A Necessary Habit for Effective Virtual Meetings
It’s About Time
For many office workers, there have been approximately 600 work days since the pandemic began. Assuming an eight-hour workday, that is 4,800 hours since many started working from home, or hybrid working, or returning to the office and then being sent home again, or getting sick of it all and resigning.
Maybe, if you are like me, you spend some of that time in meetings. Maybe, some days, it feels like you spend your whole day in meetings. Maybe, some days, you spend your full day clicking “join” and “leave” on the half-hour.
I am not here to decry meetings. Arguably, I schedule more than my fair share of meetings. Some have the objective of building or maintaining connections with and among team members; others are meant to solve problems; still others provide information and clarity to the attendees. Meetings have an important role to play in balancing a distributed workforce.
In the last 600 days, though, we have transformed the way we meet. We have transitioned from conference calls without any visual cues to virtual meetings with a number of visual aids — video of ourselves and others, presentations, live chat, raised hands, “reactions” and even “whiteboards.”
With all of our meetings and calendar management, we have become more aware of time but less disciplined about it. We hold ourselves accountable but seldom suffer the consequences of lateness. Without the external pressures from glares of colleagues waiting outside meeting rooms, we let meetings overrun their time until we run late for the next one.
Despite these time pressures, we are terrible at quantifying the time we need to share information, brainstorm ideas or discuss a topic. We overfill agenda leading to unintended consequences; important topics are rushed or pushed aside completely.
Sometimes, we set false expectations, saying we will take only a few minutes, or saying we will talk briefly about a subject. I hope we strike such disclaimers from meetings. If a topic needs to be discussed, we should take the time it needs to drive an action or an outcome. If attendees need to be informed, we should ensure we take the time they need to understand the information.
That is not to say these conversations should continue endlessly; the gift of moderation requires a powerful balance of understanding when to shift gears. We can help moderators by thinking about what we want to achieve in a meeting, asking for the time we think it will take to achieve it and clarifying our objectives to our colleagues.
We should have enough respect for our work, our colleagues and ourselves that the time we use to inform, discuss and share is meaningful, that it accomplishes our objectives for each session. If you value yourself, your time and the work you are doing, you can do this.
Even if — gasp — it means setting up another meeting.
