Makemeetings matter again!

Are we saving or wasting time now that we’re online?

Remember the office meeting? Requisite elements like pre-discussion small talk, quickly silenced cellphones and the occasional plate of yesterday’s bagels were part of the fabric of getting together to talk about what was new and what was next. But now? You throw on a Zoom shirt, grab your coffee and “click here to enter.”

But it’s not all bad. If you tried walking around the conference room table to stretch your legs, you’d get plenty of side-eye as you lapped your co-workers. But if you’re home and you want to pace around your home office, just turn off your camera. Need a moment to tell your kid to stop butchering Billie Eilish songs in the hallway? Turn off your mic. And if you want to finish that stale bagel, turn off both.

Also, unlike in-person meetings of the past, it’s much easier to self-distract. You can check out Twitter for 20 minutes, pay a few bills or chat with friends, as long as your phone or additional screen can be seen without turning your head.

Lisa Poole, a pharmaceutical sales manager in Atlanta, Georgia, says she’s mastered the art of “paying just enough attention” during meetings to get things done — “and I’m the one running the meeting,” she says. “I’ve come to realize that brevity is key. Say what you need to say and get out, or you’re going to be talking to a bunch of people who are posting on Facebook.”

Poole says she’s taken a new casual approach to meetings, thanks to some direct intervention from her employees.

“I guess they had a bit of a coup,” she says. “They complained that I spent too much time working with people one-on-one and too much time talking. I kind of thought that was the point.”

But Poole says she was willing to listen to her team, so much so that she asked her HR department if they had any suggestions on how she could improve her meeting prowess. And they had plenty. “It was like they were waiting for 10 years for someone to ask that question,” Poole says. “They

Our work conditions have changed, perhaps meetings should too.

set up an online training session, they sent me examples on video, they sent me scripts. I was like ‘OK. That’s enough.’”

Still, Poole says the information was helpful, as was the chance to take a step back and try to do things a different way.

“You realize you’re spending 60 minutes to accomplish 15 minutes worth of work,” she says. “I learned I could spend 20 minutes asking for updates via email each morning from various individuals instead of having everyone let me know via Zoom.”

‘Like going to church’

Martin A., who doesn’t want his last name used, says he used to love going to meetings when he was in the office but today, the 41-year-old insurance analyst dreads them. “At work, it was casual, laidback,” he says. “We’d joke around, do what we had to do and then get on with the day.”

Now, Martin says meetings are sometimes excruciating. “I feel like I’m seven years old and it’s like going to church. When you’re young, everything sounds the same in church — same songs, same pacing, same people. And that’s how I feel about meetings. It’s like a formatted talk show you can’t break out of.”

Martin says he’s tried talking to his manager but says he won’t listen. “He does everything by the book,” he says. “I think he read somewhere that we have to spend 45 minutes mapping out our day and he won’t budge.”

Hillary Yale, a career coach in Miami, Florida, says it can be hard to set new patterns, especially when they involve larger groups in today’s remote-working environment. “I’m very sympathetic to managers today,” Yale says. “The only time they can get their team together is an online meeting, so they hang onto it and I think that’s a good thing. It’s just that some managers think they can use the same playbook as they did when they were working with each other in person. And you just can’t.”

Break the pattern

Yale says she isn’t a fan of the regularly scheduled morning or weekly meeting because it implies that nothing is new. “When everything is new, when you’re calling a meeting every day to discuss minutia, then guess what? Nothing is new. It all blends together,” she says.

While Yale says she realizes it’s impractical to have various times for meetings, she thinks managers shouldn’t be afraid to switch things up. “Why do you have to go through the schedule every time? Why not brainstorm one or two days a week and do the schedule and deadlines the other days — it doesn’t change as much as you think it does,” she says. “And why not have five-minute meetings? Go around the room, explain what you’re working on and move along with your day.”

Martin says he misses brainstorming. “We used to have some really creative discussions,” he says. “Now it’s all agile stuff. Every answer is a response to ‘so, tell me where you’re at with that.’”

Do something different

The monotony of meetings can be damaging to the dynamic of a department, says Yale, so take some chances and do things differently. “I know companies that bring in an expert on a completely random topic, like cooking, to give their employees something to look forward to,” Yale says. “A woman gave a demo on cooking omelets at home and the team loved it. I’ve had clients who took their meetings on a walk along the river and never take the camera off of their view. I’ve heard of a company that hired an artist to paint portraits — like portraits of each person in their Zoom box — during the course of a meeting. Just things that give people something different to look at, something different to do.”

Of course, the field-trip approach isn’t for everyone. Poole says one of the meeting seminars she attended suggested that she play weekly trivia games with her team, an idea that lasted three weeks. “It was fun the first couple of times but by the third time, it was a drag,” she says. “Everything in moderation, I guess.”