Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person meetings have become rare. Despite efforts to bring team members back together in some enterprises, face-to-face meetings are too often the exception.
It’s easy to understand why this is so. From the perspective of the enterprise, the much wider geography made available by remote work is compelling. For individuals, the time spent commuting is not missed.
For much of our working time, virtual meetings are perfectly acceptable, desirable for the reasons above and others. However, there’s something missing. People can build relationships remotely, but they are rarely as solid and trust-based as those founded in-person.
Face-to-face, people generate an average of 30% more ideas. Teams that meet face-to-face, even as infrequently as once each quarter, are more likely to trust one another, avoiding the communications and productivity deficits that flow from suspicion and distrust. Together in a meeting room, people are much less likely to be distracted by the many forms of multitasking available to them in their virtual spaces.
The two most valuable ways that teams can spend time in-person are planning sessions — ideation with whiteboard, markers and Post-It Notes — and, perhaps more importantly, dedicated social time. The team-building role of time specifically dedicated to social encounters can’t be overstated.
What to do? First of all, if you are a leader in an organization, develop a business case for teams to meet in-person at least quarterly, budgeting for travel, meals and supplies. For meetings that remain virtual, encourage a culture of “video on.” Remember that the communications bandwidth of a Zoom or MS Teams session is no better than an old-style conference call if people are audio only.
You may face resistance: People have reshaped their working lives around remote work. Many team members will not want to return to in-person meetings several days a week. The good news is that less-frequent face-to-face meetings with team members can be just as effective in the ways that count.
2 thoughts on “Opinion: Face-to-face meetings matter”
I disagree about social time. Forced social time is an easy way to make many people feel they are wasting their time and unstructured social time is worse as it often makes people from historically excluded groups unsafe. It is important to build rapport-building activities into activities that have an explicitly business result-enhancing purpose beyond “team-building”.
In any enterprise, social time is pretty much guaranteed to be structured. The onus is on the facilitator to ensure both that people feel they are getting value, and that exclusion for any reason is not an option.
Tying all social time to “business result-enhancing” activities risks losing the team-building benefits of devoting time to socializing in the first place. It’s important for people on teams to get to know one another as people: their effectiveness working together will almost always be enhanced by that opportunity.