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Help! Should we do a little discussion with the virtual meeting?

Dear OOO,

How little discussion is there in video meetings? It seems like my company splits pretty evenly between those who open the weekend or ask what or what, and those who get on the agenda in an effort to finish as soon as possible. On the one hand, a small discussion feels compelled, but on the other hand, it is a rare opportunity to interact by chance. What is the solution?

–Matt

The first part of this column opened with a memory about the magic of conference calls, and below is one of the key rules for my management: Most video conferencing should be phone calls and most phone calls should be email. I’m no longer a manager and I actually don’t have a real job anymore, but mostly being unemployed has only strengthened my commitment to this philosophy.

In my old life, the average day was somewhere between seven and 10 Zoom meetings. By the evening, I was tired of usually having a normal conversation with my spouse, and even less so in times of pandemic it became common for online drinks and rounds of curiosities and birthday parties and so on. Zoom fatigue it’s real, and companies and managers need to do a much better job of preventing video chats from monopolizing employees ’lives. Today, I may have one video meeting a week, roughly 2% of my total, and that reduction has only made me feel healthier than a few months.

Throughout all of these meetings, I saw incredibly different perspectives on meeting facilitators chatting (or not). Many meetings opened with five or more minutes spent in small discussions about the weather, people’s background, or yes, weekend activities. (Only once did I come across a compassionate, formal ice-breaker – asking a dozen participants each “what hobby did you pick up in the quarantine?”) Others, on the other hand, took a stronger hand. A former colleague, a guy who reads articles about management theory for fun, was a fan of moving the meeting to the moment the last person arrived (nice!). Most of us, however, fell for it somewhere, with no interest in putting small discussions on the agenda, but humbly cutting out the necessary small discussions, even when it was clear that no one was enjoying it.

I’ll admit that when that colleague opened a professional meeting with an icebreaker I tried to drown out an eye shot, and I sighed moderately and heavily (though silently, of course!), Even though it’s not so structured in the chat. I’d love to spend a few minutes instead of stretching or drinking water or stroking my dog ​​instead of telling my pandemic exercise what it really was like as a hobby, while listening to the third one singing his praises of the sugar curd. As you can see, in the warmth, I bend over backwards to my colleague who cut out the pleasures for everyone’s reason to be.

That said, as Matt rightly points out, Matt has little value in casual interactions. I realize that people who have fewer meetings than I do can be more excited to see colleagues, even if it’s just on screen, and have less desperation to run away. Meeting a co-worker (especially one I didn’t normally work closely with) was a huge advantage of working in an office in the hallway or kitchen, and often led to conversations that improved our work, making our feelings warmer to more pleasant workplaces. Losing that has hurt.

Here’s where I stop, though: No matter how hard you try, I think the last 16 months have shown us roughly can’t recreate the magic of temporary office conversation online. Our pandemic era has been different and more horrific for all sorts of reasons, and I think we’d better do that instead of trying to solve an unresolved problem. The social cohesion that emerges from one-on-one meetings in the office does not come from a discussion of people’s hobbies or a list of conversations about weekend activities, but from a kind of free conversation that feels organic only when confronted.


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