Elise Keith  0:13  
Okay. Now for everyone if you are at all wondering what it is you found yourself in. Today, we are gathered to talk about the latest discoveries and science in 2021 in the practice of successful meetings. This session is, as I told Lisa who's joining us to help with some graphic capture today I told her this is session 11 of 10.

Because what we have been doing since August of last year is working our way through the 10 science backed rules for meaningful meetings and in the chat there you can see a link to the course that this particular session is related to. And in August we looked at rule, three, and then we looked at each of these rules in turn so we basically have been running a very long online conference diving into the science and practice of effective meetings and today we are here to revisit those rules and say okay well what have How have those rules changed. Right What is with the rules themselves are mostly intact, but how is our understanding of them evolved in the last 18 months, and based on what we've learned in the last 18 months. What else might we add to those rules if we were writing them now. So, I know many of you have been to some of our sessions before and if you have what I would love for you to do is to turn on your camera and wave at the group. So if anybody has been here before just wave so everybody who is brand new. If you find yourself into a breakout room with any of these waving people Welcome, welcome to our party, this is what it is like these people are here to help you have a fabulous conversation and an interesting experience and to share what they've learned as they've shared with other people, except for Louie who is not. So welcome, welcome to our party. Now I would love to see cameras on because the first thing we want to do is figure out who all is here in total. And we're going to do this using a slightly different polling mechanism. So for those of you who can turn your cameras on and I know for some of you you are in places where that's just not going to work for you and if that's okay please use the chat. But for those of you who do have cameras. I want you to go ahead and find a way to first turn it on, And then cover it. Using your hand or a little flap or a piece of paper.

Unknown Speaker  3:03  
Oh, excellent.

Elise Keith  3:05  
Okay, now the first question I have for you is, shoot my, my everything move for me. Who here has more of their meetings online now than they were in 2019. Go ahead and reveal yourself. I'd expect to see pretty much everybody right like more me online meetings than 2019. Okay. Thank you. I forgot who is attending more meetings in total than you were in 2019. So in other words, who feels like you're spending way more of your time in meetings than ever before. All right, not everybody. Okay, interesting. All right, coming back up.

Unknown Speaker  3:59  
So who

Elise Keith  4:00  
has participated in one or more meeting trainings in the past year.

Look at that meeting training was not a thing in 2019, that people did so alright that's exciting to see. Okay, come back up. And who here feels like they have become pretty skilled with at least one new kind of meeting tech, like for example, do you become pretty good at it. Yeah, a lot of people right. Cool. So what if we change that to two new kinds of meeting tech like you really mastered like zoom plus something else. Alright, what about three or more. Zoom and mural and something not as many. All right, so we've got a lot of tech but not as much big tech. And then finally, last question. Glenn cover up per second. Who feels like your meetings are more successful now than they ever were before. Hey. All right, look at that meetings are getting some hot dogs like he's I'm not sure what to do with this paper kind of baby but. Okay, great. Well that is of course our mission and our plan here today so let me show you exactly and you can all come, come back onto cameras now thank you so much. So here is our explicit plan. We are going to do an intro hey guess what we've all just sort of gotten a sense of who we are introduction. And then we are going to dive into refreshing the 10 rules of meaningful meetings. Then we'll spend some time in breakout so you get to share some of what you have learned what have you learned about meetings what remains a question for you. After that, we'll come back and Joe will share with us, exciting new brand new science. And then we'll look together in our last 30 minutes at our predictions and trends for the future because there are a lot of interesting things coming down the pipe. So with that, I am in fact going to share my screen for quite a bit of this. And the first first thing I want to do is introduce you to Joe, and have Joe Say hi.

Joe Allen  6:37  
Hi, so uh.

Elise Keith  6:42  
So as I'm getting this up let's get this okay so as I mentioned we go to 11 with this one. And for those of you who don't know me and my company. My name is Elise, Keith I'm the founder and CEO of lucid meetings and our focus as a meeting innovation company is on the practice of everyday business meetings and Joe.

Joe Allen  7:06  
Yep, that's me. I'm a professor at the University of Utah, I'm the director of the Center for meeting effectiveness and have been setting meetings for a decade and a half now, and have really adopted the idea that we can make our meetings better, but we have to figure out what the science can help us do and know what what actually changes, it makes them better and what actually doesn't. So that's what I've been doing for the last 15 plus years,

Elise Keith  7:31  
and I've had an opportunity to collaborate quite a bit over the last 18 months so as we work through this will both just talk to them and you are all welcome to communicate in the chat, and with each other now if you find chat distracting go ahead and turn it off. But let's go ahead and look at these 10 science fact rules. So the 10 signs back rules for meaningful meetings are listed here and we're going to go through them one at a time, the very, very first rule about that science has validated is incredibly important to running successful meetings on an ongoing basis is experiment with meetings. And this is a screenshot from the session we ran with Dr. Chris Laurie who looked at experimentation. Now experimentation with meetings has exploded, because we've had no choice but to everybody's been forced into new ways of beating. So, some of the experiments that I thought were kind of interesting, and Joe would love to hear what you think about these but one has been the incredible explosion in communities of practice I think Jody is on this call. So, Judy. Reese runs a community called remote together, which has been fabulous wave Judy

Judy Rees  8:51  
was eating a biscuit.

Elise Keith  8:56  
The wonder of an international audience where it's a terrible time for a call. In some parts of the world and great for others, but so Judy and her and her team run a great community where they talk about how to run effective online meetings online events specifically, another community that does an amazing job that way and this is a terrible screenshot but this is a calendar from the liberating structures community and that's all of the events running around the world in just one week. So, some of the experiments that teach us in the practice world how to do a better job have just gone crazy and very very very active other experiments have not been as successful who saw the lawyer cat. Yep.

Unknown Speaker  9:39  
Right. Yeah.

Elise Keith  9:41  
Well your cats a lawyer cat that poor I am not a cat, really it's important. And then we're seeing some really interesting experiments in the field of measurement. So one of the questions I'm asked as people go to try and change their meeting behavior is, how do we know that things are getting better, how do we measure this one of the new measurements that we're seeing teams use is basically the wow way of working, Promoter Score. So at the every month or so they asked their team would you recommend this way of working on a scale of zero to 10 to other teams. So there's a very non technical experiment and way of measuring those experiments. And then the other one. This is a screenshot, it's a terrible little screenshot from a new company called riff analytics which is analyzes conversations like this for things like influence affirmation, turn taking, so they can tell in real time using technology, whether you're having a positive conversation or not. Joe, what are some of the experiments you're saying,

Joe Allen  10:45  
Well, I think what was fascinating for me was that we, we all suddenly had to experiment with a with a format of meeting that we, we made some of us may or may not have done a lot with right and so I think what what happened a lot is whether you whether we call it an experiment or not. We were trying and we were engaging in trial and error, with our virtual meetings. Right. And so it's been it's been fascinating to see how people have have adopted new things and then said well that's not really working really well. Let's not do filters anymore, that sort of thing, or a variety of other things, I think for me also when I think of experiment I think of research and research is always behind it was I always feel like I'm behind. And so we often when I think of experiments I think of all the design and getting people into it, whether it be a lab or in a virtual environment. And the interesting thing about that is that it takes time for this scientific experiments to catch up to the real world experimentation that we all need to be engaging in to try and figure out what what makes our meetings better. And so I think for me, what has been fun to see is so many people taking a moment to reflect on their meetings and then trying new things. And that, that didn't happen in 2019. You know, I think it took it took an unfortunate worldwide pandemic to get us to say, you know what, I think I can do this better. And try some things, even if the first trial was like that, that didn't work, but trying new things was was really fascinating to see so many people doing that. So,

Elise Keith  12:15  
so experimentation is the huge theme and we have a couple of experiments we're running here the, the polling with the video we're only half the people are on video that was a little bit of an experiment for this session I hope you all will be making your own mental evaluations about how that's going. Let's go on. So the second rule in the 10 rules, is to find meetings and this is all about making sure that when you show up to your meetings they have clarity of purpose and whatnot. Now, this rule as far as I'm concerned has not changed this rule absolutely hold steady. I am a little bit sad to report that I believe that it has in fact taken a hit. So in the in the things that we have seen what we are seeing is a growing heard a proliferation of meetings on everybody's calendar that say things like we need to sync up. We need to check in. Because as we have lost the ability to talk at the watercooler in the halls and whatnot people are desperately filling that with meetings that lack purpose lack definition and it's and it's leading some of the things we'll talk about later on.

