I attended a lot of virtual meetings this week (Zoom, Skype, Teams) - some one on one, others small groups and one with multiple attendees - and was juggling them all successfully with other work, until Friday when I lost the plot and was very late joining one and had to be reminded. This of course is discourteous and not acceptable, but it did make me think about meetings generally and our attitude to them, and indeed how best to run them.
I have experienced very different attitudes and practices over the years to meetings (of whatever kind). One IT company I worked for was so zealous about punctuality that if you were even two minutes late after travelling for three hours, you were not allowed to attend the meeting and had to sit outside as some kind of penitence.
By contrast I was also reminded by all the cyclists out on the local streets, often in family groups, not the usual Lycra clad racing experts, of a lawyer I encountered much earlier in my career when I worked for an oil company. I was leading a team negotiating some complex and sensitive joint venture with lawyers from other companies within the “Seven Sisters”, a common term for the seven transnational oil companies which dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, alluding to the seven mythological Pleiades sisters fathered by the titan Atlas.
One of the lawyers who worked for Texaco and was approaching the end of his career rode an old bike around London (a far rarer site in those days before bikes with 20 or more gears and cycle lanes), dressed a bit eccentrically and (perhaps because of his cycling) often turned up late for our regular morning meetings in a central London hotel , for which he seemed completely unrepentant. He would just stroll in fifteen or more minutes late, get himself a coffee and then join the meeting as if nothing untoward had happened. I was very surprised and with the zealousness of one relatively new to the profession thought this was odd if not poor and reprehensible behaviour. However, he always made sensible and valued contributions and so his behaviour was tolerated if not condoned.
I suspect it would not have been any different if we had been able to fast forward in time and hold a Skype meeting. Indeed, it may have been worst; the added challenge with virtual meetings is that they are very easy to set up and you can invite loads of people, some of whom may be a bit peripheral to the subject matter. With a physical meeting (remember those) you have to make much more effort to attend and have a lot more incentive to make sure it is relevant and worth your while.
For encouraging timeliness at virtual meetings see this blog 5 Creative Ways to Get Your Team on Time to Meetings which has some suggestions for Once you have all the right technology in place, and workers are still late to meetings, what can you do to get them there on time? Or this articlewhich advises Encourage punctuality. As with physical meetings keeping to a set agenda and managing time will improve productivity and outcomes. Research has shown that about 45 minutes is the ideal length for any meeting. This becomes even more important for virtual meetings as they can be more tiring because attendees may only have audio to go by (rather than being able to also see each other).
Actually, on more mature reflection this is not just about punctuality but about how best to hold and run and manage virtual (or indeed any) meetings. If you have the right topic, timeframe and attendees and manage the meeting well attendance on time is much more likely. See this Harvard Business Review article What It Takes to Run a Great Virtual Meeting or this blog where a Google executive shares some ideas explaining the five best practices at Google that allow us to scale the culture of spontaneous creativity and productivity across offices.
See also this article The ultimate guide to remote meetings in 2020 which discusses technology, setting agendas, etiquette, engagement and even virtual water coolers! I think this is another manifestation of the “tea and cakes” meetings we have started to hold in my company which help keep our teams together even though we are all at home.
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight I should have managed my Texaco colleague better recognising and allowing for his eccentricities. In these peculiar times when almost all meetings are virtual, I have noticed more socialising and general discussions at the start which perhaps replicate what happens naturally at the commencement of a face to face meeting. You rarely arrive in a room unpack and open your laptop, without a greeting or other polite discussion, and start with “Well let’s get going then”. That sort of behaviour will not endear you to the other participants in the meeting or make them inclined to take your point of view.
What I could have done at the start of our oil company meetings is to have a sort of grace period where we had a real tea and cakes and discussed things generally to allow for latecomers. These discussions are often invaluable not just as ice breakers but sometimes to identify issues that need to be discussed. Why not take the time to consciously do this in virtual meetings?
I know some criticise meetings of any kind - the management consultant Peter Drucker commented Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.
However, I think this is wrong and that, in a professional business, meetings remain the bedrock of our operations. We need to strive to get them right, attend and get the most out of them as a means of collaborating with our colleagues – albeit virtually these days.
