How to communicate better in meetings?
How many times have you walked into a meeting and regretted being there just after 20 minutes? I can vouch for many such times! It is a well-known fact in the corporate world that meetings are nothing but a waste of time, most of the time!
There is always this one person presenting with several people zoning out within a few minutes of the presentation! The problem with most of the meetings is that there is no clear agenda defined beforehand. It is highly likely that one person asks a question, and the entire discussion goes around taking most of the designated time. Other people with something more to add either end up extending the meeting or never really gets the chance to talk about it!
Enter Silent Meetings!
The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, came with this novel and brilliant idea of silent meetings! There will always be designated presented, but in this case, that person would prepare a document with agenda, ideas, and all the relative content. The room will just sit in silence and read that document and add any comment they would have spoken about, to the document now. Everyone else shall do the same. This way each participant will get to weigh in their opinion and time would be used effectively!
After having this document digitally, every person has a chance to review other people’s comments and add to them without wasting time! This idea quickly spread across not just Amazon but to other companies too.
Why is communication important in teams?
Most of the companies have global teams and there are interdependencies within a team. Communication becomes the key to the successful delivery of any project, especially in such cases. One needs to communicate effectively to get ideas across to develop a better solution. Most of the time, there is always a hesitation due to language constraints across global teams. There are always introverted people every time and even though they might have good points, they tend not to contribute due to their nature. Silent meetings can bridge this gap as no one has to really speak but write down their comments and thoughts! This gives equal opportunity to everyone to participate.
Also, in any global team, there are mostly members logging in from different time zones. The process of silent meetings helps you create a document in the end with narration and everyone’s comments in it. This helps in passing on the conclusion of the meeting to different teams globally who probably start in different time zones!
Fortunately, I have been a part of such a situation in my previous company, IBM, where we had people from Budapest, Texas, LA, and Bangalore (four different time zones!). We actually used to follow this convention for all of our discussions and after comparing the productivity of this new meeting technique with the traditional way, all of us were amazed at the difference! We saw much more clarity in thoughts and participation from almost everyone!
Pandemic era = Zoom meetings!
The pandemic changed a lot of things in the corporate world- one of the biggest being remote work culture! A lot of organizations have fully moved to the remote culture as nearly most of them ended up making more profits by cutting the infrastructure costs!
Online meetings do have their advantages, but it also causes a lot of fatigue. Communication within teams becomes even more important in this scenario. People must be on one or another call for almost half of their days and participate in all of them effectively. With the use of silent meetings, any discussion can be done in a more organized and timely manner. It has been proven that online meetings cause more fatigue than regular meetings because of continuous staring into the screens. Most of the time, people tend to just stay quiet because they’re too tired to express their opinion.
Example: In our practicum project, we had almost all our meetings online due to rising Covid cases during the month of January. The meetings usually used to get monotonous soon due to lack of participation and interest! After our practicum session about effective communication using silent meetings, my team decided to implement that in our daily meetings. Within 3 weeks, we realized that everyone was more interested and the team, was much more productive. Communication improved without even uttering a word!
Conclusion
Communication is one of the pillars of a successful project. One of the ways for effective communication and saving time is silent meetings! It maximizes participation, saves the meeting from digressing from the agenda, provides equal opportunity for everyone to participate and express their views, removes the authoritarianism of the presenter, and always provides a conclusion! My practicum team has used this technique to improve our work by collaborating in a smoother and much more efficient way!
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