Why asynchronous meetings work better
Email and meetings have been uncomfortable necessities for decades, and they both harken back to a time when communication was formal, hierarchical, and had to occur at a set time and place. But the fluid nature of collaboration technologies like Slack, Teams, and WhatsApp is a game changer.
Listen to the podcast at our podcast host, Blubrry.com, or find it on your platform of choice, including iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Audible, iHeart, and YouTube.
Transcript
A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours are lost. I am sure you have heard that expression before. There’s great truth in it. Meetings have long been seen as one of the greatest time wasters in work life, yet we continue to have them. And during the pandemic, when no one was allowed to be in the same room together anymore, we simply lifted and shifted the exact same meeting procedure onto video chat and continued on. Needless to say most people did not enjoy these home based meetings any more than the office ones, except perhaps for the fact that you could bring your cat.
In-person meetings were designed to try and achieve something within a short amount of time, capitalizing on the one single fact that everyone who was needed for the meeting was available and could physically be together in a single room to hear or participate. For much of human history up until this current time, this was the only way to do this. To communicate and collaborate, you had to all be there.
But what if the need to be together was no longer necessary? Would meetings still need to be an hour or two hours long? Or could we make them longer, but less painful and more productive? How about Slack?
I am a big fan of Slack. I have found it to be an excellent way for people to communicate, and is certainly a vast improvement over the formality and distractive nature of email. Email is just an electronic version of the paper-based mail that preceded it. An individual action of opening a letter and reading its contents. That’s obvious of course, but compare it to live dialog or a multi-person conversation. A letter carries none of the rhythm or dynamics of a conversation. It is just the carrier of the words.
Technology evolves and is intended to do ever better things to answer the needs of people. In the case of most meetings, I feel the same is true. Throughout the 20th century we fell into the tradition of having meetings because that’s what we had always done, and also there was no alternative. This changed once the telephone provided the possibility of dialing in to a meeting, but the meeting culture persisted, despite its many shortcomings.
When you look at what an agenda is, you see a menu of objectives that are supposed to get addressed by the end of the allotted time. Seldom are meetings successful in this because in many cases, excessive conversation makes the meeting run long. Either insufficient time is given to each topic due to the limited duration of the entire event, and/or an agenda item gets hijacked by excessive and irrelevant conversations.
To be fair, not all meetings turn out this way. Some are run well and achieve their objectives. But in all cases they are bounded by time and the need for personal presence – everyone has to be there, in person or online to participate.
Cut me some Slack
I think that the model Slack is based on – asynchronous collaboration – is a perfect way to replace most meetings. Currently most users of Slack apply it to ongoing projects, and it is excellent for this. It has a sense of presence that email never had, and with each channel dedicated to a specific project, all the communication that goes through that channel remains relevant. As I have said before, it’s like having all the team members sitting across the table from you. Conversations stay relevant and informal, and that goes a long way towards keeping peoples’ minds simultaneously focused and relaxed.
So what if we were to turn a meeting into a Slack conversation? Instead of calling a one-hour meeting for any particular time of day, we set a Slack channel with an agenda, and a duration of one week?
The first pushback would be “my meeting only takes an hour, your Slack meeting takes a week, therefore my meeting is more efficient.” But is that really the case? Do the outcomes of an in person meeting truly start to pay off immediately upon its conclusion? No. Most people move on to their next meeting, or hurry back to their desk to catch up on the work that they had to put aside to attend the meetings. Often the effects of a meeting take days to show, and a week goes by awfully quickly.
The second pushback might be “a meeting is where people get to discuss ideas,” but that, too, is inaccurate. A meeting is a place where certain people might discuss things while the others listen, or struggle with boredom. Strong personalities and leaders will get their say, but the quieter people will remain quiet, and will wonder why they were told to come here in the first place.
The problem with meetings is that they expect universal conformity. Everyone needs to have the attention span, metabolism, and personality to adopt to the meeting’s form. And everyone must also be aware of and respect the power structure in the room, which means tribal deference to the meeting chair, who in most cases is the manager or other recognized authority figure.
This is something that is going to change a great deal in successful companies through the decade of the 20’s as people discover greater autonomy and carve a career that better fits their priorities.
Meetings that start at 9:00 a.m. sharp are fine for the early-birds whose metabolism allows them to be at their best first thing in the morning, and although that represents the majority of people according to current research, it does not represent everyone, especially night owls as well as people who have family obligations around the same time – getting kids to school, for example.
Similarly, meetings that occur in the afternoon, especially around 2:30, are particularly challenging, even for morning people, since mid-afternoon is an energy sinkhole – combining a circadian echo effect in which the body seeks to repeat its deep sleep period of 12 hours before, with the digestion of lunch, and also information overload, as a busy day unfolds. Mid-afternoon is the worst time to have a meeting, especially in a stuffy boardroom.
