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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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A rationale for moving meetings online

How many meetings do you attend that could be offloaded to a wiki or some other online mechanism? The kneejerk reaction to such a suggestion is that online community is reducing the amount of face-to-face contact we have and that’s a bad idea. We’ve been hearing this since message boards first gained popularity.

I’ve never bought this argument. I’ve met more people online whom I have since gotten to know in the real world, people with whom I never would have dined or worked had I not gotten to know them first in the virtual world. Using the asynchronous online world as a surrogate for meetings also lets people participate without having to travel or block out inconvenient time slots.

Now there’s a new argument for shifting face-to-face meetings to a team wiki, a team blog, or some other online channel. According to research from the University of Minnesota (Duluth), meetings have a deleterious effect on employees. The study found “a general relationship between meeting load and the employee’s level of fatigue and subjective workload.”

The study, reported in the journal, journal “Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice,” was based on a test of two theories:

  • Employees experience increased “negative effects” when the number of meetings they have to attend increases
  • Employee experience increased “negative effects” when they have to spend more time in meetings.

“Negative effects” refers to fatigue and worsening moods. The authors of the study — Alexandra Luong and Steven G Rogelberg — arrived at the notion of  “the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals.”

The Guardian has a complete article on the study, including some of the early research that informed the project. (For example, a 1973 study established that typical managers spend more of their time in meetings than doing anything else.)

Of course, some meetings will need to be held just because they’re the most practical way to accomplish the goal that led to the meeting. But this research could serve as an argument to reduce the total number of meetings and shift the work to a project wiki or other online productivity tool. 

01/17/06 | 6 Comments | A rationale for moving meetings online

Comments

  • 1.Shel - my feeling has always been that wikis and other online tools may not necessarily reduce the number of meetings, but if done right, they should improve the quality and level of discussion of actual face-time. This should also reduce the deleterious apect of typical meetings, as well.

    kris olsen | January 2006 | Cincinnati

  • 2.Interesting post, thanks Shel. I'd conclude that folks want fewer crappy meetings. If we can use technology to allow us to have fewer but richer meetings, great.

    Johnnie Moore | January 2006 | London

  • 3.I couldn't agree more, Johnnie. (Nice to hear from you, btw.) I remember going through training courses on meetings, reading books ("Mining Group Gold" comes to mind)...yet crappy meetings continue to be the norm. While I'd like richer meetings among those I have to take, I'll take fewer meetings any way I can get them. Too many people who run meetings just don't know what they're doing and have no interest in learning. Sadly.

    Shel Holtz | January 2006 | Concord, CA

  • 4.I think that is not so much a meeting that is draining as much as the perceived necessity of that meeting by all attendees. Also, unless a meeting is controlled it can drag on and attendees then start getting stressed because they know they could spend their time more productively elsewhere. I agree that the web has allowed us to increase our network and resulted in physical networking that might not have happened before.

    Steven Harold | January 2006 | London, UK

  • 5.I think that more meetings could be conducted by video conferencing or telephone, but as for wikis, etc I don't necessarily agree. I take the point that they can certainly make face-to-face meetings more productive, but I would argue that simply leaving everything to print can mean some things get lost in translation because of the way someone interprets the notes.

    Personally I'm more in favour of conference calls and then employing a wiki as a means of distributing the contact report which encapsulates the actions which must now take place, whose responsibility they are and what timeline they must be completed in.

    by then feeding back into the wiki as tasks as completed, the client relationship can be better managed so that ensuing meetings are more efficient as an agenda is already pretty much in place.

    Piaras Kelly | January 2006 | Ireland

  • 6.My experience has rather sadly been that shifting bad meetings online just results in bad online meetings.

    I've had (as I'm sure most people have) some tremendously energising and positive meetings (after all, a meeting is just a bunch of people getting together). Sadly, they don't happen very often. But I think it's often more to do with the nature of the tasks that end up being done in meetings rather than the meetings themselves.

    Ian

    Ian Brodie | September 2009 | Manchester UK

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