As the American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes commented "Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up."
While Charles Darwin observed "It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."
And Steve Jobs said "Great things in business are never done by one person; they're done by a team of people."
I have experienced very different attitudes and practices over the years to meetings (of whatever kind). One IT company I worked for was so zealous about punctuality that if you were even two minutes late after travelling for three hours, you were not allowed to attend the meeting and had to sit outside as some kind of penitence.
By contrast I was also reminded by all the cyclists out on the local streets, often in family groups, not the usual Lycra clad racing experts, of a lawyer I encountered much earlier in my career when I worked for an oil company. I was leading a team negotiating some complex and sensitive joint venture with lawyers from other companies within the “Seven Sisters”, a common term for the seven transnational oil companies which dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, alluding to the seven mythological Pleiades sisters fathered by the titan Atlas.
One of the lawyers who worked for Texaco and was approaching the end of his career rode an old bike around London (a far rarer site in those days before bikes with 20 or more gears and cycle lanes), dressed a bit eccentrically and (perhaps because of his cycling) often turned up late for our regular morning meetings in a central London hotel , for which he seemed completely unrepentant. He would just stroll in fifteen or more minutes late, get himself a coffee and then join the meeting as if nothing untoward had happened. I was very surprised and with the zealousness of one relatively new to the profession thought this was odd if not poor and reprehensible behaviour. However, he always made sensible and valued contributions and so his behaviour was tolerated if not condoned.
I suspect it would not have been any different if we had been able to fast forward in time and hold a Skype meeting. Indeed, it may have been worst; the added challenge with virtual meetings is that they are very easy to set up and you can invite loads of people, some of whom may be a bit peripheral to the subject matter. With a physical meeting (remember those) you have to make much more effort to attend and have a lot more incentive to make sure it is relevant and worth your while.
For encouraging timeliness at virtual meetings see this blog 5 Creative Ways to Get Your Team on Time to Meetings which has some suggestions for Once you have all the right technology in place, and workers are still late to meetings, what can you do to get them there on time? Or this articlewhich advises Encourage punctuality. As with physical meetings keeping to a set agenda and managing time will improve productivity and outcomes. Research has shown that about 45 minutes is the ideal length for any meeting. This becomes even more important for virtual meetings as they can be more tiring because attendees may only have audio to go by (rather than being able to also see each other).
Actually, on more mature reflection this is not just about punctuality but about how best to hold and run and manage virtual (or indeed any) meetings. If you have the right topic, timeframe and attendees and manage the meeting well attendance on time is much more likely. See this Harvard Business Review article What It Takes to Run a Great Virtual Meeting or this blog where a Google executive shares some ideas explaining the five best practices at Google that allow us to scale the culture of spontaneous creativity and productivity across offices.
See also this article The ultimate guide to remote meetings in 2020 which discusses technology, setting agendas, etiquette, engagement and even virtual water coolers! I think this is another manifestation of the “tea and cakes” meetings we have started to hold in my company which help keep our teams together even though we are all at home.
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight I should have managed my Texaco colleague better recognising and allowing for his eccentricities. In these peculiar times when almost all meetings are virtual, I have noticed more socialising and general discussions at the start which perhaps replicate what happens naturally at the commencement of a face to face meeting. You rarely arrive in a room unpack and open your laptop, without a greeting or other polite discussion, and start with “Well let’s get going then”. That sort of behaviour will not endear you to the other participants in the meeting or make them inclined to take your point of view.
What I could have done at the start of our oil company meetings is to have a sort of grace period where we had a real tea and cakes and discussed things generally to allow for latecomers. These discussions are often invaluable not just as ice breakers but sometimes to identify issues that need to be discussed. Why not take the time to consciously do this in virtual meetings?
I know some criticise meetings of any kind - the management consultant Peter Drucker commented Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.
However, I think this is wrong and that, in a professional business, meetings remain the bedrock of our operations. We need to strive to get them right, attend and get the most out of them as a means of collaborating with our colleagues – albeit virtually these days.
As the American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes commented "Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up."
While Charles Darwin observed "It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."
And Steve Jobs said "Great things in business are never done by one person; they're done by a team of people."
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