Reinvent Your Meetings and Combat Zoom Fatigue

When I last found the time to write on here, I was enthusiastically discussing how to make yourself brighter & shinier over Zoom calls with the help of some good lighting. I look back and see and myself excited about the idea of working from home more often, smiling, with a recent haircut.

Well, after 6 months of non-stop Zoom calls, homeschooling, and regrettable DIY haircuts, I am not bright & shiny. I never could have imagined the sheer number of hours I’d end up spending on Zoom. For all of its brilliance as a technology and the collaboration it enables, Zoom is exhausting. It seems that with everyone home and therefore accessible, we’ve filled every second of the day with conference calls. The time boundaries that the school run, the commute, and other work travel used to provide are now filled with virtual coffee breaks, pub quizzes, and watercooler chats. These have, to some degree, served a purpose, helping us stay connected to the colleagues we never see in person any more.

But Zoom almost makes it too easy too schedule a meeting, so easy people don’t take the time to think about why they’re having a meeting in the first place. So instead of rethinking the nature of work in this all remote all the time scenario, we’ve just lifted & shifted our in person meetings, doing nothing to embrace this opportunity to modernize and transform our collaboration culture.

Hence, Zoom Fatigue.

Remote working is the new normal. In a recent survey, we found that the majority of our employees think up to 90% of their job can be done remote. I know this isn’t true for everyone, I’m grateful to be in a position where I can do my job remotely. But this is a big deal. It’s unlikely we’ll ever go back to the way we worked “before COVID.”

Zoom in unavoidable, it’s a great tool. But we need to rethink, reinvent, & reimagine how we use it to actually engage with the people on the other end, whether they’re our colleagues or customers. They’ll thank you for it.

How do we do that?

Start With Why

Before you click send on that meeting invite and ask other people to give up their most precious resource, time, ask yourself, why have a meeting in the first place? Consider – what outcome am I trying to achieve with this meeting and could this be handled over email, a quick phone call, or other collaborative tool?

Here’s a fun challenge – use Harvard Business Review’s Meeting Cost Calculator. Meetings aren’t cheap and are the most expensive way to accomplish a task, they shouldn’t be the default. I’m personally a firm believer in the use of more asynchronous collaboration – especially when done right. If your culture is currently meetings by default, transitioning to an asynchronous by default culture is truly refactoring how you collaborate. For more on this, look no further than GitLab’s Remote Manifesto and Playbook for best practices around all remote working that drive results, efficiency, and flexibility.

However, there are still good reasons to have meetings:

• You need to make decisions that require input from multiple participants.
• You need to deliver a difficult decision.
• You need to problem solve, plan, or brainstorm ideas for an upcoming project or initiative.
• You are trying to connect and team build.

After you’ve asked yourself why and qualified your meeting, how do you make it worth people’s time?

Plan Before Your Meeting

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson’s Law

• Take the minimum amount of time necessary. Avoid defaulting to the one hour meeting – time pressure will actually increase focus and efficiency. Meet for 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60. In our new world of endless Zoom, people need mental health and bio breaks! The best meeting leaders share a similar mindset: recognizing their role as a steward of others’ time.
• Don’t over invite. The effectiveness of meetings decreases as size increases. Especially if the objective of your meetings is decision making or planning, keeping your meeting under 8 people, two pizzas, is best.
• Plan the agenda & share ahead. Don’t waste time during the meeting on things that could be shared ahead, share your slides and any other content ahead of time. This is also inclusive allowing people who need more time to think more time to prep. With content and desired outcomes shared ahead of time, attendees can focus on interaction & come prepared to participate. When possible, crowdsource the agenda as this ensures that everyone feels they are involved and contributing. And, agree the ground rules – roles & responsibilities, how actions will be recorded, communicated, & followed up.

Engage People During Your Meeting

Raise a virtual hand if you’ve sat through what is commonly described as “Death by PowerPoint.”

The only thing worse than a long presentation in person is a long presentation during a virtual meeting. 

If you’re not involving your audience, you’re losing your audience. Studies have shown that 80% of people are multi-tasking and doing other work during virtual meetings.

How can you avoid that?

• Humanize the virtual room. Use icebreakers, humour, empathy, and appreciation. One of the easiest ways to do this, use video. Yes, it is hard to be on video all the time and there are times when you just need to be off camera. But video does make a huge difference in your ability to connect with your audience.
• Set norms & expectations. Remind people of the outcome, roles & responsibilities, etiquette around giving everyone the chance to speak. The Macro.io app is a really interesting Zoom add-on which will show you who is speaking the most, and who is being silent. It’s super helpful at giving you real metrics to see if a small number of people are dominating the conversation. And instead of spending time introducing everyone on the call (a big time waster), have them introduce themselves when they first speak. Or, a best practice I’ve seen, have a slide with everyone’s photo & role.
• Stop regularly and ask questions. Break your presentation into 7–10 minute segments by inserting interactive techniques, asking questions, & changing topics. Asking questions is one of the simplest ways to get people engaged. There are great tools like Mentimenter which can really help you engage your audience. Zoom also has built in polling, chat, and breakout rooms, all of which can be used to great effect. Use them.
• Rethink PowerPoint. Throwing up slides full of text and bullet points is the quickest way to make your audience bored and start doing email. Instead, learn to Talk like Ted. There’s a reason Ted Talks work – they’re short, they use compelling visuals, and tell compelling stories. A PowerPoint deck full of text heavy slides will leave your audience bored, overwhelmed, and confused. Virtual whiteboarding is also a great way to mix things up and get your audience engaged. Use the built in whiteboarding with Zoom or supercharge your whiteboarding & facilitation game with tools like Miro.
• Focus on connections not facts. Meetings should be times for discussions and relationship building. In the age of Google, there are no unanswered questions. Don’t overburden your audience with information they can easily find and reference elsewhere. The uncomfortable truth is that they will forget most of what you tell them anyway.
• Start and stop on time.

Feedback After Your Meeting

If you disconnect from the Zoom call and there’s been no summary of the takeaways, actions, and next steps, how do you know if your meeting has achieved its desired outcome?

To make it more likely that your meeting has a successful outcome:

• End your meeting well. Summarize the actions, key takeaways, next steps and responsible parties. Make sure that everyone is clear on what they need to do and when.
• Record & share. How often are you double or triple booked for meetings, on holiday, or otherwise have some conflict that means you can’t join a meeting in which you’d like to participate? Consider how you are ensuring that everyone feels included, even those who should be in the meeting but can’t attend. Failing to document and share the outcome of the meeting means you’re excluding people who could have important contributions or who should be informed.
• Ask for feedback. AKA do a retro. Ask the attendees – was this helpful? Did we achieve what was needed? Could we have done this better? Use that feedback to improve your next meeting.

Start Now

Are you already using some of these techniques? Awesome. If not, why not start now? You might have some workplace cultural inertia you have to work through, I do. But lead from the front and tackle it one meeting at a time. Your audience and your colleagues will appreciate that you’re engaging with them and being considerate of their time.