It’s time to start meeting better
Last week, Zoom announced that it surpassed 300 million daily meeting participants globally. This surge in usage clearly demonstrates the importance of tools that allow us to meet online right now. During a global pandemic, Zoom, MS Teams, and other platforms are enabling us to keep in touch with people and keep working.
At the same time, rapidly moving our meetings online (whether with family, friends, or colleagues) seems to be revealing some challenges. In early March, before the global pandemic really took hold here in North America, Harvard Business Review published an article titled What it Takes to Run a Great Virtual Meeting, which had some great tips for how online meetings can be “run more effectively”. Then last week, almost two months later, Harvard Business Review published a new article titled How to Combat Zoom Fatigue with tips on how online meetings can be “less exhausting”.
Are online meetings turning us into “zoombies”?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. As someone who considers themselves a community builder and fairly digital savvy, I was already preoccupied with how to create high quality online spaces for people to gather and hold conversations. Lately, it’s moved from preoccupation to passion.
What I believe is happening in this moment is two-fold: 1) our meetings weren’t well designed or facilitated to begin with, and 2) most of us don’t have the unique skills and knowledge to design and facilitate good online meetings. These two issues compound and make it easy to blame the tools we’re using rather than the design and facilitation skills we’re sorely lacking.
What’s simultaneously exciting to me is that I’m waking up to the reality that around the world there are people who are actually already really good at working online. In fact, through some searching and lots of conversations, I’ve discovered that people have been practicing designing and facilitating online meetings for decades. Today I consider myself to be just dipping my toes into the water here, but I think I can safely hypothesize that if organizations took the time to explore this space, we’d see dramatic increases in productivity and decreases in fatigue.
I recently had the great fortune of stumbling onto the work of Amy Lenzo and Rowan Simonsen of Beehive Productions. Amy and Rowan have been practicing hosting online meetings for years. They are practitioners of seemingly innumerable techniques for group conversations such as those taught by Liberating Structures, Art of Hosting, and World Cafe to only name a few. I’ve now taken several of their courses online, the most recent of which was an incredible six-session course titled A Grounded Response to Online Engagement.
From my experience exploring the teachings of Amy and Rowan, I wanted to share some reflections about online space that I’ve found useful. My hope is that you’ll consider these lessons and recognize your responsibility as someone who convenes online space (meeting organizer, chair, etc.) to make sure the space you convene has the right conditions.
Letting go of assumptions
Let’s start by asking ourselves what we believe about online meetings. Do we believe that online meetings are inherently “lower quality” than onsite meetings? Do we believe that it’s harder to “connect” with people online than it is onsite? Do we believe that online meetings simply can’t be run as well as onsite meetings?
When working on solving problems, it’s a good idea to start by identifying your implicit assumptions, which will determine how you show up. For example, if we believe that online meetings are inherently lower quality than onsite meetings, what does that do to the likelihood that we’ll explore the online space with curiosity about what’s possible? What if, in considering how to design online meetings, we instead believed that online space was a space as real as any other? If we believe that the medium is what determines the quality of our interactions, how likely are we to explore ways to overcome or leverage the nuances of online meetings?
My belief, and what I heard from Amy and Rowan, is that it’s not about the technology. It’s about us. What technology does is provide a platform for things to happen. What we do with that platform is up to us. As Amy says,
The internet is no less real than what is often called ‘real life’. It’s how we choose to work in it that determines it capacity to impact us and those that we’re working with.
This also matters with regards to the language we use about online meetings. Again, from Amy:
Language is super important online. We have fewer senses involved and so the focus on you as a host is much greater. Your language and how you behave in and treat the online space will have a lot of impact on your group and how they can show up.
In other words, if you show up to meetings online apologizing for the fact or lamenting the fact that we can’t be together in person, you are degrading the potential of the space. Let go of the assumptions you have about how good or bad online space can be. Lean into this moment as an opportunity to create good experiences for people to meet online by showing up with curiosity and an open mind.
What is truly different?
When it comes to hosting meetings, a lot of the same rules apply online as onsite. Hosting any good meeting requires you to be present, be in tune with the needs of your group, be prepared, understand the context of the group meeting, provide materials, and design for your outcomes.
