TLP309: This Author Has Written More About Meetings Than Anyone - a podcast by Jan Rutherford and Jim Vaselopulos, experts on leadership development

Dr. Joseph A. Allen has written more about meetings in the academic literature than anyone. He is a Professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Utah. On the show, he shares recent research that shows hybrid meetings are better than either in-person or virtual meetings. Dr. Allen shares his rules for effective meetings, whether in-person, virtual, or hybrid; and how to foster inclusivity and engagement. Do you know your people? Have you talked to them? What do they want? Encourage participation. … There are ideas out there that will solve the problems in our organizations. We just need to let our people share them.   Key Takeaways [2:01] Dr. Allen has written more on meetings in the academic literature than anybody else! [3:11] Having poor meetings is a problem in nearly every organization. [4:33] In the first week of  March 2020, Dr. Allen and his co-author Karin Reed predicted that video meetings and remote work would happen in five to 10 years. Instead, they started two weeks later in the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown! Web video cameras were hard to find by May! [6:13] Dr. Allen collected data in June 2021 for a study showing that face-to-face meetings before the pandemic weren’t great, virtual meetings were as good as face-to-face meetings, and hybrid meetings were better than either. If you make sure everyone is seen and heard, hybrid meetings can be the most inclusive type of meeting. If you don’t put the effort into it, they are challenging to do well. [8:15] Early adopters were running hybrid meetings that started on time, ended on time, and had an agenda and a purpose. They encouraged participation. They were following the best practices Dr. Allen had been preaching for years. If you do those best practices, you can have a good meeting in any format. [9:41] In virtual or hybrid meetings, there should be one camera for each participant. We can’t continue to set up conference rooms with the “bowling lane” approach. We need to work toward finding the best way to use multiple cameras and microphones. [11:18] If you don’t know how to facilitate a meeting based on the agenda, you will not hold a good meeting. Dr. Allen talks about the need for procedural communication, to interrupt a monologue and steer the conversation back to the objective. He also notes that most meeting leaders have a blindspot to their faults and think they do a better job of facilitating meetings than they do. [15:30] Dr. Allen says it is paramount to use your camera in a video meeting. If you want your voice to be heard, turning your camera on provides the additional input of facial expressions and gestures. Don’t turn off your camera so you can check your email. Be engaged. Leaders, run your meetings so participants need to be engaged, or you are giving them an out not to engage. [17:42] Who needs to be in the meeting? Part of planning for a meeting is selecting who needs to be invited. [18:21] Everybody doesn’t need to be invited to every meeting. They need time to do their regular work. With the pandemic and seven-step “commutes,” managers started filling commute time with more meetings. Sometimes sharing the meeting minutes is better than having everyone in the meeting. Or record the meeting and others can play it back at 2X speed. [20:5] Between choosing phone or video, you should hold a video meeting when you’re meeting someone that you’ve not worked with a lot. If you don’t see each other, someone might be confused over your meaning. [22:24] The more complex an issue, the more important it is to have a virtual environment that allows sharing charts as well as seeing each other. Phones are good tools for simple issues. [23:09] If you don’t know how people are going to react to what you throw out there, use the strongest communication modality you can. In-person or video is better than phone, email, or text to communicate a complex message. [24:13] Joe recommends a virtual commute, which is taking the time to get your brain ready to work, and after work, getting your brain ready to be home. You could listen to a podcast, a book, or the radio. You are giving your brain the natural cues to transition to the next environment with its activities.[26:23] It’s psychologically healthy to take breaks, reflect, and focus. Joe has a paper on meeting recovery under review at a journal. This is discussed in his book, Suddenly Hybrid. Humans need moments to be human. Without transition time, we start to burn out. Meeting recovery is a big issue. Make meetings 25 minutes or 50 minutes long so people can take a break before their next meeting! [31:09] The best practices for any meeting, in-person, hybrid, or virtual: Have an agenda, start on time, end on time, have a purpose, and describe the purpose at the beginning of the meeting. [31:40] The best practices unique to hybrid meetings: The leader sets ground rules, like calling people by name and asking them to participate; it’s OK if the answer is, I don’t have anything to add. That way, everybody gets a chance to be seen and heard on this. Set a ground rule that it’s not OK to turn the camera off