From bottleneck to strength — Change the way you think about remote meetings
It’s easier to work remote now than ever before. For many of us, all the tools we need for our profession can be found on a website or downloaded with an app. Communication between remote team members has gotten better as well with apps like Slack and Zoom making chat and video calls a button press away. However, there has been a downside to making communication so simple and easy: over-communication is now a problem. So much so that it’s become the main bottleneck for remote team productivity.
You would think that being out of an office and not being face-to-face, there would be a reduction in team meetings. It now seems the opposite is true, where people’s days are filled with Zoom calls. When social distancing measures first began, it was great to see friends and team members via video chat. At this point, it mainly causes anxiety and frustration. The term “Zoom fatigue” is now part of the lexicon…
So what the hell happened? There hasn’t been enough time for studies to come out about this phenomenon, but there are some reasonable guesses. Perhaps with reduced in-person contact, people want to demonstrate their productivity (to their team or to themselves) by scheduling copious meetings. Maybe some people have less to do in a remote environment and are organizing meetings out of pure boredom. Whatever the reason, meetings have always been a productivity bottleneck and making them virtual has only exacerbated the issue.
At Tendii, we have some simple philosophies about remote meetings that we think other teams could benefit from trying and eventually implementing into their ethos:
If you can’t think of an agenda, it’s not worth having a meeting
Maybe you want to have a quick chat to sync up with a couple team members, an agenda isn’t necessary right? Wrong. This type of mindset is what leads to 15 minute meetings becoming 30, one person wasting time becoming 4. More people need to ask themselves, “Does a certain topic require a scheduled meeting, or can it be handled via Slack or email?” A good rule of thumb is that if you can write up a quick agenda, it not only lets you use everyone’s time effectively, but it shows that the meeting is worth having in the first place.
Deprioritize people’s faces
Seeing people’s faces and fun backgrounds is great for virtual happy hours, but for work meetings? It may be important for certain presentations or negotiations to see people’s facial expressions, but for the most part there’s little benefit in having everyone’s video feed be front and center. As part of Tendii’s workspace design, the video chat is intentionally minimized so that the focus is placed on the agenda and shared documentation, leading to less social anxiety and better meeting outcomes.
Short-hand notes are better than recordings
With so many meetings going remote, people are making screen recordings and using voice assistant AIs to transcribe meeting notes. In theory, this is great because there’s no added work mid-meeting and attendees can just focus on discussing the topics at hand. In practice however, no one wants to watch or listen to a full recording of the meeting and AIs rarely capture what you’d consider to be the most important aspects of the meeting. That would be like asking Siri to create a grocery list for you. She can try, but you’ll almost certainly have to add and edit things, defeating the whole point of a virtual assistant.
99% of the time, it’s better to jot down some short-hand notes mid-meeting. With a tool like Tendii, you can always refine the notes post-meeting and then easily share with others when they’re ready. It’s like giving people your Sparknotes instead of making them read the whole book. This also reduces the stress involved with remote meetings when people don’t have to worry about being recorded.
It’s still early days in the “new normal” of remote work, teams are still figuring out how to be most effective when some or all of the group is virtual office. The trick is identifying any and all productivity bottlenecks. If you feel remote meetings is one that sticks out (you wouldn’t be alone), keep the above philosophies in mind when organizing or attending remote meetings.
If you’re interested in a tool that helps reinforce these philosophies, check out tendii.io. It’s great for small teams running remote meetings and is free to try out.