Joe Allen  13:20  
Yeah, I would agree with that, I think, you know, as the pandemic, you know, started started going I remember making the advice Hey, you need to have opportunities and moments to bump into each other we don't do that anymore. And I think, unfortunately some people thought of that and started doing that, but it translated into let me invite my 10 favorite people sync up, and that's good that gets really expensive and really time draining. And so I think the the key here is we need to have some humanity in our meetings. But we don't have to remove purpose in order to accomplish that.

Elise Keith  13:54  
Right. Yeah, so lots of very few purposeful sheep standing up in the middle of the herds unfortunately so we're working on changing that collectively you all are ambassadors for purpose technology. So technology is rule number three and that one obviously has worked well I don't know if you recognize this gentleman here at the beginning, This is Scott Wharton to my left Scott Wharton led our session on use technology back in August and was a happy dude because Scott Wharton is the VP of cameras for Logitech and do you know what's in high demand cameras right you know who else does a happy dude this guy in the middle that's Eric that's Eric won the CEO of zoom, which is, you know, one of the legit expensive stocks stocks now, not just because they've invested in Bitcoin like they're doing great. And as you can see, facilitators have, and people who run meetings professionally have done an incredible investment in upping their game so this is a screenshot of Douglas Ferguson's home studio. Douglas Ferguson, is a facilitator. He He's not a YouTube star he is you know not a musician, he, He runs design sprints and he gets people into breakouts and they talk about like what they like to see happen in their businesses and in their companies. And actually if you have not seen voltage controls work they do really great free workshops for people to come and just play with these things but this is how he's evolved his technology. So hardware tech is just one of many kinds of tech that has evolved that I think embracing technology using technology we're kind of taking a big check on that one. And now the question becomes what how does that technology evolve going forward. Joe any thoughts on this one.

Joe Allen  15:44  
Yeah, I think the terribly obvious thing about use technology that rule is that the, what's changed for me or what I've seen is the adoption rate, you know, before it was like, Oh well, I'll get on a, on a virtual call but I don't really like the camera I'm I'm gonna leave that offer, you know, we, there was, there was not a lot of embracing of technology as a way to meet. I mean what was happening some and to a greater extent than previous in 2019, but man did we did we adopt fast, and did we adjust fast. Some to to great and wonderful outcome some two not so good outcomes. But that was the thing that changed the most for me on this rule was just the adoption rate of people having to use it whether they like it or not having to use technology for their collaboration.

Elise Keith  16:30  
So, um, so there's technology now let's talk about real for real for us avoid drift that stay on target so we're working to stay on target right now, in this call this role has not changed in my opinion.

Joe Allen  16:41  
No, I will need to avoid drift.

Elise Keith  16:46  
And I have had somebody I have somebody who looked at my slides earlier go Why have you used this picture. Well I use this picture because this is a picture of Dr Abraham's who led to a session on avoiding drift for part of our class so every one of these pictures is actually from, from the courses that we ran on on these topics. I think, and it was fun to clearly.

Joe Allen  17:05  
Yeah. Yeah. And one thing I would add to the avoid drift, I think actually goes into the technology thing I remember my background here I remember when I first when we first went online, my background did not look like this. I was in a variety of different situations and so forth. And I learned from others, including my co author Karen read that this matters because if this is distraction distracting, then people aren't looking at me, they're looking at that they're looking at other things and they're not being, they're not hearing what I'm saying. So I think the avoid drift is also, you know, helping to keep attention. Yes and keep people engaged by not distracting them with things that just kind of happened in our background.

Elise Keith  17:47  
Yeah. haad real five build larger teams for some meetings. So this particular rule is about how, when we are doing things that call for divergence like more ideas more perspectives more voices we want more people in the room. I think this is the one that has absolutely nailed it. In the last 18 months because look at who's here, right look at who's here today I heard a you know I'm in Germany, but you can pronounce my name this way and a brochure, and I know we have some folks from all around, who are building a larger team here together and when you get a chance to come together and share your insights that will be a way in which you can maximize the divergence of our output which is really exciting. Unfortunately, on the flip side because it has become so easy, we have that proliferation of meetings that everybody's invited to that may or may not be relevant to what they're doing. So there is a there is a dark side to too many people in a meeting. Jeff any thoughts.

Joe Allen  18:57  
No, I think this is a you're absolutely right that he this this rule kind of nailed it for the, for the divergent type things. I think the other thing to kind of keep in mind, and this is, this has been true before it's true is true now is for certain types of activities, decision making that sort of thing. More convergent type activities, larger teams actually doesn't help you so it's really this rule is really about making sure you right sighs appropriately size, your meetings,

Elise Keith  19:28  
embrace diversity. Now, I know this is a picture of a white woman on a white screen. So I, we, I understand this, this is, this is Dr. Alison Brooks she led our conversation about that. And she, she talks about the importance of after you get everyone into the room. Right, so you've got an interesting and diverse audience. How have you actually make it safe for them to share what they have to say. And there are a number of things that we have learned in the last 18 months that help with that. And we have learned quite a bit, and with a huge focus on inclusion and diversity of both about how to improve our ability to reach out to folks and bring them into the conversation than we did before, but also how to include them in that conversation when we're there so if you will look now at the people in our group, and I'm just going ahead and stop sharing this for just a second. You'll see that we have options. So providing options is one way in which you help with inclusion, some of us have chosen to stay on camera. Some of us have not, that's okay. Some of us will choose to speak when we have opportunities to speak. Some of us will not. Some of us, if you don't want to speak can use the chat. Right, giving people options is one of the ways in which you allow for more diversity and inclusion. The other area and aspect in which we've seen some really great progress in the inclusion and diversity front is accessibility. So we still haven't nailed how to help people who don't have good internet participate in events like this one, but people who have challenges with visual or auditory interactions or even manual physical interactions have had a lot of tech come out to help. So one of the things we are experiencing and experimenting with today is live transcription. So if you look at the top left corner. At least it is for me and I hope it is for you, you might see it's a live on custom live streaming service does anybody ever see that. So if you click that on the drop down. You can say view stream on custom live streaming service. And this is a robot listening to us talk and trying to give us basically closed captions in real time about what we're saying. The other thing that's wicked sweet, about the robot transcript beyond the fact that it will be funny, because they will get it wrong, is that you can if you choose to contribute in this way, go click on it and you can highlight things and you can add comments there, you can add screenshots of things that you thought were interesting, and we get a way to inclusively co create our view of what's happening right now. So on after this call I will send a number of links to things that are other ways in which you can make zoom, for example more inclusive, and, and, and we'll answer these questions about the diversity so Carolyn asked who led the diversity session that is Dr. Allison wood Brooks from Harvard. She's a specialist in conversational skills and taught us a lot about how do you make it safe for, especially women who are in groups of men and not feeling like they can contribute to have not only be brought into the conversation but to have their voices and their perspectives amplified, because in some ways it's not who talks the most it's who's heard that actually matters in our meetings. Don't. Other thoughts on this before we move to level seven Yeah,

