9 Ways to Avoid the Remote Meeting Death Spiral
By: Erik Johnson
Tags: Remote Working, Management, Management And Leadership, Meetings, Productivity

Everyone who works in tech has been stuck at one time or another in the dreaded Remote Meeting Death Spiral. That’s when the people in your meeting disengage and start answering email, doing other work, getting on social media, writing snarky Medium articles, etc. instead of focusing on what’s being said. Whether or not they SHOULD be disengaging doesn’t matter at this point, because once enough people have disengaged, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — your meeting has become useless and you’re wasting everyone’s time.

The Death Spiral has two main causes:

Cause 1: The meeting didn’t need to happen

This happens when you are addressing something that doesn’t require a meeting. Either you’re trying to tackle an issue that’s “too big” and needs to be broken into small chunks to discuss productively, or you’re addressing something “too small” that doesn’t require everyone’s time.

Big remote meetings should be the exception, not the rule.

With modern communication tools, unless you are holding an active discussion that requires fluid input from every person on the call, you probably don’t need the meeting. If asynchronous communication would work, do that instead. If you only need feedback from 3 people, don’t invite 8 to the call. Also, if it’s a big important issue that you really need 8 people’s full attention for, if at all possible get them in the same room.

Cause 2: The meeting is not being facilitated well

Meme Morpheus is harsh, but fair

This happens waaaayyy more frequently. It’s an easy trap to fall into — not everyone’s connected to the call, so you awkwardly wait and then someone starts talking about their weekend, then someone else has problems connecting, and before too long, you’re 15 minutes into the meeting and absolutely nothing of value is getting done. This is a facilitation problem and it is fixable — but you might have to step outside of your comfort zone to make it happen.

Here’s how:

1. Start and end on time — Once in my teaching career, we were in a long “vision and culture” meeting being led by a new principal. The principal had charged us with creating norms based on our values that we would use to interact with each other. Different groups put up norms like: “We respect each other,” “We value everyone’s contributions,” “We are a community,” etc. My suggested norm was: “We start and end meetings on time.” The principal frowned at that (since the workshop had started late and was clearly going to run over), but that norm garnered far more votes from the attendees than any other. Because frankly, if you can’t start and end on time, you’re not showing respect or valuing other people —and it’s often a symptom of a larger culture/communication problem.

What to do (start): Send out meeting details and info well ahead of time (not 1 minute prior). If possible, designate someone as the “cat-herder” to ping people and troubleshoot any connection issues. Sign yourself in early and start the meeting no later than 5 minutes past the posted time. If you truly need to delay b/c of a key person who isn’t there, wait up to 10 minutes and then just re-schedule.

What to do (end): Time-check 15 minutes prior to the end of the meeting so you have time to address important issues. If you’re in danger of running over (~5 minutes left), ask to schedule a follow-up (which may just be an extension of the meeting time if the key people are available right then).

2. Ask directed questions — Without visual cues, everyone is reluctant to respond to an open question for fear that someone else is about to speak. Every question you ask should include a person’s name. Any question that starts with “Can somebody…?” or “Can anyone…?” is going to land like a lead balloon. If you can’t attach a name to your question, you probably shouldn’t ask it.

Practice these stems: “[Olaf], can you speak to this?”, “[Beatrice], is this something you can handle?” Otherwise, you’re asking for a ton of dead air (or for the most domineering person on the call to take over.)

Even Hollywood’s most boring teacher ever figured this technique out.

3. Explicitly structure participation— I was on a daily standup call where time and time again, the leader would say: “Let’s go around the circle and give our status.” In person that would be fine, but remote, there’s no circle! No one knows when to talk! Same thing when having discussions — tell people what kind of participation you want from them at the outset.

What to do: Just like the previous tip, use names. Work from an attendee list and call people out by name: “[Klaus], what are you working on today?” When asking for feedback, be explicit: “I’d like to hear from [these people] first, then [these other people]” or “I’d like to hear from someone who agrees with [X] first, then from those that disagree.” Once the discussion starts, you can step back and let people talk fluidly, but it’s your job to kick things off right by giving people explicit cues.

