It’s a truism that people in organizations of all kinds suffer from too many meetings.  As we wind down 2023, a year that seemed to me to go by in a blur of meetings and a very elastic sense of time – sometimes slow, sometimes fast – let’s resolve to have fewer, more interesting meetings.  Two recent studies point to strategies to accomplish exactly that.  The studies suggest that in-person interactions are naturally more engaging for humans than on-line ones, and that the problems with online meetings have to do with under stimulation rather than cognitive overload.  In other words, we are more likely to be engaged in person and bored online.

OK, so if you have a choice, it’s easy:  meet in person. If you can’t, then the research suggests that you should be trying to make the meetings more interesting.  Fortunately, the research further suggests a few ways to do precisely that.  Professor Niina Nurmi of Finland, who conducted the second study, suggests that you should avoid large online meetings, keep them under 30 minutes, and hide your own picture because looking at yourself is stressful. Given that the research also shows that bringing lots of interest and enthusiasm to the meeting helps, especially online, then I would suggest inviting the right people to the meetings as well.

Passion for the subject means that everyone will be glad to be there, engaged, and driven to accomplish something as a result.  Those are the real criteria for meeting success.

If we dig a little more deeply, we can uncover a few more helpful strategies.  Every communication is two conversations, the content and the intent.  People care about both deeply, but if your intent is mixed, or lacking in presence, no amount of work on the content will save the day.  That’s because we humans want to understand each other’s intent as a way of judging the worth of your content.  To understand this phenomenon, ask the politicians.  They will tell you that a proposal introduced by a political ally can be enthusiastically received when the same proposal introduced by a political foe can be rejected out of hand.

How do you deliver on both content and intent?  Here are two quick tips on ensuring that each are both up to snuff.

For content, show your work.  Preparation for meetings is key, and showing how much you’ve prepared is essential to getting the message across that you care.  If you take the meeting seriously, others are more likely to as well.  Show your focus and attention by preparing an agenda, timings, specific roles for contributors where that’s important, and sharing the load so that all have some skin in the game.  If participation is ‘lumpy,’ the work product of a meeting will be less and the satisfaction of the participants lower than if everyone participates equally, or as close as humanly possible.

For intent, show your hands.  We humans first look to each other’s faces to judge intent.  Is person across the table smiling, nodding, or scowling, avoiding eye contact?  Second, we look to hand gestures.  Most people think about them in terms of the relatively few gestures that are emblematic, such as a hand wave, the outward facing palm or (in some cultures) a ‘thumb’s up’.  But most gestures accompany and amplify speech rather than conveying specific meanings like speech itself.  These gestures serve to emphasize, or clarify, or intensify our words.  That’s why they are important for deducing intent.  Think of the head shake that accompanies a verbal “no,” for example, as a way of showing that there can be no further negotiation on that particular subject.  The speaker might say ‘no’ while looking down, drawing the eyebrows in and down to express regret, and shaking the head slightly.  All of that body language serves to hint to the listener that the intent of this denial is final, with regret perhaps, but final.

Attention to both the structure and subject of meetings, the content and intent, will help ensure that your 2024 is filled with more of the good kind of meetings, and less of the soul-sucking time-wasters.