Joe Allen  23:18  
one of the experiments that I did in relation to this, or actually wasn't even religious I was just gathering data, frankly, we actually did a recorded a bunch of virtual meetings like this, and we just we coded the data, and we did a count on how much talk time each of the people had in the meeting, and we were very surprised to see this was in May of 2020 that people had more egalitarian talk sharing in these virtual meetings, than they do in face to face meetings. And that's partly because the environment is different than the face to face meeting you often have a table you have a power seat you've got you've got hierarchy you've got other cues that are that are that are there that are somewhat normalized in the virtual environment. However, later on, as the as people got used to this environment some of those. Some of that socialization some of that structure some of those things that we embraced in the face to face meeting that we probably shouldn't have. And in terms of diversity and sharing and equity has started to creep back in. So data I collected. Just, just a month or so ago, actually is different than what I got in May. Same teams, but we see more or less egalitarian sharing in the virtual meetings so we've now embraced some of the, you know, some of the things that have led to less equality and sharing than then than before then when we first got onto these in this environment. So it's fascinating to see that immediately it was it was great. We have more equality and then our own our old habits kind of crept back in. And so I think it's important for us to be aware of that and know that okay if you're really trying to embrace diversity and inclusion and so forth. You have to keep at it. You can't just, you know, expect oh well if I change my environment it's going to be better Well it might be for a few meetings but then we return to Our old, old ways whatever that might be, which is oftentimes not as oftentimes not as inclusive as it could be.

Elise Keith  25:16  
And I think we'll get a chance to talk about that a little bit in trends because we're starting to see, you know, there was a lot of great stuff that happened right as the pandemic hit and we're starting to see some backlash, as people are just overwhelmed by trying to do everything right all the time. So six embrace diversity now number seven, I believe, Nancy is here today. This is Nancy and she led us a fabulous fun session on embracing process there's Nancy she waved Yay, with the Christmas lights in the back. This has not changed as in my opinion, this is, this particular rule remains the same. When you have a have a meeting. It is important to get everybody clear on what to expect and engaged in the process of what to expect. Yeah, any anybody disagree with that, is this one involved at all. All right, so let's move on. Let's number eight. I am the design of meetings now. This one sounds like it's about how you would create an agenda but in fact it's actually about the design of physical spaces, and the gentleman shown here, this is Matt chatter every other one of my presenters who knows Matt talked about having the deep man crush on Matt because he's fabulously interesting and cool. And he talked about how to make meeting rooms, exciting to be in. Well guess what happened. Nobody has gets to go into the meeting rooms anymore so this one has evolved like mad. Now we are starting to see some interesting things happened. For example, this is the honest hotel capacity chart, where you can look at a venue that you're thinking about trying to bring a group back together to in person, and talk about your social distancing rules and whatnot and it will tell you how many people you can actually put it in there, regardless of what the hell, what the hotel says, I'll put a link to this in the follow up notes. So you don't have to I chart it quite so much. The other thing we're seeing is an explosion in technologies that are about trying to reimagine space in the digital world. So this is a screenshot from one of the simpler ones this is wonder, and in wonder, you can set your background and you can design little digital spaces and then when people join. They get little tiny avatars, and when their avatars move around the screen and bump into each other, then they have a conversation. So there are all of the kinds of tools that are trying to imagine what if the space was not a physical space but it was a virtual space, and we moved around it as people with autonomy, just like we would have we been in a conference setting. And you can make them purple and you can put your, you know, fantasy towers in the background or your office in the background so there's all kinds of interesting tech trying to imagine our sense of space in the digital realm.

Joe Allen  28:23  
Yeah, I think the thing I would add here is that I think the the fact that we've been adopting these different technologies, has led people to start to think about Okay, can we can we push this further what can we do further and, and I've heard even people speculating well maybe we'll be like the, and then being a little bit nerdy here but it will be like the Jedi Council, and we'll have projectors that'll project us into a council room, and we'll all have our, our avatar will be actually us, you know, and so it's it's fascinating to think about as this rule how it's changed is that where we're actually thinking about it. I think too often before I was like, oh, we're gonna have a meeting, let's go to a little conference table, we didn't really think about the space, whether it was virtual or otherwise, we just met. And now it's kind of like Well no, there's something to this and I think that's something that I think is unique about, you know, a lot of these that we're actually thinking about it. And so I think that's what's changed with this was a word, we're thinking about it, which is cool.

Elise Keith  29:18  
Yeah I'm super excited to have opportunities to plan spaces for hybrid meetings and some of the newer things that we've learned since, since this came out. Yeah, so that's oh that's that's me and Tom in our tiny bubble, and there. There we are in our screenshot. All right, so use leadership to enhance performance I also don't believe this one has changed and this is very much about you know leaders need to show up in and do a good job leading and making space for everybody. The two gentlemen who presented this one are Andy Walsh who's a high performance coach for Red Bull and Juergen Heitmann who is an ex special ops operative and also currently a high performance coach, they do amazing work with teams helping them, unlock their achievement together so a fabulous conversation but I don't believe any changes in this one.

Joe Allen  30:06  
Yeah, I think the only thing I would add to that is that I think the one thing that's changed for me is that I think more people have to do it. Because in a virtual meeting when you got your your window into everyone's you know setting. If you don't say, Bob, what do you think Susan What do you think, Lisa, what do you think if you don't actually call people by name, you often have that talking over each other and and and and so forth that happens and I think a lot of us have adapted that but i think that's that's oftentimes more of a leaders responsibility than it is. Attendees responsibility and more of us need to embrace that. So, if anything, there's there's a greater need for this than ever before.

Elise Keith  30:44  
All right. Final Rule plan for creativity and captured these outcomes. This is a picture of shear Marotta he runs a company called coda, which is a way in which people can organize their information and whatnot. This one I think has radically changed in the world of people who do professional facilitation for sure, because in the past it was flip charts and sticky notes. And now we have all kinds of things. So these are just some screenshots from events that I've run this is a group that put together top five tips in a Google slide. And we walked out of the meeting and they had beautiful Google Slides all all created. This was an event I ran where we use mural, and we walked out of the meeting and mural board full of ideas that people could use afterwards, was out there and ready to use. This is an event they use that we ran that uses group mount, and again, walked out of the meeting all of those ideas are there in a way that the company in the business can actually put to use. I will be shocked to see if everybody goes back to doing it all on sticky notes and paper. Because the value of being able just like we are today with the live transcription and the recording and I actually want to show you one of the other things we're doing here Lisa Are you in a place where you could share.

Lisa Rothstein  32:03  
I am. If you just if you'll pin my if you'll pin my video.

Elise Keith  32:08  
Yeah, I will. And I'm going to actually I think that's it on this particular. So I'm going to stop screen sharing screen sharing we're going to pin Lisa for a second.

Martin West  32:15  
I can I can I it's a little small but I'll zoom in. I'm drawing this live on my iPad so here we are with. I'm still working on it but here we are with our 10 rules,

Elise Keith  32:26  
the lease. Yeah, it's awesome.

Martin West  32:28  
it's lease What do you think

Unknown Speaker  32:33  
you are

Martin West  32:35  
working on it, working on it but it's close very exciting.

Yeah, so I obviously I keep that you guys are saying so many great things I have to keep, you know, shrinking the space. So I can leave room for all other great stuff you've got going on so. So, Um,

Elise Keith  32:50  
so, with the use of technology and with a little bit of planning ahead we can get multiple useful outcomes from our meeting so Lisa does amazing graphic capture and also has a really funny cartoon about zoom fatigue in the New Yorker, which we will encourage her to share with us later. But, but in any case, what those.

