s much easier to coordinate phone meetings with three to four people than it is with twelve people).

  Use Intervals

  The second option for decision-making with a remote team is something I call using the intervals—working in the time periods between short meetings. I will share another example from Sandy to help illustrate. Sandy has a remote call with her team during which she outlines a problem that needs to be solved by the collective. She also answers questions that folks have about the problem itself. The meeting is just fifteen minutes long. Then, post-meeting, using a basic Google Docs type of technology that allows for shared input, folks asynchronously brainstorm ideas and approaches to the problem. After a set number of days, the brainstorming ends. Sandy assigns a representative from the team to clean up and condense the document, which is then used for the next phase—prioritizing.

  Team members are asked via email to go back and vote on the five ideas they think are the most promising solutions (this can be done anonymously if desired). A twenty-minute remote call meeting is then set up (this is not hard to do since her team blocks off two hours a week for activities such as this). In this meeting, Sandy shares the top vote getters and leads a facilitated conversation in which folks talk about the finalist options on the table and ask questions. Sandy does not try to seek consensus—she recognizes that the dynamics on the phone would not allow that to happen in a truly genuine way. The next day, team members are asked to vote for what they consider the best solution, using an online survey (e.g., Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey). Sandy announces the path going forward and asks three individuals to lead implementation. These three individuals are given latitude to tweak the solution as warranted given any emergent issues.

  In this second approach, I appreciate that Sandy recognized the limitations of the remote telephone meeting and built an alternative meeting process that was highly efficient. The total meeting time was just thirty-five minutes, yet she was able to get a huge amount of engagement and buy-in to the ultimate solution. Her team members felt that the process not only respected their input but also respected their time. A key takeaway I want to emphasize here is that a meeting leader can leverage “meeting intervals” to do incredible things, with an actual net savings in time. While this story illustrates how intervals were used for one meeting purpose, the approach can be altered for most any meeting purpose as a means of gathering information and input, reacting to information and input, voting, and prioritizing.

  As a related aside, there are data suggesting that breaking a meeting into two or more smaller parts results in higher-quality outcomes. Let me share some information from a classic study in social psychology that touches on this. The researcher had attendees in a meeting make a decision collectively to address the task at hand. They then told participants to make the decision again—clearly an odd request. The researcher left it open for the team to decide what they wanted to do with the second decision and no preliminary feedback on the first solution was provided. Here is the fascinating part. The second solution typically was more integrative and creative than the first solution and attendees recognized the improvement. The researchers suggested that breaking a meeting into parts helps counteract a natural tendency in meetings to seek premature consensus. Namely, attendees often rally around the first reasonable solution and ideas generated, often stopping genuine and critical deliberations too early. Breaking meetings into parts may serve to reduce this bias. Interestingly, a Harvard Business Review article published in 2004, titled “Stop Wasting Valuable Time,” discussed how companies like Cadbury Schweppes and Boeing have put this practice into action—often having one meeting to discuss alternatives and another meeting to make the decision. These companies have found that by separating discussion and decisions, they can yield higher-quality outcomes.

  Conclusion

  Having spent over a decade researching how to make meetings more effective, I genuinely believe that the remote, audio-only meeting is the most difficult type of meeting to run—at least if you wish to yield a positive outcome. But I also have seen them work well—if the advice in this chapter is applied to a good extent. I can also confidently say that you, as the meeting leader, will derive incredible satisfaction from being able to pull off this extremely difficult situation. The vast majority of leaders do not do this well. And, while the techniques discussed here are essential for an audio-only meeting, they actually can be applied to other meeting modalities and contexts. For example, meeting intervals can be a powerful intervention for in-person meetings as well.

  Takeaways

  1. Although there are ever-advancing technologies that are being introduced into our meetings, it is imperative that we remember that the fundamental nature of the meeting remains unchanged. Even with sophisticated technology, the meeting is still essentially composed of work-related interactions, occurring
between at least two individuals, that have more structure than a simple chat, but less than a lecture.

  2. Most of the lessons in this book apply to all meetings, but there is a certain type of meeting that deserves special attention: the remote, audio-only meeting (e.g., conference call). It is important to remember that these meetings encourage social loafing—an individual’s reduction of effort when in a collective; they can also be fraught with communication issues, from misinterpretations to awkward flow.

  3. In order to avoid the shortcomings of the remote audio-only meeting, the meeting leader in this type of situation needs to be a very active facilitator. The leader needs to keep the meeting on task, encourage everyone to participate (and say their names when they do so), consider banning the mute button to increase engagement, and constantly evaluate how these meetings are going.