Why Meetings Are Boring

Meetings are boring when there is nothing at stake for the participants.

The “meeting that should have been an email” absolutely exists, and chances are you’ve put one on the calendar (we all have). I’ve even led meetings where I found my own mind wandering, because the content or format wasn’t particularly engaging. I can’t imagine what my team was thinking.

What does it mean when nothing is at stake?

The outcome of the meeting doesn’t have any measurable or meaningful consequence for the participants. They are warm bodies in seats just absorbing information that does not result in a decision, nor does it impact immediate priorities. The information is just… informative.

Status updates, recurring team check-ins, and even all-hands or department-wide meetings often fall into this category. So why do we continue to call them? Lack of trust, mostly. We don’t trust that our teams will get the information unless they have a Zoom window open, looking at slides. When I put it that way, it probably sounds a bit ridiculous — because it is.

I’m not anti-meeting. But I am anti-boring meeting. If you’re still reading, you probably are too. So here’s what I do to avoid them.

Discussion Meetings vs Decision Meetings

We’ve all been given the advice to decline any meeting without an agenda, but I’ve attended plenty of crappy meetings that had a clear agenda. Beyond the sequence of what is going to be talked about, a key expectation is whether the meeting is a decision or discussion meeting.

Decision meetings should be short -- 30 min max. This is achievable when the discussion required to make the decision happens outside of the meeting. The other important factor here is that someone must be responsible for making a decision. You can try to make the decision democratically first, but for stickier topics, that won’t always work, and someone needs to be responsible. That directly responsible individual should be called out and made obvious to the team early on in the process.

Golden Rule: the bigger the group, the slower the decision-making process. I’ll cover some approaches to deal with that in the Format section below.

Discussion meetings are helpful only when the material is complex enough that it can’t be handled async. Otherwise, we’re squarely in “meeting that could have been a Google Doc” territory. For discussion meetings, create an accompanying doc that has all of the research, resources, and any other materials. The meeting facilitator should send this out with plenty of time for the participants to review and comment — but also with a deadline for when input is due. Based on the async discussion, you’ll be able to set a clearer agenda of the topics that warrant discussion in a meeting, and make an agenda from there. The outcome of this meeting is not a decision, but rather to make sure all of the information is on the table so that the decision maker can make the decision.

Splitting up the discussion and decision allows you to avoid the situation where the impacted team members get into depth while the rest of the team’s eyes glaze over, because they’re only interested in the outcomes. There’s nothing at stake for them in the discussion.

You can use this technique on a micro level as well. For example, for items raised in retro, it can be helpful to understand if the team wants to surface it for discussion and awareness, or if a decision needs to be made.

Format

Switching from one talking head to another is incredibly boring, even if the content may be interesting. Zoom meetings often just mirror an in-person meeting — that is, a bunch of people sitting in a room together — when there are a lot more interesting facilitation techniques that you can use in order to keep people engaged and get to the outcome you want faster.

Small groups

Remember the golden rule: bigger groups mean slower decisions. So make smaller groups. If there’s a decision of sizeable importance, instead of trying to get 8+ people to come to agreement, I might split the team into groups of 2-3 and give them 10 minutes to come up with a recommendation (remember — at this point, all of the information to make the decision has been covered in a discussion meeting). After the time is up, all groups share recommendations with one another. It’s surprising how often this has resulted in all teams coming up with the same recommendation, even with fairly controversial topics.

If they don’t, then you have the opportunity to have more targeted conversations about the disagreements, or skip directly to the decision-making taking their input and making a final call.

Virtual whiteboards

In a discussion meeting, a common failure mode is that teams keep returning to the same points over and over again, or the conversation feels very unbalanced (both in terms of participants as well as content). Using a virtual whiteboard can help keep conversation on track and see where people already agree.

This can be lightweight: on a Miro board, I create a bunch of sticky notes and the team drops in their ideas in a 5-7 minute brainstorming session. Then we categorise the topics, and start either with the common ones first, or the most controversial.

You can also create more structured exercises, like spider charts, quadrants, and a number of different column formats. Depending on the meeting type, a tool like Retrium can be helpful here, or you can roll your own.

Chat, polls, voting, reactions

Zoom and Teams have plenty of built in features that allow people to give input without having to unmute themselves or wait until a break in the conversation to get some airtime. You can use emoji reactions in Zoom to take polls, utilise chat to get simultaneous input from participants, or even add quizzes, shared notes, and other stuff via Zoom’s app marketplace. Some of this will seem a bit cheesy at the beginning, but it doesn’t hurt to experiment.

Independent work

Just because you’re in a group meeting doesn’t mean that everything has to be done in a group. Sometimes it’s useful to give people 5-10 minutes to read something, draft a diagram, or answer some reflection questions to prep for discussion. Bonus: you can share your computer sound only in a Zoom meeting (Share Screen > Advanced > Computer Audio) and play some worktime music during these times. This is my default worktime song.

All of these different formats keep people’s brains from melting away as they watch talking heads rotate across the screen. Remember: if you’re bored in a meeting, everyone else probably is too.