Unknown Speaker  33:15  
What you

Elise Keith  33:16  
can do is she is completely changed now. So, with that, I think it's a great moment for you to take a deep breath because that was a lot. That was like oh, here's a bunch of stuff about 10 roles science and practice and go and work together to have a conversation about what you've learned. Right. What have you learned that may be different from what we've discussed. And, you know, while we've learned a ton. What remains a mystery to you. What part of running effective and meaningful meetings, are you still really unsure about. So the, we're gonna send you into breakouts we're going to be in groups of three or four and we're going to have eight minutes to go ahead and have this conversation Joe I'm, I haven't got enough wizardry to pull you out so either come back or just have a nice conversation. And when we come back, Joe will talk about some science. All right, eight minutes. Have a wonderful conversation.

* Breakouts Happened *

Joe Allen  42:40  
Everybody's back

Elise Keith  42:42  
welcome back welcome back, I hope you had some really fascinating interesting conversations because I would love to hear some of what you've heard about. Now we don't have time for every single person to share all of the cool new ideas that you have so we're going to hear from like four or five people and I would encourage you to raise either a digital hand or a physical hand either way and we'll, we'll call you out. So, who had who heard something in your conversation that you thought is really worth sharing with this group.

Nancy. Settle Murphy.

Unknown Speaker  43:22  
So,

Nancy Settle-Murphy  43:22  
we had a bit of a conversation at the end about how best to integrate asynchronous conversations in support of the, of the goal of the real time meeting, and we had one person had an example of how do we use a slack conversation, and take that content and embed it or relay it in a meeting so how does that become part of the whole meeting.

Elise Keith  43:46  
Right, super great challenge, who talked about something different.

Unknown Speaker  43:59  
I can jump in.

Betsy Clayton  44:00  
We talked a lot about what's missing and that what we used to be able to get from face to face meetings was that sort of that sort of adjacent synchronous spontaneousness where you would jump in and have a conversation with somebody else after the meeting, and a lot of productive things came out of it as an outflow from the meeting but it didn't happen in the meeting itself, you would bump into somebody and you would have that conversation, or you could hit somebody up to say hey how's this project coming, and we don't seem to have that opportunity yet in a virtual environment breakout rooms are great. I think the other thing we heard is that you really have to have a strong, or a good leader to help drive the conversation. Otherwise you run into what we happen in our breakout room where everybody looked around and said, What's the assignment, who's gonna jump in. I think that was a challenge. That's a challenge we still have to come and deal with and Lewis had a great comment and I'm going to call on Him to relay it because I don't have his friend john say quad to say and effectively, so.

Louis Vareilles  45:03  
Okay, so thanks Betsy, it was very interesting what we shared. I read something in French there's a guy. Matthew Boucher Matthew Boucher is the CEO of tech soon. I don't know if you know this tool, a bit like he went on, and he wrote lohar Nipa democratic in English speaking is not democratic in some way. And what is great in remote meetings that you can balance activities where people are talking, or people are writing, and which means that you give everyone the ability to contribute, which could not always be so easy. If you are around the table, and where only the speakers can really contribute. And I think it's related to what was said just before by by density, about the fact that what can you do synchronously and in a synchronous manner. So, but I think there is a real big value in remote meetings where you can balance, writing and speaking. Right.

Elise Keith  46:07  
Excellent. It is right it's the opportunity and I think some of the research that Joe's gonna show soon is going to help us. Embrace why we need to be seizing that opportunity to take more of the conversation into an asynchronous world. Before we move on, we have time for one more. What was something interesting you heard in your conversation something different.

Unknown Speaker  46:30  
Sure. Talk for our group. We found that there is real value in having the participants prepared appropriately to contribute once they get to the meeting and that perhaps is not not often well done and I think it's probably compounded because of the frequency of all these zoom meetings, just as Betsy was saying so. I like, Louis, your point, perhaps we could have attendees, do a little bit of both. I had a time a little bit of planning to think about what they want to speak about, but also perhaps jotting down some notes to bring into the meeting that would be more effective.

Elise Keith  47:10  
Yeah, I love that. And of course they compound not only in terms of all of that but in terms of having to follow all the rules right because for somebody to prepare means you need to know what the purpose is which means you need to know who's going to lead it you need to know what kind of contribution you need it just backs up and backs up, which is why, at least, we are so keen on systems, you know, how do you create frameworks and systems that make that possible without killing yourself with all the work that it takes to get all of that prep done. So just one quick note before I turn it over to Joe, Tom pointed out that the transcription was running during the breakout, I know. Welcome to the fully transparent living. If you would like, if you think there's secrets there are no secrets it's all it's all there so you're welcome to go back and see Joe and I talk about how awesome it is that Lisa's here and and and a number of things like that. Patti Did you have a have a quick comment. I saw a hand. Okay.

Unknown Speaker  48:13  
Yeah, okay.

Unknown Speaker  48:16  
All right, Joe.

Joe Allen  48:17  
So you probably all know the research. Yes, I'm excited to share the new research with you and if you if you did see the transcript during the breakout you know that I, I had to take a moment to refresh myself and prepare for for the presentation, and we'll talk about why that's important in a second. But let me go ahead and share my screen and share a few things with you, and hopefully get you involved in that conversation as well. So, here we go. Can you see my slides are my Yeah, there you go. Fabulous. All right, so, uh, so I want to introduce you to a few different things. But first off, you'll see there there's the title of this little presentation that as we call it, is suddenly virtual making remote meetings work which is also the title of my book that's coming out later. Next month on the ninth you're welcome to take a look at that if you want to. I think it's a fabulous. It's going to get, you're going to get a bit of that today a bit of the details from there today but there's a lot more in that I'm a professor of industrial and organizational psychology, and I'm a meeting scientist, as many of you know, and we're not in a self help group here. It's okay to like meetings and and also to be a meeting scientist. We're among friends, so that's good. So, if I get there we go it convinced the slide there we go so first I want to I want to get you to reflect a moment or two on your experience of meeting so in the chat. Once you go ahead and put down. What were your meetings like you know in October of 2019. What was kind of the, you know, situation that you were found yourselves in before the pandemic if you must be for the pandemic This is October 2019 what what did that look like.

I need to convince my computer. Let me see the chat. And I can see it often and effective in presence. Less focus video was rare more in person. Yeah, Nancy carry all in person, and snacks. Yeah. Now you can choose your own snacks. But then, the other people were giving the snacks right snacks is, you know, and there's actually some research on that we can talk about some other time. Almost all contained video Okay, cool. Angela. There was small talk. Yeah, that's something that that I strongly recommended early on, as we were in the pandemic was, we need to have. We need to humanize our meetings a little bit, make sure everybody has a chance to say how they're doing and and deal with, with some of that less than less formality that we might need less formal Amy says that start five minutes late. Yeah, I have some fun research on, it's it's actually. Yeah, it's okay in terms of the meeting outcomes if you start a few minutes late, but once you get past five it starts to be a real big problem. So, anyway. Okay, thank you everyone I really appreciate sharing that now let's flip a little bit, and now in the chat, less scribe may of 2020. Okay, so now we're a couple of months into the pandemic where we're thinking that by fall of 2020 we're gonna be back in, you know, face to face, even though that was a pipe dream. What were your meetings like in in May of 2020. In less than recurring Thank you, thank you, Carolyn all online. Yep, more meetings more people less focus. Okay. Not as productive as his hope for Linda, yeah. Doug man may 2020 purposeful.

Elise Keith  52:07  
I like that one where phone calls, suddenly seemed strange right where before they were.

Joe Allen  52:13  
Yeah. Call seem strange. Yeah, instead of zoom or teams, I get it. Yeah, that makes sense. People were afraid. Almost suddenly. Yeah, that's, that's why I like the title my book suddenly are suddenly virtual right we're all suddenly embracing that whether we want to or not.

Elise Keith  52:35  
Right. You're on mute is the is the new.

