Is there room for calm in your meetings?

As a remote worker and leader, I felt challenged reading this post:

Grounding Practices for Zooms + Meetings, And Why They Matter Now

Mora makes some valid points about giving your team space to breathe, time to think, and an opportunity to be grounded for a few moments, rather than feeling constantly on edge.

All that nervous energy is trying to tell us something. WE ARE MAD, SAD, AND DISTRACTED. WE ARE FREAKED OUT. This makes it hard to be present, concentrate, and make good decisions.

Mora’s advice is to slow down, pause after someone finishes speaking, take a breath before coming off mute, and slow your speech.

I think those are great ideas that I plan to spend a little more time on and bring to the meetings I host in order to bring calm to the whole team. But then I started thinking about the many meetings I take part in each week, and how few of them feel anything like that. They ooze anxiety, tension, and focus on “getting through” the agenda at lightning speed before the next meeting comes at us with even more of the same.

They make us feel more distracted and uneasy, not less.

The problem isn’t just the meeting, though; it’s the entire culture.

1. We need meetings that could have been handled by email, because no one reads their freaking email anymore!!
2. We have so many meetings that we wind up squeezing more agenda items than we have time for.
   1. How many monthly 30-minute meetings have an agenda that is not possible to cover in that time? But we can’t schedule another one until next month.
   2. How do you pause when there literally isn’t time for it?
   3. How do you make room for others to speak when the initial presentation is really longer than the meeting time?

Here are some suggestions from me.

1. Read your email. Respond to your email. Maybe you would have fewer people trying to schedule meetings with you if you responded to any other method of communication.
2. Related: have other effective methods of communication, such as email, chat, shared task lists, etc. Anything that allows everyone to have current information outside of a meeting.
3. Run through any information you need to present.
   1. As a former trainer and somewhat frequent public speaker, I know there is no substitute for knowing how much time you have and how to fit what you have to say into that time. Too many people throw together some slides to share information in a meeting and clearly do not know how long it will take to get through.
4. Prioritize meetings to only the most important topics. If you have 30 minutes and five agenda items for everyone to discuss, the last two aren’t happening. Accept it. Move those to another platform. (Maybe not always, but that seems common to me.)

Truly, if you want to use AI, use it to help with this. Use it to summarize information outside meetings, coordinate information without needing to meet, help design an agenda that fits the time available, and sit in the meeting to help you stay on topic.

Your team deserves a chance to breathe. Meeting with them should be an opportunity to provide calm, clarity, and thoughtful decision-making processes. If your meetings aren’t doing that, it might be time to rethink.

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