COVID-19 has taught us that the only thing worse than a meeting is a virtual meeting. And the buzz lately is about the relative merits of video calls vs. in-person work gatherings. I had dinner recently with a former colleague, now a communications professor, who has concluded that videoconferencing is best for meetings people want to avoid while in-person gatherings work better for meetings people want to attend. No question it’s easier to multitask and disengage during virtual meetings.
Because of my work in this arena—including a book on videoconferencing in the 90s and two subsequent books on collaboration—outlets have been asking me for my take post-COVID on how to improve meetings in the “hybrid” work environment. Since my focus is on completing a new book for release next year, I have been quiet here and elsewhere. Yet I feel compelled to inform those who have yet to read my books about my view of meetings.
Meetings are a waste of time. That’s true whether we’re talking about same-room or virtual meetings. When I wrote the book Personal Videoconferencing in the mid-90s, I concluded that the benefit of then emerging PC-based videoconferencing was that we could work together screen-to-screen while seeing one another. We could jointly create a work product. In many scenarios, this involved minimizing the video while we shared applications and together produced something.
Virtual meetings were by no means the killer app for personal videoconferencing. The killer app was co-creation. That’s still true. Yet during COVID, many of us grew to hate videoconferencing because we misused the tool for something we dislike: meetings.
So how do we fix meetings? We don’t. Instead, we replace them with collaborative group sessions. I write about this in my book The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration®. In a nutshell, meetings—whether physical or virtual—are a remnant of command-and-control culture. Often, the highest-ranking or highest-status person sets the agenda and conducts the proceedings. Meetings involve presentation and discussion. Then participants leave to do follow up work, often in isolation. Then this work is reviewed or discussed at yet another meeting. Meetings produce no work product and therefore create no value.
In contrast, a collaborative group (CGS) session produces a work product. Participants co-create documents, drawings, slideshows, animation, 3D models, spreadsheets—you name it. A CGS creates value and is infinitely more collaborative than a meeting. Goodbye meetings. Hello collaborative group sessions.
