Technology allowing businesses to hold virtual meetings with employees who are scattered across the country or even globally provides enormous benefits, including substantial savings in both travel time and cost. But there are downsides to meeting virtually, not the least of which is the struggle to hold attendees’ attention.
The challenge of keeping virtual meeting participants from multitasking presents leaders with a two-pronged question as they plan their 2016 meeting strategies: Is the meeting agenda important enough to bring the group together offsite, or is it so light on critical information that a virtual meeting isn’t even necessary?
“If people are multitasking on your calls, first ask yourself if they are right — is Facebook or the latest email or text actually more interesting and relevant than your meeting? If it is then you can’t really blame people for multitasking — much as we would like to,” says Kevan Hall, author of “Speed Lead: Faster, Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects and Teams in Complex Companies.”
Llamas gotta’ eat
The problem was highlighted in a recent New York Times article in which a half-dozen or more virtual workers confessed to tackling everything from cleaning house to doing yoga during conference calls. John Halamka, a chief information officer for a Boston hospital, said he spends approximately six hours a week on conference calls from his Sherborn, Mass., farm, and he uses the time to sand and varnish office furniture, walk his dogs or tend to his llamas — restocking the hay feeders, filling water buckets and shoveling manure.
A San Francisco marketing consultant who spoke to the Times for the same article admitted to falling asleep during one call with London-based client and she was awakened by her own snoring. (In her defense, the time difference meant she was on the call in the middle of the night.)
Some companies are shifting to videoconferencing in attempt to resolve the wandering ways of their meeting attendees, but participants often opt out of the video component claiming their service is not strong enough.
If a manager senses attendees are checking out mentally from a virtual meeting, something should be said, advises Hall. “Once you have done what you can to make your calls engaging, then it is time to call out others who are multitasking. It may be that they don’t need to be at your meeting, but if they do, then they really need to be present throughout. If it’s important, it needs our full attention; if it is not important, then we shouldn’t be having a meeting to discuss it.”
