How often do you sit in a meeting with 5-15 minutes (or more) of technical difficulty?
“Can you hear me?”
“I’ve got video, but no audio – can you check your settings?”
– Insert your hilarious story here, I’m sure you’ve got one.
Stumbling through the first minutes of a meeting is almost expected or commonplace these days. While these moments can serve as good ice breakers, or get a refill on your coffee – they take up valuable time for your team. Once a meeting starts poorly it is hard to get it back on track, assuming your team waits around for 15 minutes for you to sort out your technical trouble.
In the Fast Company article “The seven sins of Deadly Meetings” (https://www.fastcompany.com/26726/seven-sins-deadly-meetings) the top sin is “People don’t take meetings seriously. They arrive late, leave early, and spend most of their time doodling.” The key to changing that is running a crisp meeting. If you’re looking to change the pace and mood of your meetings, it’s very hard to do when you start with technical challenges every time.
The second sin is “Meetings are too long. They should accomplish twice as much in half the time.”
Some high-performing teams keep track of the cost of each meeting at the bottom of their agenda. They do a calculation of the salary costs of each individual participating and if 8 people are in the meeting, they tally the cost of 1 hour x 8 people and add that dollar value at the bottom of meeting notes or agenda. It’s a sobering and motivating reminder of the value of your time. As your team grows and you spend more time in meetings where some of your team is remote, it can be useful (and gut-wrenching) to calculate the cost of wasted time on technical difficulty. A useful exercise would be to take stock of how many meetings your team participates in a week where there are remote connections and figure out what you could save by knocking 10 or 20 minutes off each meeting. Or how much more you could do with an extra 20 minutes in a meeting?
The Harvard Business Review has a great calculator you can use if you’d like to see what your meetings are worth: https://hbr.org/2016/01/estimate-the-cost-of-a-meeting-with-this-calculator
Clear communication is critical
Beyond the first minutes of technical difficulty, clear communication amongst your team is critical. I’m sure you’ve had an experience of a video chat or a phone call where the audio was poor or the quality of the video was low, and you were straining to listen in to a call. Take a moment to consider the posture and mindset you’re in while you’re straining to listen. Is it thoughtful, contemplative, and creative? Or hard-pressed and stressed? If you’re sharing new ideas or collaborating with your team – you need solid communication tools to be at your creative best and approach new ideas with an open, thoughtful perspective. If you’re trying to solve a key problem on a short timeline, it can get frustrating very quickly if you’re repeating key details. If you’re interested in a high-performing team, then providing high-performing tools is a great start.
Dedicated teleconference tools aren’t for every business. You may glide along smoothly with free tools and be able to dip into communication quickly from your phone. However as your team grows and you have regular communication, especially where that communication requires collaboration, open thinking, creativity, and clarity it may be useful to explore a Telepresence Solution with dedicated high-quality equipment, fast connections, and simple and easy-to-use controls. Of course, you’ll have to think up a new icebreaker for your meeting and make sure your coffee is full before you start.