Over the last 18 months virtually all of my meetings have been on Teams or Zoom, or once on Google Meet. I can probably count the number of in-person meetings I have had on the fingers on one hand.
As with most people’s experiences, the experience hasn’t been excellent or even good, it’s either been okay or awful.
Over the next twelve months, I am still expecting that most of my meetings will still be on Teams or Zoom.
So how could we make things better?
The BBC published this article: Can better tech make video meetings less excruciating?
On most video conference calls, only one person gets to speak at a time. It’s a deliberate, designed feature of platforms such as Zoom. But as Susan D Blum’s linguistic anthropology class found out, it makes having a natural conversation practically impossible.
Though the technology can be a limiting factor with this, part of the problem is we are trying to replicate what we do in-person and do it online using a tool such as Zoom. The reality is that the nuances of what made the in-person experience so effective are lost when we translate to digital and we also don take advantage of the affordances that digital can bring.
So technological solutions are only part of the solution, the other key aspect is transformation.
There is some aspects of understanding why you need the meeting in the first place.
Even though all my meetings these days are online meetings I found this article by Atlassian on making meetings better, useful and interesting.
Running effective meetings isn’t simply a matter of doing the obvious things like sharing the agenda and starting on time. While those things are important, they’re just table stakes. The real key to running a great meeting is organizing and running them with a human touch – not like some corporate management automaton.
They have a useful flow chart as well.
When it comes to meetings the article also says
Meetings should never be held for the sole purpose of sharing information – that’s what email, chat, and company intranets are for.
The fact that many video meetings are excruciating or awful, maybe that before the in-person meetings were equally excruciating or awful, but we didn’t recognise this and the tech has exacerbated the problem.
So before looking for technological solutions to meetings, start reflecting on why you are having a meeting in the first place.
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- What are the objectives of having the meeting?
- Do you actually need a live face to face online meeting?
- Could you meet the objectives in a different way?
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A simple example, you need to review some content or a document. You could do this in asynchronous live online meeting, but this isn’t always very efficient. Online can exacerbate those inefficiencies and make for a less useful and rewarding experience.
An alternative approach could be to undertake an asynchronous review of the meeting, using comments and collaboration on a shared document. It would take “longer” than a meeting, you might need a week or a few days, but people could choose as and when to engage with the process.
One kind of meeting I attend a lot are catch-up meetings, where we go around the “room” and provide an update on what we are doing and is happening.
I refer to Atlassian again: Meetings should never be held for the sole purpose of sharing information – that’s what email, chat, and company intranets are for.
So post your updates on Teams, Yammer or the intranet.
One of the reasons why we don’t do that, is because people don’t read the stuff they are sent, don’t engage with collaborative processes, or ignore company intranets and tools such as Yammer. As a result we have meetings, which we know people will attend.
The perspective we can solve engagement issues by having meetings, and so we need to improve the online meetings, misses the key problem, which is the lack of engagement. This is a leadership and management challenge not just about improving online meetings.
People have a personal responsibility to engage with corporate communication, give them choice, make it easier, but to think you solve it by having a meeting, is a similar thinking that people read all their e-mail.
Could write more, but I have to go to a meeting!
