I typically attend something in the region of 30 online meetings a week. A handful of these meetings are hybrid – with participants all across the world. Championing working from home and with responsibility for a few hundred people means I get the joy of meeting after meeting. Some I chair, many I don’t. Some are ‘all hands’ (don’t get me on the inclusivity issues that phrase brings), many deeply technical and a fair few I wish never happened in the first place.
Add this number up, multiply by a career’s worth of such experiences, and I have literally tens of thousands of examples to justify my top 10 pet online irritations.
So here goes. These are the people that irritate the hell out of me:
1. The latecomers. I have never turned up late to a meeting in my life. It’s rude and it’s disrespectful. It doesn’t matter if that meeting is with a client or a colleague, just turn up on time, please.
2. The multi-taskers. I’ve got a full set of academic qualifications – from school to uni I ticked all the boxes. But because I was quite idle at school I even had my IQ tested (I was too cool for homework, idiot me) to see if I warranted extra support. Turned out it was worryingly high. But here’s the thing, I can’t multi-task and nor can you. If you have other stuff to do, don’t turn up.
3. The bores. Lengthy monologues are dull. Delivered without any intonation or pitch changes they are dull squared. I’ve a pal who is a sports commentator and runs training courses. I asked him to summarise the skill in 10 words. He said: ‘Speak with 25% more enthusiasm than you would normally use’. Try that when you speak – humans are attuned to enthusiasm in voices. Give it a go, it works.
4. The 15 minuters. This one is a personal bug bear for me. If I attend an hour-long meeting and the last quarter starts with the words ‘we have 15 minutes left’, I leave. Why? Because what I am hearing is ‘I’ve got 15 minutes left in my diary and though we’re pretty much done here, I want to bang on a bit more.’
5. The Interrupters. One of my favourite jokes at primary school goes like this: ‘Knock, knock’
‘Who’s there’
‘Interrupting Sheep’
‘Interrupting Sheep wh……’
BAAAAAAAAAA’.
Geddit? Point is that if a colleague is speaking then don’t talk right over them. It’s rude and should only be done in an emergency to neutralise the 3s, 4s or sometimes 1s. But we can all be better than that.
6. The Ignorers. One of the great things about online meetings is mostly you can see the faces of the participants. Better than that, they all face you – apart from the 2s who will be facing another screen as they are ‘multi tasking‘. So when someone has spoken, just take a quick look about and see if a hand is raised, or lips are moving. Chances are they want to say something. Try listening – you never know it might be useful.
7. The patronisers. I’ve worked in tech for more years than I care to remember (or increasingly can actually remember). There is little new in this world, so it is with some irritation that I recall numerous occasions when the bleedin’ obvious is explained slowly and deliberately by people who really should a: know better and b: stop being 3s.
8. The jargoneasters. This one is my absolute favourite. Hiding behind nonsense – ‘platformisation of generative AI paradigms’ anyone? You know the type. Not long ago the b/s generators only had three columns – now most have four so you can ‘disambiguate cloudified virtual clusters’. Oh stop it. Just try saying that to your gran and she’ll put you right, right?
9. The misogynists. Perhaps the dullest of the meeting behaviours. Meetings are not a contact sport and all views, irrespective of the utterer, are mostly valid (excluding 3s, 5s, 6s, 7s and 8s obvs) and it’s so dull to have to intervene to make sure inclusion and diversity of thinking are, erm, included.
And finally…
10. The narcissists. People who think that they are god’s gift to the world of meetings and that their behaviour cannot be improved in any way. (No, there’s no irony here, what are you talking about?)
Almost everyone can fall into one of these buckets at any given time (apart from me, of course). But for mere mortals, that’s why we’ve created Meeting Canary, a new way to nudge meeting participants to behave in a more productive and inclusive way.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure is a truism, but it’s also very helpful to know when your own behaviour isn’t quite what you thought it was. Seeing that you are hogging a call, noting that you say gendered words sometimes, seeing that a bright colleague is never saying anything – that’s what we’re trying to help with – not judge you on.
Unless you are a tremendous misogynistic bore, then you can go into politics. For a bit.