Joe Allen  52:40  
Yep, you're on mute. Okay, thank you so much that I think we have kind of a shared mental model as we might call it about our experiences in May of 2020, they were they were similar and and and in October 2020 October 2019. They were similar as well. So let me go ahead and share my screen again. And we'll keep going here actually have a couple of polls that I want to ask now and I don't know if at least if you're if you're able to do that. Thinking about your meetings again. Before the pandemic. So, at least you have that handy and there we go fabulous. So if you could quickly do a little vote here on, you know, what percent of meetings are face to face in October 2019 for you.

Elise Keith  53:37  
And it looks like we've got, oh everybody's coming in here come the phones. Uh huh. All right, let's close this poll up in 54321.

Joe Allen  53:53  
Okay, so in October 2019 So, according to the poll 75% of your, of your meetings were face to face. Okay. And that is actually the correct answer if you if you want to look at the statistics that's about right or was. And we'll talk about that in a second. So let's do the second poll, real quick here.

So this is what percent of your meetings were face to face in May of 2020. So again, reflecting back and forth between these two time periods in two different worlds we've lived in recently are currently.

Elise Keith  54:33  
You don't have to do it to get a good point you need a zero.

Unknown Speaker  54:38  
Yo, yo,

Linda  54:41  
see one is to pick 10 instances no zero. If we're.

Joe Allen  54:46  
Well, again, this is you know, this is for you but yes, if zero is the correct answer picked in

for you.

Elise Keith  54:55  
All right. And we're to close this one in three to one ending and

Joe Allen  55:03  
fries, so no surprise everyone paid a lot, a lot of people picked 10% some, some are still having quite a few face to face meetings, which is, which is totally fine and that that varies by industry and that's why I didn't have a zero there because depending on your industry between your situation, you know, 10% is, you know, are some meetings, you know, face to face are, are still very much happening. Okay, so let's look at what the the data that I collected showed, so I'll go ahead and get the slides going again here. Okay. So, go into the next slide here. This was the format, pre and post COVID. So, Sonny's, you know, 77%, you know, face to face pre COVID down to, you know, 11%, you know post COVID, you know post COVID meeting. During the pandemic as we currently are now. And then video and and you know what from 3%, you know, three and a half percent to 260 percent. So, basically, when this all happened, or has happened to us. Our the way we meet the format with which we meet has changed. Right. Well also has the length, the length of our meanings has changed when I clicked. So, the interesting about this date is I had the happy circumstance of collecting data in October 2019 asking all these questions and then I collected again in May of 2020. And so that's what we're comparing here that's why I asked you to think about that right What was your life like, and the length of our meetings has actually gotten a little shorter, and one person asked me well is that just because of zoom and your 40 minute limit, and we control for that we controlled for some of those, those factors but we actually are a little bit shorter all the different types of things were a little bit shorter even on video we're about five minutes shorter than we were pre COVID. The other thing we've learned is that the size of our meetings has, has gotten a little bit smaller except for the hybrid meeting. Okay, so face to face got smaller telephone meeting smaller video meetings smaller, and generally speaking, that's a good thing. If you're doing convergent things right. But if you're doing divergent things you might use a bigger hybrid I think it was a little surprised that I went up but I think part of the reason why it went up is that I think people are now starting to do it more so that that might affect that as well. Okay. So you know what what are these, these changes mean well first off, it means that we're having to embrace technology right, which we all have done, there might be more work family conflict which, you know, one thing that we found is some of the other data that I didn't collect but others have and showing that we're actually meeting a little bit more our days are a little bit longer I worked a little bit longer, even though we're not commuting. In many cases, and so we're having a spillover into our family life or into, into our personal life from from meetings. Electronic meaning fatigue, which we'll talk about more in a second here. But there's also new opportunities to write, we can meet from anywhere, right, we can meet from our home office from our kitchen table from our from our couch, from, you know, the park if you've got good internet connection there and so forth so there's there's there's a lot of flexibility about the location with which we connect with others, and the overall reach of our services real reach of our of what we do, can be much greater because we're able to do to embrace these new environments. However, As some of you may have experienced or continue to express this this issue of zoom fatigue or meeting, you know, electronic meeting fatigue. And first off I want to make sure everyone knows if it is real. The data I've collected confirms that it's real. In case you had any doubts. It's all about emotional labor, which is, which I don't know if everybody's familiar with that I'm not sure how much we talked about that in our course, but emotional labor is human's ability to regulate our emotions, to be more positive we need to be be more negative, we need to be that sort of thing. Well in meetings we do this right, you go to a meeting and your boss's proposing an idea that you're not really excited about but you have to be excited about it because the boss is excited about, or you go to a meeting where you're having to do corrective action on an you know for an employee who is not performing as well. And you may be actually having a really wonderful day. But you have to be very critical and you have to be very, you know, a little more negative tone than you would actually be and so you labor to do that. Right. And then the The interesting thing is that this is all consistent with job demands and resources paradigm this idea that we as we expend more resources from ourselves. It drains us. And so we have a finite amount of those resources, and if we're doing more of this. This laboring, it's going to create more stress. Okay. And so I guess the, the, what I'd like to do in the chat for just a second, it would be to describe in your own words what zoom fatigue feels like to you. So if you've experienced this. How did it feel bigger inducing nicer least draining exhausted. Yep. My eyes are always tired. Yeah, yeah, I actually got some blue reducing blue light reducing glasses to try and help with that because I exactly as well. Sweat sweating emotionally drained mental fatigue. Yeah, bipolar, okay. physically heavy. Okay, disconnected hard to focus.

Unknown Speaker  1:00:49  
Eric. Hmm.

Joe Allen  1:00:52  
Well I guess if you're wearing if you're wearing your your your the inside or outside your ears, you're gonna get some pressure there yeah absolutely glazed Yeah, just waiting for the media. Yeah, I think you're describing a lot of the experiences that I think many of us have had with this whole Zoo fatigue right and it's a new layer of fatigue because of the the increase in meetings, the different format that we're not as familiar with, we are now but we weren't there before. Right. And so it's really important to kind of think about. Okay, so, carrying on just a little bit further, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on that I think it's neat to see others. You know validating the feelings that I've had that we've all had in relation to having so many of these virtual meetings, and I think it's actually a little easier for us to engage in emotional labor in face to face settings, it is in a virtual setting and we can talk about that more later if you would like. So what the data showed us, comparing three to October 2019 to may 2020, was that and this is on a scale of one to five with a standard deviation of point five roughly for these for these scales. If, for those of you who are egghead scientists like myself who wanted to know the numbers, but essentially what happened is we saw almost a full standard deviation, increase in something called surface acting and that's the faking the smile right it's like, Can I help you when you don't really feel like helping the person, right, or, so it's, it's that faking the right emotion for the circumstances. Now the important thing to kind of keep in mind here is what were the circumstances in May of 2020. Well, for many of us it was a lockdown. It was working from home it was kids at home from, you know, not you know not going to their actual school or at home and you're teaching them with the teachers sometimes maybe. And so there was there was a whole host of other stress factors that would require us, so we can't if we're thinking about those things. And that's expecting us internally surface acting is painting on a happy face in these in these meetings for work where we're supposed to be excited, enthusiastic adaptive, you know, flexible, because we're in this, we're in this strange situation. And yet we have a whole world of life that's going on around us wearing masks and so forth that is not very comfortable and so that dissonance is what's creating that fatigue, creating that, that, that, that mental and physical and emotional fatigue, which is zoom fatigue. So you're probably thinking, Okay. Great. Thanks, Dr. Allen you told me how awful it is. Well, that's the next question is what do we do about it. Okay. And I've got three things that I want to share in relation to that so first it was recognizing the need for recovery and I was really pleased to see people talking about the need for purpose need for preparation for meetings because on average. After a bad meeting a person needs a roughly 17 minutes to recover. Now most of our meetings are not bad. Most of our meetings are okay, which means you probably still need about five minutes to recover and that's not because the meeting was bad, it could have been a really really positive meeting, but it's because you're, you're transitioning, the cognitive research scientific research related to neuroscience and so forth, suggests that we need five to 10 minutes to mentally switch from one topic to another in a meaningful way. And if we don't provide that time for each other. Right, one we don't have time for recover. One, we don't have time to go to the bathroom. He said, The issue is these back to back meetings many of us experience, you go from one meeting to the next to the next. There are 30 minutes or half an hour, and they're back to back there's no recovery time. There's no cognitive switching time. There's no bathroom time. There's no, you know, a beverage refreshing. There's no you know whatever you might need and so recovery is really important. So one of the things that I advise people to do is why I asked them why are you setting your meetings at 30 minutes. Why are you setting them at 60 minutes. Is that because of the default in your calendar, ignore the default in your calendar. Give yourself and others, a window of opportunity to recover and prepare for the next meeting if and if they only want the next meeting, or if they're going somewhere else, it gives them a moment to cognitively switch and perform that much better. So that's the first thing. The second thing that the science would suggest is that we should be engaging in this in the best practices that we've knew before and so, at least you have the final poll I wanted to wanted to do. I think we could do that now that'd be great.