4. If you’re using new tech, do a dry run prior to the meeting — Call your mom to try out your new join.me account if you need to— don’t make the CEO and 10 other people watch you try to figure out how to share your screen or remember your password.

Likewise, if you’re using a collaborative tool like Gdocs, Mural.ly, Trello, Invision, etc., give everyone a task to do PRIOR TO the meeting— that way you can troubleshoot problems with them individually instead of having someone feel embarrassed in front of the whole meeting if they can’t connect or find the right feature. If you do wind up having to onboard people in the call, prepare and share an “onboarding” document ahead of time (with screenshots). If you must do it in real-time, share your screen and walk people through it, but plan for that to take at least double the amount of time you would think.

5. Have a concrete plan — Send SOMETHING out ahead of time: A written agenda, a bulleted list of goals, even a one-sentence description in the meeting invite. Then remind people of the purpose once the call starts — If it’s 10 minutes in and you haven’t articulated the purpose of the meeting, everyone will be on twitter/facebook/reddit/ESPN. Start the call with “Here’s why we’re having this meeting,” followed immediately by “Here’s what we need to have accomplished by the end of this call.” Re-state as necessary if people go off-topic.

6. Take visible notes — Google Docs, InVision, Trello, screen sharing a Word doc, whatever. Take notes during the meeting in such a way that everyone can see them and if appropriate, add to them. This insures that you are accurately representing what was said and provides you a document to go off of when you summarize the meeting. If this proves too challenging (and it can be), have a designated note-taker do this for you. If it’s distracting to have the notes constantly visible, only display them at the end. But do display them at some point — this gives people the opportunity to address anything you haven’t interpreted correctly.

7. Don’t let people just ramble on — This can be awkward because interrupting is “rude” and there’s no good way to be smooth about it over a call. But while it’s rude to cut someone off, it’s worse to force 8 people to sit and listen to something they really shouldn’t have to. At the beginning of the call, say: “During the meeting, I may have to interrupt and ask people to take certain issues offline (see #8). I don’t mean to be rude, but I need to make sure we hit our goals (see #4) and respect everyone’s time. I hope that’s okay.” Trust me, it will be okay.

Everyone knows the person that just won’t stop talking — that’s why this is the most quoted bit of any Adam Sandler movie (lots of reasons, actually)

8. Use a Parking Lot — The Parking Lot is a semi-mythical place where complex, thorny, or irrelevant issues go. “Let’s put that in the Parking Lot,” or “Is that a Parking Lot issue?” or “That’s a really important issue! Can we schedule a call specifically to discuss it?” are good things to say when someone brings up something that threatens to sideline the actual purpose of the meeting. Keep a written record of anything that gets sent to the Parking Lot (see #6) and follow up if appropriate. While it’s okay to let irrelevant issues “die on the vine” so to speak, if you do that too often (or with issues that people actually care about), you’re setting yourself up for massive derailment in future meetings.

9. End the call with a summary and concrete next steps — Re-state the purpose of the meeting and whether or not it was achieved. Review 1–5 key takeaways. Talk about what happens next, which could be follow-up actions, a date to expect deliverables, or (horrors!) another meeting. It’s best to do this on the call (using your notes from #6) , or someone might drop off and miss something they’re supposed to be doing. Add task items to Trello (or whatever) right then and there. Then, send an actual email with this same information out afterwards.

… and there you have it

None of this is complex or particularly hard, but you have be intentional, plan ahead, and consistently apply these principles. Otherwise you’ll find yourself sitting in front of your computer, rambling on to fill the dead air, and wondering why no one else on the line seems to care about the project.

If that happens once or twice, maybe your team was having a bad day, or their connections kept dropping, or you made the mistake of scheduling a meeting during March Madness, but if it keeps happening over and over, take a good look in the mirror and think hard about what you can do to fix it.

Thanks for reading! If you made it this far, please recommend so others can see it as well. You can see more about how we do things at purposeux.com, email me directly at erik@purposeux.com, or follow me on twitter, where I’m much less verbose.