Fun Fixes for Meetings
In last week’s post I pointed out the historical irony of meetings, at least that it was ironic that meetings might have once been seen as helpful, important, and useful. By and large, that isn’t the case in today’s climate of meetings. In fact, it looks like meetings became so bad that there are approaches developed, like SCRUM meetings, to make sure meetings were fast, to the point, and done quickly—but I repeat myself.
Since I’m a philosopher, I like to think in generalities. It’s both a strength and weakness. But the general factor that seems to be the issue in many meetings now, is that the information dump is impersonal. In fact, it’s less than impersonal, or perhaps worse. It’s that the meetings don’t really need people at all. The meetings, in focusing only on the emailable content, make having people there unnecessary. No wonder people get bored, lose interest, or more importantly, lose hope that there will be anything worthwhile to go to the meeting for. And that’s where the solution to our problem with meetings lies: people. Meetings need to draw in people, be attractive to people, and enjoyable for people. If you find a way to do all three, then you’ve really hit a homerun.
One thing that we all like is humor, laughter, and fun. So it isn’t too much of a stretch to think that if we put a little of these into our meetings, it would make them more attractive to the people in attendance. But don’t think that the meeting is a place to try out your new stand-up routine. Approaching it in this way would be unhelpful and likely would create effects opposite of what you’d like. Think about levity, being lighthearted, or just throwing in a good old incongruity here or there. The main thing is to ease into the humor and levity. If your meeting culture is pretty bad, as I assume many of our meeting cultures are, then heading with jokes ablaze won’t work too well. Ease into it.
Some of the easiest and most “low-hanging of fruits” that one can rely on to create levity, or perhaps just a less restrictive environment would be to begin the meeting with a story unrelated to the agenda. Maybe a personal story from the person running the meeting. It could be funny, or not, but just make sure it’s short, personal, and relatable. Invite someone to share one of their stories at the next meeting. In a sense, think approach as an extended set of icebreakers. Even if your team knows one another well, it would be good to help them see the people the work with in ways that go beyond the regular ways they interact based on work.
You can try to bake in clever messages or Easter Eggs into the agenda. One I’ve always wanted to try is hide a message in an email that was in white font. The only way someone could find it is do a select all and the highlighting would find it. You could also make all the first words of every sentence make a message. Or, if you’re worried that people aren’t reading emails thoroughly, do what this professor did and tie a cash prize to some part of the document’s content. But give people a reason to read that’s beyond the information. I’ve often advised people to make sure that their fingerprints are over what they wrote, rather than being some sort of copied and pasted content. I know that worked for me when I had to regularly communicate with 600+ honors students via email.
Once you’ve done all of that, it’s not too hard to start adding in some humor and levity. Put a meme in a message or agenda. Tell a funny-to-you story. Encourage others to share. Finally, take some time in meetings to give people kudos on their work, or let them broadcast to everyone stuff they’ve accomplished. But remember, whatever you do, remember that the meetings are run by people for people. Make sure that you put their needs front and center and we’ll start overcoming and changing the awful culture of meetings we’ve created.