Here we go. So what percentage of previously no meeting best practices still apply in the virtual meeting world.

Elise Keith  1:05:48  
And I can't we don't have a zero or a like a 99 100 or anything

Joe Allen  1:05:54  
that's that's the the professor coming out to me and making giving lots of plausible answers, but there's only one correct one as it were.

Elise Keith  1:06:04  
I'm super curious to see how you scientifically evaluated this one little bit measure on this one. All right folks so let's do it let's finish this one up in 321, and Paul let's see what we say,

Joe Allen  1:06:21  
all right, 80%. Correct. That is correct, yes, 80% of the practices that we used prior to the pandemic still apply now. They still apply in a virtual world. And so you're probably and to answer at least this question. How did we scientifically come to that conclusion, we did two things. One, we, we designed a checklist for you know from based on all of science, previous to the pandemic this was something that I built back in October 2019, thinking that I would use it in, in a variety of situations for face to face meetings and so forth. Right. And then I we rebuilt that checklist for the virtual environment. And we took it we compared the two we said okay what's changed what what do we have to do what we have to change here what applies in face to face that doesn't apply in a virtual, and so forth. And what we found was that about 80% was, you know, was carrying right over from face to face to the virtual environment. The second way we did that is we ask people we did a, we did a survey of people and said okay, given, you know, your experiences with meetings. What you know what best practices that you from previous used to use still use now. Right. And we and we tabulated that so there's a lot of lot of tabulation and so forth. But we found it was, it was actually a little lower when we ask people it was around 70%. So, if you put 65, you get partial credit. So, but people tend to get a lot of these are still true so let me go ahead and share my slides just for another minute or so here. And so, pre collision, they mostly still apply the new environment of the virtual environment, certainly has some new best practices that we need to be considering like calling up people by name so that way the mute the mute button and so forth don't don't don't keep us from contributing. You know, the new best practice that I mentioned is you know like that I just mentioned, there was a facilitation there's also the reducing the meetings by 10% in terms of length for that recovery. Going off of the zoom fatigue issue, and then embracing the ideas for on camera optimization, the production value, like I said, my background didn't look like this before. I had, you know, I changed a lot of things. It was my cameras and computing computers and everything we're all facing a different direction. And if I if they were right now you see a lamp you'd see a window you'd see my fish tank he says all sorts of other things that are wonderful I enjoy them. I like being able to see the outdoors, but they they can distract from me, talking to you. And so for the video for me so there's lots of different things that do apply but still. Don't forget those things that you already know, we should be doing anyway. And then the third thing I want to bring up is. Take advantage of new opportunities, sort of like we talked about with experimentation don't don't hesitate to try new things, you can partner with the Center for mini fitness shameless plug there but I'm, I love working with people working on making their meetings better. And if there's ways that I can help with that. I'm excited to do that both from a research perspective but also from just a practice in a practical perspective. The other thing is, participate in generating new knowledge I know Elise is always doing new things on the space, some of you are also doing that, if there's ways that we can connect and collaborate in a meaningful way. Let's do that. And I think that's that's something that we need to remember and keep going forward even as we get vaccines even as we transition to a new normal etc. We should really not be afraid to embrace the opportunity to continue to reflect on our meetings and make them better. And so then if you want more, I have tons of insomnia caring research that I can provide to you about all the things that I've shared today, as well as all the all the top 10 practices and rules for meaningful meetings and so forth. There's also the book, I happy for you if you would, if you would buy that not because it's going to make me any money. I might get another cup of coffee every now and then because of it, but because it has really helpful science based practice that can be used for by everybody based on you know and you saw some of that today in this presentation. So with that, I'm back to you, Elise or i or i should maybe I should I answer some questions, I don't know. Yeah, actually,

Elise Keith  1:10:41  
let's let's let's play with some of these ideas Hmm, so I'm so a, we are going to absolutely 100% hold you to that offer folks are interested in the science. I don't know how much meeting science they've read. So, we'll see how they feel about that later but books want to see the science they want to see your before and after checklist so awesome looking forward to seeing those. We're gonna give them that we have all of this stuff going on in our last 20 minutes together we thought we'd spend some time looking at okay. A lot has changed in the last 18 months. A lot it's going to continue to change it is at a rapidly evolving landscape that we are all working in. So we thought we talked about some of the trends that we see, and then give you a chance to talk finally together, and also leave any questions for us which we can answer afterwards and then asynchronously as well. So we've made sure we get you all out on time. But Joe, I think, a couple of the trends that we talked about before, that are we see absolutely coming up as a result of exactly what you just talked about. On the first is, while we know that video meetings, create richer connection and communication and we're starting to see a big backlash. Is anybody else starting to see people being less interested in being on video all the time. Like it just waves. Yep, yep. So, so one of the pieces of advice I'm seeing come from folks is turn on your video at the beginning to say hi, do a bunch of work. You have to turn it off do a bunch of work and then put on your video at the end so I'd be interested to see how the universe changes that way. God want to talk about the next one we were talking about.

Joe Allen  1:12:40  
You'll have to remember.

Unknown Speaker  1:12:43  
I forgot

Elise Keith  1:12:45  
that so so people just talk about three of them real quick. And you talked about the redefinition of the work and love family life boundaries.

Joe Allen  1:12:52  
Oh yes, absolutely. So that's another one that prior to, you know, the pandemic. There was there, there was a you know area of research, you know, work, work life balance work family conflict with family to work conflict, etc. Right. And suddenly, we all ended up going home. And in many cases right on had to work from wherever we could. And that meant being being around family who were also home or whatnot, or just being in a very different environment. And so, I, you know, in, in the future, I think, organizations are actually going to have to recognize this as an issue as a problem. And be offering some things you know for their employees to to manage that, you know, then that's where I think we get into the hybrid, which we were gonna talk about as well at least, but hybrid work environments, pre-night to 2019, we used to, you know, and I'll admit, we used to give people a hard time when they would work from home, oh you're sitting in your sweatshirt, or just having a you know drinking a cocktail and working right. Well now when everybody's at home. You know that that stigma is not going to come back. Right, or organizations going to embrace the idea of let's make sure there's a there's a space that people can come to, but let's not force the issue, right, because that work life balance thing is going to is going to need to have to be discussed and considered, and we and we need to think about ways that as leaders and as organizational participants to figure out how to embrace that.

