I'm willing to bet that in the last quarter, everyone has attended at least one meeting and left thinking "this meeting could have been an email". Humans have gotten considerably "busier" in the last several generations. In many industries, being "busy" is considered a badge of honor and one that folks happily wear as a misplaced sign of commitment, productivity, importance, and wealth. The result, of course, is a greater sense of the value of our time and the desire to not see it wasted. Despite this, we often hold on to outdated organizational modalities that leave us meeting regularly simply because it's what we've always done. We sit around a table and rattle off summaries of our work, often reading from an agenda. Do we really need to be together for that sort of work? Could it have been an email?
At that heart of this question is the balance between synchronous and asynchronous work. For some tasks, it makes sense to be together and work together in real time to address an issue, generate new ideas, or solve a problem. We've taken note of the value of this time together even more profoundly following the forced adjustments to remote and hybrid work stemming from the pandemic. We've all commented on how the Zoom experience is significantly different than that of an in-person experience. If you're anything like me, you're still finding yourself in in-person meetings, commenting on how nice it is to see people face-to-face, to see the "whole" person!
In many other instances, the work can be done collaboratively but need not take place in real time. This has been a marked shift in many industries and the value of collaborative technological solutions such as Google Docs, Microsoft Teams, and Slack signify the importance of this style of work. Sometimes it's just easier to add our own content into a larger project and allow others to comment on it as we comment on their work. At other times, our work can happen fully independent of anyone else's work. Asynchronous work has been around for quite some time, of course, but we are only more recently beginning to question whether we need to be in an office together if we're simply going to be working in separate spaces all day, staring at our own computer monitors. I'm sure we've all asked that question at one point or another, eh?
Why, then, are we coming together? Why should we be meeting? We meet to build community and sense of belonging. We meet to build relationships with one another and look for opportunities to grow together as an organization. What we do can be shared in an email, but why we do it is most effectively answered in community with those impacted by the decision.
Think back to your education history. What made your favorite classes so meaningful? I'm sure you were at least tangentially interested in the content, but I'm willing to bet it had more to do with the professor and other students in the class. You formed a connection with others in the class, and the content seemed to come alive. You found yourself asking better questions, trying to understand not only the facts but how all the pieces fit together. If education was only about memorizing facts (we can discuss the flaws in the U.S. educational system at another point), we could simply check out the books we needed from the library. However, the coming together of a community of scholars to collectively understand and apply knowledge transcends the mere facts on a page. We should strive for our meetings to cultivate that same sense of wonder and engagement.
We have an opportunity to distinguish facts from culture every time to host a meeting. We have an opportunity to reiterate our values and beliefs as an organization and explore how our decisions are guided by those values and beliefs. We have an opportunity to build community and strengthen relationships. We have an opportunity to leave people saying "that was worth my time" instead of "that could have been an email". Set your agenda accordingly!
