Virtual meetings – avoiding meeting fatigue & being inclusive

Image by Concord90 from Pixabay

If you read my January blog you’ll know that I’ve identified 6 areas where leaders and managers are finding challenges as they adjust to managing their teams virtually.

Last month I shared some tips to help you know when to have virtual meetings.  This month I’m sharing some more tips related to virtual meetings; when I collated the information I had from 40 managers of their experience of managing virtual teams, their additional meeting challenges over and above when to have them included:

1. Meeting fatigue
2. Challenges with chairing meetings
   a) Not knowing who is speaking
   b) Speaking one at a time can be awkward
   c) Some people hogging all of the air time
   d) Chat functionality being a big distraction

In this blog I’ll address these, providing tips on how to design to avoid meeting fatigue as well as how to create an inclusive and effective virtual meeting space.

Meeting fatigue

Virtual meeting fatigue is a very real issue as research by Microsoft has shown. The research shows that ‘Brainwave patterns associated with stress and overwork were much higher when collaborating remotely than in-person.’ This is because virtual meetings require higher levels of sustained concentration than in person meetings. In order to protect your meeting participant’s wellbeing, you’ll need to remember that virtual meeting fatigue starts to set in at about 40 minutes into a meeting. As such, ideally it helps to limit meetings to 30-45 minutes. For longer meetings where a number of linked outcomes benefit from some continuity, design so that the meeting is in short segments of about 15 minutes with a clear signpost when moving to another segment and design in regular breaks with a rule of thumb being 10 minutes for every hour.

Creating an inclusive and effective virtual meeting space

We spend enough time in meetings and so need them to feel vibrant and inclusive, and have intentionality and purpose rather than be grey and ‘hum-drum’. We also want to ensure some structure and clear and agreed ways of working to enable equal share of voice.

Using ‘ways of working’ principles such as the components and methods of Nancy Kline when creating a Thinking Environment can help:

• Encourage everyone to agree to giving the person that’s speaking their full attention by looking at the camera and giving silent encouragement through their body language. Nancy says that the quality of our thinking depends on the way that we are treated while we are thinking – on a virtual meeting, giving attention to the speaker helps them to think well.
  
• Aim for equality in relation to the ‘air-time’ that each person has. Use rounds regularly, at least at the start of a discussion, with participants knowing they have equal time (e.g. 1 minute) to share their initial thoughts to ensure everyone gets a chance to speak.
  The rounds can continue with those who have nothing more to add saying ‘I’m good’ or ‘nothing to add’ if needed. To know who should speak, the facilitator can call on the next person when someone is complete or the person who has just spoken can call on the next person or send a table diagram out in advance and indicate who will start and whether the discussion will go clockwise or counter clockwise.

Image by ijmaki from Pixabay

To avoid the chat function being a big distraction, include guidance on when and how it will be used. For example, ask that generally chat is not used unless expressly requested – this could be for everyone to answer a question or to vote on options. You can also give regular slots for any questions to be posted in the chat. If you feel that people may be distracted by privately messaging each other some platforms allow you to disable this (e.g. Zoom).

To keep a virtual meeting engaging while also aiming to avoid meeting fatigue the following can help:

• using different people to lead different sections,
• using images and stories,
• using online chat features to enable all members to contribute thoughts
• using polls to gauge participants views
• using breakout rooms for paired or small group discussions (paired discussion early on in a meeting is a great way to build confidence in quieter team members that they have something to contribute)
• using annotation to enable participants to vote on options

Finally, if you’ve been working virtually for a while you will likely have other tips that work for you in avoiding meeting fatigue and ensuring inclusive meetings. Do share them in the comments section for others to benefit from.