Elise Keith  1:14:24  
Right, so we see a massive shift in just a complete shift in the expectations and we don't know where that trends gonna land. And then the final one that is unequivocal is a significant rise in the hybrid meeting, and that's a little bit of meeting speak so for those of you who don't know what that means that means some people are all together in a room, and some other people are either together in some other room somewhere else or some of them are dialed in and whatnot this the meeting we're running today is a fully virtual meeting. But imagine that that Patty and Encino and Amy were all together in one room, and we were trying to figure out which one of them were raising their hand, and which which one of them is, you know, on mute or not on mute it's it's a very challenging environment. I don't know how many of you as facilitators have ever facilitated a team that was entirely in the room together and you are away. Yeah, right, like oh man is that not a challenging thing and that is that is coming and that is coming with with bells. So, so those are some of the things we see coming that create new challenges and new, new opportunities for learning which is the question I would love for you to explore in a final breakout spend a little bit of time sort of reflecting on this and then giving us some guidance because we are super down with continuing to innovate and explore in this space. And when we come back in 2023. To do this again. I am curious to know what questions do you want to see answers to. At that point, right, what do we not yet know that we should know by 2023. So I'm going to send you back into breakouts again for another six minutes to have that conversation. If it is unclear who the leader is I encourage you to have the person whose name begins with the first earliest in my alphabet begin the conversation. So any questions about the topic, or what might, what is about to happen. All right folks have a wonderful conversation six minutes.


* Breakouts Happened *


Elise Keith  1:23:33  
So how, how did that conversation go What should we be talking about in two years I'd be happy love to hear from some folks about what they discussed. Who would like to share first, Linda. Well,

Linda  1:23:57  
it was interesting because for some of us it was really hard to imagine this future perfect world. Although we talked about the proliferation of hybrid, and some of the challenges in the, in the, whimsical way in which I was thinking, we had been so successful with the technology and it is advanced to such a level that we're able to feel a sense of connectedness with people who are very different from ourselves, and that we are beginning to have far more international connections because of this experience with this crisis. And people feel far more engaged in the online environment than we had ever experienced back in 2021. And we have been able to simulate some of the richness of face to face experiences online, although in 2021, we had no idea that that could even be possible. And I'm complete.

Elise Keith  1:25:08  
Alright so was there. Is there a question in in there is there a question in any of your. I see Betsy he's got a lot of notes here somebody else have a question they want to pose for our future research.

Lisa Rothstein  1:25:29  
I think one of the questions that we were looking at was what I saw repeated was, what can we really expect advances in tech wise, that help make the hybrid sort of meetings, a first class experience by default. And I don't know the answer to that.

Elise Keith  1:25:52  
That makes for the best, best kinds of research right stuff that we don't actually know the answer to yet. Perfect. Who else talked about something different was something different that came up in your conversation that really struck you from all of this

Patty Brandmaier  1:26:08  
meat was the idea of culture, you know, and how does the hybrid meeting affect your work culture because you're gonna have people who are individually at home or wherever, and you're going to have a collective group of people together. And that no power differentials dynamic difference that will impact productivity and so I'd love to talk, you know, That would be my question is how to you know companies will navigate that going forward. I also dropped one, an article in the chat box from Sloan Ken from one of the schools about multimodal leadership skills and what does it take you know for leaders too and it kind of gets to your point, Joe, about people, exchanging leadership roles because it will take leadership skills, different leadership skills and what are those really for a hybrid meeting to be effective.

Unknown Speaker  1:27:06  
Yeah,

Joe Allen  1:27:09  
those things. Sorry, Martin You go ahead. No, no.

Martin West  1:27:14  
So we talked about how horrible hybrid meetings were pre COVID as well as during COVID are actually more pre, pre COVID and. And we talked about the, the need for each person having a touch point, the same touch point, whether they're hybrid Li connected, whether they're face to face, or whether they're connected through technology they still have to have the same connection points, otherwise it becomes really imbalance.

Joe Allen  1:27:48  
Yeah, I completely agree, and that's, you know, if you were wanting to describe my next area of research, you pretty much hit it Patti and Martin. Right now I'm actually launching two studies right now on hybrid meetings as certain areas of the world are able to transition more to the, to the hybrid context. And we're studying it right now. I'm also working on, on, on putting together some recommendations and best practices and so forth, related to that because what you described is actually what we saw, there's a there's a few meetings that we collected in 2020, where we saw a hybrid setting, right, people were matched up in one room, and we had a person on video, just imagine that situation and what we found is that the sharing of contribution was really, you know, by camera screen as opposed to by individual number of individuals. Right, so I immediately realized, oh my goodness, there's there's a, there's an issue here, there's a communication network problem that we have to solve. And so that's that's that's coming.

Elise Keith  1:28:52  
So speaking of problems and opportunities and things to solve one of the best practices that replies, both in person and online and in all settings is ending on time. So we are explicitly at the end of our time. So here's what something that you can expect going forward. After this call, we will in fact edit the recording, we'll send that out, we'll send out as many links to all of the things as we can possibly find the studies the, the tech that we looked at the slides, all of those things will be yours let them eat results. And we, in this community. I'd love to do the thing where the speaker, as if we were in the room, we hang out. So if you'd like to hang out with us and continue the conversation for another 10 to 15 minutes after party on. But otherwise, please know that we very much appreciate your contributions spending the time with us and Lisa, shall we show them what you found so far, because I know she'll work on this afterwards but why don't we pin Lisa and just kind of see what Lisa's takeaway for us all. It's

Lisa Rothstein  1:29:58  
gonna be me pin me baby. Yeah, yeah, I guess, having so much good information I kept having to move things around and I was waiting for your bluff. Don't you have a bluff.

Elise Keith  1:30:11  
I do but I ran out of time.

Martin West  1:30:13  
Well, so I have space for you at the bottom so

Elise Keith  1:30:18  
everybody who's been here before knows I love the bluff. And if you would like to stay and add a bluff for both Lisa and the bluff prompt is this in one word or phrase What's one insight or idea from this session that really stood out for you

Unknown Speaker  1:30:34  
and allowing

Elise Keith  1:30:36  
sharing that will give Lisa a chance. Yes,

Martin West  1:30:39  
and remind me what bluff is bl us blot the

Elise Keith  1:30:43  
bluff stands for bottom line up front.

Unknown Speaker  1:30:46  
So,

Elise Keith  1:30:47  
the bluff technique is for everybody who watches this who dropped out early or didn't have a chance to join us, because 150 people registered 50 some showed up, 37 stuck to the end. What should they as they watched the recording be watching for in one word or phrase that is the that is the bluff prompt. And if anybody would love to contribute that both Lisa and I would love it.

Unknown Speaker  1:31:16  
Zoom fatigue is real. I don't know.

Joe Allen  1:31:20  
It's true, it is real.

Unknown Speaker  1:31:27  
All right.

Elise Keith  1:31:29  
I see things in the, in the chat I see thank yous I see shoutouts. I see maintain humanity however and wherever we meet love that Nancy,

Lisa Rothstein  1:31:39  
it will get better. Yes, it will.

Unknown Speaker  1:31:45  
I like that Linda

Elise Keith  1:31:46  
science is real, it's not wild meeting science it's a thing. Yeah. All right, friends. Does anybody have a question that they would love to ask while we are all still here because we are officially complete.

Joe Allen  1:32:04  
Yeah, for me, I would love to answer any that I can.

Unknown Speaker  1:32:09  
One of the questions that we had during that last session was when there's certain different types of meeting that you have like some are pattern based some sort of totally ad hoc. And what's the, the split between those types of meetings and how does it matter. Does it matter if we're online or not, is there a different way to address an ad hoc totally ad hoc versus a structured and pattern based meeting.

