by John J. Walters

I admit it.  The title is not clever at all, especially given that conference calls are just impersonal meetings (so I’m just stealing my own website’s motto).  But I’ve tipped my hand.  I’ve already given you posts on my two favorite meeting tricks: egg timers and talking sticks.  So what now?

I’ll tell you what now.  I complain.  And, truth be told, I don’t have much to complain about.  The vast majority of my meetings have always been in person or one-on-one phone calls.  In fact, I’ve only been involved in a handful of conference calls, and most of them have gone rather well.  So why complain?  I complain on your behalf — because I know the vast majority of conference calls suck.

Recently, I was involved in a rather large conference call with my book team and two representatives from the publishing company.  That meant that there were nine people on the phone lines at once, which initially made me nervous.  Things actually ran fairly well, much to my surprise, so for your benefit (and my own as well) I’m going to conduct a quick and dirty postmortem.

What Went Well

• We had very few instances of people talking over one another.  This, however, may be due to the fact that there were three main talkers and six main listeners.
• We stayed on topic.  With the exception of a little chit-chat in the beginning to get reacquainted (our team hasn’t been all together in the same room for over a year now), we kept it business-oriented throughout.
• We accomplished what we had set out to do.  The main purpose of the meeting was to develop a plan of attack to move forward with editing after the first round of reviews.  We did exactly that.

What Went Not-So-Well

• The meeting took an hour.  While I know a lot of people are used to hour-long phone calls being the norm in the business world, my experience dabbling in journalism and interviewing has taught me that anything over 15 minutes is pushing it, and anything over half-an-hour is problematic.
• I barely heard from most people.  And I’m not sure I even heard from everyone.  Maybe everyone opened their mouths once during the hour, but gone were the days of everyone weighing in on an issue that called for diverse opinions.
• It took us a long time to get in touch after the meeting — almost a week to get the notes emailed to everyone.  Luckily, this project is something of a labor of love for all of us, but had this been a standard work meeting we would have already forgotten everything by then.

In my search for ideas on improving conference calls, the top few search results pretty much all say the same thing.  Two articles in particular stand out, mostly because they say the same things as the others but better in some way.  But the advice can be distilled down to a very short list:

• Do your prep work and prepare/distribute an agenda in advance.
• Make sure everyone is prepared.
• Stay on topic.
• Don’t be long-winded or talk just to talk.
• Keep things as brief as possible.
• Ask people for feedback to keep them engaged (when appropriate).
• Make sure to follow up as soon as possible.

Not surprisingly, these are the same words of wisdom any experienced team lead will give you about meetings in general.  The same goes for conference calls only more so, and I humbly suggest that MeetingCaptain could help you with many of the above as it marches slowly but surely towards its beta launch.

Now all that remains is to figure out a way to solve the problem of people talking over one another, or being too shy to speak up when they don’t know who they may interrupt…

by John J. Walters

I cannot take credit for this title.  That honor belongs to Dan Saffer, who created the term “topless meetings” in 2008 to refer to meetings where laptops (and other technological distractions) are forbidden.

I know, I know.  I was a little disappointed too.  This is, after all, the internet.  Yet while you never know what you’re going to find on the high seas of the unpoliced web, I can assure you that I will be keeping the lasciviousness on this blog to a bear minimum.  Pun very much intended.

I thought it was fitting, since we talked last week about using technology to help you get your meetings in order, to talk about the flip side of the coin this week.  Technology can be a great way to help you get organized but it can also be a horrible distraction.  This is where topless meetings come in.  The goal is to remove all the distractions that come from wading into a meeting with your laptop and your cell phone.

To do this requires preparation not just on the part of the meeting creator but on the part of each attendee.  You can’t just show up, armed with all the data contained in your laptop and on the internet, expecting to just fudge it until you can catch up with the conversation and contribute something you just pulled up.  You need to know the subject backwards and forwards, much like was necessary when you took a test or gave a presentation in front of the class (back when you were in school).

Actually, I am surprised more people don’t make this standard practice.  In spite of their usefulness, laptops and cell phones have very few places in a meeting.  Sure, it’s reasonable for someone to be using a laptop for a presentation or for someone else to be taking notes (only one person need take notes in a meeting — having as many sets of individualized notes as there are attendees is unnecessary, provided you have good communication and follow-up after the meeting concludes), but aside from that the primary job of everyone else in attendance is to pay attention and contribute what they can.  Not to answer emails, not to “look” busy as they type away on their little keyboard, and definitely not to surf the web as I saw so many students doing when I was in college.

They may require some extra preparation and they may be met with some initial resistance, but topless meetings can help your team communicate better and faster if implemented properly.  Isn’t that worth it?