and disengage. It’s up to the participants to help and participate. [32:54] Dr. Allen strongly recommends the leader rotate the location of the hybrid meeting, either office or a remote location. It reminds the leader how hard it is to participate remotely and how important it is to engage the remote participants. The leader should set the rule for the discussion part of the meeting that remotes chime in first before anyone in the room does. [33:57] It’s easy for the people in the room to create a tiered communication system, where the people in the room are primary and the people on video or audio are a secondary group. This derails the sense of team effectiveness. Rotate who speaks first among the remote participants; if you know your team, you know who will respond well to being called on first and share their thoughts briefly. [36:57] Gary Hamel, author of Humanocracy, has advocated for years that we stop managing people like Napoleon, command and control. Now managers are insisting we get back to work nine to five. Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments recently said, “If you get your work done, that’s all that matters.” [37:44] Surveys of workers show that some people want to work from home more and some people want to work from the office more. To retain your top talented folks, establish policies and procedures around hybrid work that allow people to work from home when they need to and work in the office when they need to. Add some required days where people come together and re-energize the team. [39:28] On days when you bring everybody in, have people collaborate. Why commute for an hour to sit in a box? Collaboration is skills-based. Leaders can read about it and implement it. It can be done even by people who are introverts because they know that collaboration on their team is important to their success. On all-hands days, have team meetings and things that cannot easily be done virtually. [41:40] CEOs, are you creating an environment for your leaders to learn how to do this really hard stuff that is leadership today? [43:01] One size does not fit all. Different teams have different requirements. Get to know your people and provide a sense of flexibility that might be a little more uncomfortable than you would like. If you don’t accommodate your people, you may lose them, even though they may find out the grass is not always greener over there. [47:20] Dr. Allen issues a challenge to the listeners: 51% of our meetings are rated as poor. The ways to improve meetings are not rocket science. Take stock of your meetings. Think about what would be the ideal situation. See what you may not be doing and try it. Encourage participation. There are ideas out there that will fix problems in our organizations. We just need to let our people share them.   Quotable Quotes “There isn’t actually a course in the management schools across the country that trains people on how to run effective meetings; why would we do effective meetings?” “Everybody had to figure out what was going to work for them in their environment.” “What we learned is that we can do this. We can meet remotely. We can make it work effectively.” “Early adopters are often those people who know how to make the Apple Watch work really well. Or they know how to pull things up on the screen that you don’t know how to do. They’re the people that take on technology and just embrace it.” “The meeting leader, who comes in with an agenda and a purpose, gets steamrolled by somebody … who just goes off on their favorite topic. … That leader needs to know that they can say, ‘Thank you for that comment. That’s meaningful. I’d like to get your thoughts on this.’” “You know that one bad meeting causes three more meetings! That is scientifically shown across a lot of different samples and a lot of data. It’s worth the effort to make the meetings better because it means we should have fewer meetings moving forward.” “[A ‘virtual commute’ is] that psychological and meaningful human transition from one thing to the next. And we need that transition time. Without it, we start to really burn out.” “It’s easy for those folks in the room to create a tiered system of communication, where the people in the room are the primary and the people that are not in the room, whether it be on video or audio, become a secondary group. That ... can derail the sense of ... ‘team.’” “[Collaboration] can be done even by people who are not the most collaborative or wanting to be. … Introverted people … learn how to do it, anyway, because they know that collaboration in their team is really important for the success of their team.” “It’s all about: Do you know your people? Have you talked to them? What do they want? And if you go against what they want, be prepared for the ramifications! Be prepared for the mass exodus that’s been happening in some organizations.” “Encourage participation. … There are ideas out there that will solve the problems in our organizations. We just need to let our people share them.”   Resources Mentioned Sponsored by:

Further episodes of The Leadership Podcast

Further podcasts by Jan Rutherford and Jim Vaselopulos, experts on leadership development

Website of Jan Rutherford and Jim Vaselopulos, experts on leadership development