Joe Allen  1:32:42  
Yeah, I mean, for both of those you know for a pattern based meeting, you should have an agenda and you should have a procedure that you're, you're typically trying to follow and there's a variety of those at least has some fabulous ones that I that I like, you know, and so I think that's, that's the obvious one for the, for the informal meeting as it were, or the the check in that sort of thing. It's okay to have a pattern but there's also, there are some benefits to, you know, the balance of structure versus non structure. And so my advice on that would be for the chickens that sort of thing. Make sure that there's a purpose that you identify the purpose but don't over structure it, otherwise you, you lose some of the opportunity for, for some of the humanity that you might need. So it's one of the things where there's a balance so you don't want to over schedule everybody with all these check ins and blah blah blah. But you also need to have opportunities for people to bump into each other. And you know, in an environment that's not really pumpable.

Elise Keith  1:33:42  
You know one thing. We have a client that's been doing that I think is really brilliant and wonderful is in their regular team check in meeting.

Unknown Speaker  1:33:49  
They do.

Elise Keith  1:33:51  
The. They do the normal stuff like they do their greetings and their business and whatnot and then when they get to the section where they're trying to work together to clear blocks right which is a really typical thing to do in a in a business weekly team meeting you're like okay we're running into these problems, they identify what those blocks are and then they assign each of the key priority blocks to a different pair and send them off into breakouts pairs or dyads, where those people will work in twos and threes to to like make progress on that block. And this is doing a couple of things at the same time one it's getting them to mix up into different combinations so they're team building, and their, their familiarity of working together on something real goes way up so it's a great intimacy thing and what you know as you've just experienced that whatever happens in breakouts you can't control whatsoever. Create some of that outside of the leaders viewpoint sort of serendipity. And we find that people rate meetings higher when they get actually successful results out of them right that actually are useful to them that where they're making a contribution in a meaningful way at work and that way every single person is making meaningful contributions to something they need to get done for work. So it's like this, quadruple win of serendipity parallel processing, with the people all working on problems at once and using the technology in interesting ways.

Louis Vareilles  1:35:26  
Drew. What, what are the key tips you have for what you call hybrid meetings, could you already share some ideas, even though you are writing your book, I know that.

Joe Allen  1:35:36  
Yeah, there's a there's a chapter in the current book on hybrid meetings. It was, I wrote it back, you know, six months ago. Not quite six months ago but and so there's, you know some ideas there. So, the kind of the couple of things have already mentioned, which is strong facilitation whoever is responsible for the meeting has to be willing to say, you know, I need to hear from this group I need to hear from that group and then that has to happen because one of the things that the, that I'm researching right now is that the network of communication. When you have a face to face meeting the network is contained with face to face group. When you have a virtual meeting and everyone has a camera, you know where the lines can go. Once you now have a group here and a group here and a group here, you need to have people in each of those rooms who make sure that they don't end up creating their own little communication network and forget about the other nodes in the in the meeting and the other people in the meeting other groups or other individuals. So it's really, really important to have a very strong facilitation effort by the leader. And it's important to to train people on how to make sure that they stay involved. And so that's one of the, one of the things that I would say about this is a lot of the tips that I'm that I'm going to be writing about or providing that sort of thing. They're not always intuitive like, you know, face to face meeting a lot of them are to have a purpose blah blah blah. Those are all still true. But in these meetings, you're now these hybrid meetings, there's a skill set, and I'm one of the things that worries me is that, just like with the suddenly virtual situation where we went from, you know, not virtual to virtual. There was a skill gap, and there was a little bit of a decline in the people that kind of tested things out and figured it out and got a camera and got a got a chair that could sit in whatever right. We're gonna run into the same thing for organizations, when it comes to the hybrid meeting. The facilitations needed, recognizing the differences in communication, ensuring participation across the subgroups. Not forgetting about the person who's who's on the phone connected to one group but not connected to the whole group, you know, so there's a whole lot of a lot of attention that needs to be paid to, how do we prepare our people. To do this, we need to have a training associated with the unit anyway we need to be able to do that. Otherwise we'll see the same thing but I think it'll be more dramatic I think that was they'll see a dip in productivity by people in their collaborative efforts and that sort of thing, but it'll be more dramatic in this case because these are not skills that are, you know, that people already know that they've already prepared for and are able to just jump in and do.

Unknown Speaker  1:38:10  
That's a comment from someone that's been a remote participant. Before COVID something our typical way of doing that is you have a group that's meeting and a single camera at one point. And then when they have a speaker mic speakerphone and mic in the middle of the table, and everybody's volume drops for the people that are in there so at least having a headset for every participant, so we can at least hear everything. Yeah, plus there is at least one device an hour or something like that, that has a camera in it that rotates to face the person speaking. That sounds like good technology to me.

Joe Allen  1:38:53  
Yeah so yeah I haven't experienced it. Yeah, that's great, Jim, I appreciate that because that's you're right there are some technological things that we need to consider as well like volume control right making sure, because it's really hard to have a side conversation if you know everybody can hear it. Right. Whereas, in these hybrid settings if we don't have that set up like right now, it's really hard for me to have an actual physical conversation, you know, verbal conversation with Doug, for example, right now in this virtual meeting. Now I could do it, I could type it in the chat, sure, but I couldn't do it like this, you know, and without everybody else hearing it. And so I think you're right Jim that's a great idea a great thought there is if we might everybody. Now, those side conversations that are likely to happen in these virtual in these hybrid settings are going to be minimized because they don't want to necessarily have those heard just like you wouldn't want them heard if you're having a side conversation in a virtual meeting.

Elise Keith  1:39:46  
That said, I do know, we know the folks at Bell Labs and QB, which is another of the that one you can put an iPad on a robot and the robot. If you get the big one, it can like drive around and come visit you and stuff which is really

Unknown Speaker  1:39:59  
fun.

Elise Keith  1:40:01  
And there, the way in which people react to them is pretty mixed, it's it's a, it's a, you know, just like zoom was unnatural for us for a very long time those things are also unnatural in some really interesting ways so definitely not a not a solved problem. It'll be fascinating Joe you need to talk to the old people about what they've learned, as you work on your new book.

Unknown Speaker  1:40:25  
Yeah, yeah, and

Elise Keith  1:40:27  
Logitech has strong thoughts. You know whether those are good ideas or not.

Joe Allen  1:40:32  
Yeah I you know and I think at least you and I've talked about that some, some people might say you know what this is not working everybody go back to your, your one camera one person, you know situation, and that might be the right answer for some people, rather than having a hybrid situation.

Unknown Speaker  1:40:48  
Fabulous.

Elise Keith  1:40:49  
Well folks,

Unknown Speaker  1:40:50  
they Oh Do you have a question Are you saying,

Louis Vareilles  1:40:53  
yes. Teddy question Could you tell us a bit more about partnering with the center of meeting if effective this, what would that mean oh

Joe Allen  1:41:02  
yeah so. So as the director of center the Center for meeting effectiveness there's a variety of things that we do there from everything from simple observation of people's meetings then giving them some tips on them specifically that sort of thing to full scale, you know, large, you know, grant funded research initiatives, from you know by you know from from, you know, private and and and and government agencies, so it's everything in between. So if there's an interest in partnering with with with me in that regard, reach out to me via email, you can. Or, I think the email, put that in the chat or or whatnot but reach out to me that way. You can also find, find a link to my contact information on my website. And so yeah just connect with me and then we can have a conversation.

Unknown Speaker  1:41:47  
Thanks.

Elise Keith  1:41:52  
All right everybody thank you so much for hanging with us. Thank you for all of your ideas and your contributions. Lisa is going to get us a copy of her cartoons soon.

Have a wonderful rest of your day, evening, really appreciate your time. Yep.

Unknown Speaker  1:42:15  
Hi.

Unknown Speaker  1:42:15  
Hi.

Unknown Speaker  1:42:17  
Thank you.

Unknown Speaker  1:42:21  
Thanks Linda Bye.

Unknown Speaker  1:42:22  
Okay.