There are, however, some differences to consider when hosting online that you don’t have to consider when hosting onsite. The two most obvious are physical limitations and the importance of technology. For example you can’t provide paper copies so you need to send materials in advance. And you can’t use a physical whiteboard so you need to consider using a videoconference tool that has a digital whiteboard if you need one.
There are also some slightly less obvious differences. For example, as Amy noted, “The amplification is higher, senses are limited, and your voice is most important.” I think this point is interesting. Consider the difficulty making eye contact with someone. It’s definitely harder to read someone’s mood from their eyes through videoconference, so we’re relying much more on our voices. As a meeting facilitator or chair, your job becomes to use your voice as your most important tool to create the right space for the group. This means speaking clearly and using the right tone becomes much more important.
Tactics for online engagement
According to Amy and Rowan, the concepts of space and time are a great place to start when considering how to create good online meetings.
- Space: good conditions for online meetings start with the space we create. Consider how you welcome people to the space. Also consider opening the space 30 minutes early to allow people to arrive and test out their technology. This will help ease people’s anxiety and help make sure your meetings run smoothly.
- Time: the concept of time is tied to space and it’s equally important. Duration, frequency, and rhythm are important to consider with your online meetings. As a general rule, you should start engaging with participants within the meeting’s first 15 minutes, even if it’s just introductions or a check-in. When doing presentations, a single person should not speak for more than 20 minutes at most before switching gears. You can use time to create a sense of spaciousness by maintaining a relaxed tone of voice, leaving space for silence, and even inviting pauses for reflection. This can be particularly useful for calming people down when time is tight or anxiety is high.
Beyond space and time, consider a few design elements that might help create better conditions for your online meeting.
- Breakouts: groups of three or four people can be much more effective than plenary for people to share ideas or connect with each other
- Mirroring: after breaking into small groups, have participants share back what they heard from the others in their groups
- Imagery: have participants use images to help them convey their ideas or share personal stories
- Helping each other: have participants support each other with technology or take turns facilitating breakouts
- Storytelling: create opportunities for participants to share stories as a means to build empathy within the group
- Reflection: create space for silent reflection or journaling
A concept I really appreciated from Amy and Rowan that brought this all together for me was The Wheel of Online Hosting, a relational map that defines how all parts of hosting are connected.
The wheel’s four quadrants represent four key concepts that combine to help us understand how to design and facilitate good online space.
Presence — be present, awake, aware, ready to respond rather than react.
Relationship — recognize and appreciate the relationship between yourself, your team, the meeting participants, and the natural world.
Technology — partner with technology rather than simply using it. Understand its strengths and its limitations.
Design — create the container through a program of activities. Your design animates the forms of connection between people.
It’s time to start meeting better
With the rapid move to fully remote working, the cracks in the foundation of how we meet are starting to show. We have grown complacent and sloppy with generic meeting objectives and purpose. No wonder we are frustrated with online meetings. Complacent and sloppy onsite is an absolute disaster online.
Let’s ask ourselves: if our meetings are bad online, were they actually good onsite? Are we sure? Are we really sure? I am asking these questions seriously because I find we too often assume our meetings are good as long as nobody is actively complaining or as long as people are showing up. If those were the indicators for your outcomes for onsite meetings, then no wonder your online meetings are exhausting.
And it’s not your fault. I find that our organizational expectations about meetings are really low. At the same time, it’s very quickly becoming no longer acceptable to blame our lax culture for our bad meetings. You’ve gotten away with it onsite and you can’t get away with it anymore online.
So start now. Be curious about meeting purpose, meeting design, and meeting facilitation. Consider how to be inclusive and design for the value of diversity. Consider how you can partner with technology to achieve your meeting purpose. Consider how you are designing and facilitating your meetings that make the most of space and time. Consider the language you use and your tone of voice.
Consider whether it’s really the medium that’s the problem. Or maybe online meetings can be really great. Maybe what matters is how we show up.
Thanks for reading. If you ever need help with online meetings, let me know. I’d be happy to chat, give you tips, share the things I’ve learned, introduce you to good resources, or even help you facilitate.