Worse still is the working lunch, based on a 20th century notion that employees who eat lunch are not being productive, so let’s use that time for another meeting. This is not only cruel, it also robs people of a much needed break, which, like fueling up or charging up your car, or recharging your phone, is a vital part of its effective use. People also tend to eat too fast during such events, which has further short-and longer term health implications. Frankly any organization that is forced to resort working lunches has a serious issue with its culture, and although people may have put up with that through the last few decades, the new reality is, more of them will not put up with it any longer, especially when they know there’s a better life out there.
So basically, in our modern era, there is really no great time for a meeting. It was built out of a homogeneous work culture and is in many ways a demonstration of power more than a true opportunity for collaboration. A lot of great ideas do not end up on the whiteboard because those ideas are held by people too shy or too jetlagged to speak, which quickly erodes any profit that a meeting hopes to gain from its attendees.
Certainly there are times when live presence is a good thing. Get-togethers are still healthy for team culture. But, following the 80/20 rule, it is likely that in many corporate cultures, at least 80 percent of the meetings held prove to be less than stellar in their achievement, and could have been done in another format, as an email message, or, if collaboration and a meeting of minds is needed, then through the relatively new interactive technologies like Slack.
Ricardo Semler, whose work was introduced to me by my colleague Jack Skeels of Agency Agile, wrote two amazing books, The Seven Day Weekend and Maverick. He believed that organizations have way too many meetings, and he set up some interesting rules. First, he said, invitees have to agree to attend before you make the meeting. Managers should have a conversation with the invitees about whether this meeting is needed. An interesting offshoot of this, as Jack says, “If I have to go ask everyone, do you think this meeting is needed, I probably have to explain why I’m having a meeting. And maybe in the course of doing that I actually exhaust the need to have the meeting.”
So instead of pulling a bunch of people into a room for an event that is seldom more than 50% productive, we instead have a bunch of small conversations that are actually far more effective, and we avoid having the meeting at all. So this encourages a different kind of behavior, and guarantees better engagement for the meetings that do happen.
“Semler was also a proponent of the evaporative meeting, which basically meant, if you’ve had enough and you don’t feel this meeting serves your purpose anymore, you’re welcome to leave. Really. It’s OK and it’s recognized as a smart use of your time,” Jack told me.
Can you imagine? This puts a whole new spin on meetings, placing the focus back on the people rather than the status of the meeting itself. I find that amazing. And the bottom line, in my opinion, is that Slack could do this. It’s a similar kind of thing. Rather than focus on the one-hour or two-hour time block, we can focus on the objective of the meeting and the best way to achieve its goals, and this could likely best be done through an asynchronous conversation. Have people drift in and out as their schedules and attention spans allow. The dedicated channel or room retains the focus of the meeting, and if visuals are needed, they can be there too.
Meetings in their current form fail more often than they succeed. This is caused by time being the key source of pressure. People think, “we’ve only got an hour and we have all these things to get through.” Or “a key person is running late, so let’s give that person a few minutes,” then we’ll get started, which then leads to the worry, if we start late, are we going to run over time too?
Like you, I have attended many, many meetings over the years, and the two things that always strike me about every single one of them is the collective sense of relief in the air when everyone realizes they are now allowed to leave the room and get back to the next item on their schedule. I have also noticed, on those rare occasions when a meeting actually ran well and achieved its goals within the time allotted, just how surprised people are. “Good meeting!” they will say, as if they just saw a unicorn walk down the hallway.
It takes a long time for traditions to change in an organization or a culture. The ritual of the meeting is part of office life, there’s a sense of team building, and in some cases they do get things done. Many organizations like Federal Express are famous for their quick standup start-of-day meetings, and I think that’s great. They’re focused, well-run, brief, and employees leave that meeting feeling connected and knowledgeable. That’s good. But it still requires that everyone be at the same place at the same time for this to work. So if you have a team of people who are ready to go out and start their shift, whether it’s drivers for FedEx or your team in your office, this method might certainly work, provided it is well planned and orchestrated.
But most meetings are not like that. Their goal is to achieve something, certainly, but in many cases, they are not planned well enough to use the talents of the attendees most effectively. And that means, it’s a waste of time, money, and engagement opportunities.
I think the next iteration of the meeting concept should be one where we free ourselves of the need to be in the same place and time in order to be part of an under-planned live event, and instead, focus on how to achieve the real goals of a meeting by using the best of new technologies and blending them with people’s own best time and talents.
For this, my money is on “asynchronous.”
If you have a comment about this podcast, you can drop me a line through the contact form at cooltimelife.com, where you can also find my social media links and a full listing of past episodes. I update all episodes regularly so that they remain a collection of viable and timely concepts. So, check them out and download whatever feels good. If you feel you are getting value from this series, please leave a review, and if you want, you can support us on Patreon. Contributions from our listeners allow me and my team to spend more time researching and preparing our podcast series. If that feels fair to you, please visit patreon.com/cooltimelife. Until next time, stay safe, and thanks for listening.
Thank you for visiting. Do you have comments or thoughts about this episode? Feel free to get in touch through our Contact page.
Keywords: meetings, collaboration, productivity, Slack, Microsoft Teams, asynchronous
CoolTimeLife 