Doing the ResearchHow meetings affect corporate successPlus: 4 tips for a successful online meeting

21 April 2022, by Anna Priebe

Photo: UHH/Lutsch

Meetings allow for the observation of many psychological phenomena. Digital meetings pose special challenges.

Many employees spend several hours per week in meetings. How can meetings, virtual or in person, be effective? Prof. Dr. Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock and her Work and Organizational Psychology research team are studying this very question. Our series Doing the Research introduces research projects at Universität Hamburg.

What makes meetings so interesting as a research topic?

Team meetings are a locus of interaction in organizations and allow for the observation of a multitude of relevant phenomena. For example, you can see how managers affect their employees and how well teams work together. This makes many of the factors for success known to be crucial to a team’s efficacy and organization and that we can normally study only by using surveys highly visible in concrete situations.

So, you go to the meetings and observe?

We record the meetings and the employees’ behavior, which we then analyze using software-based methods. We focus either on verbal or nonverbal content and try in this way to systematically understand behavioral patterns that you can compare in different meetings and various organizational contexts.

For example, we found out that gripe sessions are common to meetings across fields and hierarchies. Someone begins to complain and then everyone talks about what annoys them. We have found this kind of interaction in many different settings, whether meetings took place in the morning in small businesses or in meetings at management level. We can only understand this when we can analyze and systematize interactions in meetings in minute detail.

We also use a questionnaire to depict the subjective experiences of participants or productivity data to see whether what we observed in the meeting is linked to team performance.

So good meetings are crucial to corporate success?

They definitely have a big impact on our behavior and experience at work. If you ever sat in a meeting where everyone just whined and complained, you left feeling frustrated and discouraged. We could also illuminate the medium- and long-term impact on work attitudes, for example on satisfaction, commitment, and the signs of stress.

But team performance and corporate success also go hand-in-hand with behavioral patterns in meetings. You can see this as a kind of magnifying glass for the whole organization: The behavioral patterns that we can observe in a typical meeting reflect the working processes and the climate of the entire organization. So there is much to be said for not simply putting up with meetings but for looking more closely at how we deal with one another and what each of us can do to make meetings in our everyday lives more successful.

And since the pandemic, meetings have taken place online.

Before the pandemic, we were mostly concerned with face-to-face meetings, simply because these constituted the majority of meetings. With the sudden rise in virtual meetings 2 years ago, researchers have also been seeing a trend towards concern with psychological phenomena in digital meetings, for example, the much-discussed “Zoom fatigue.” By now, the hybrid settings in which some participants are working from home and others in the office receive greater attention because this model is the model of the future.

To what extent does it affect your research if a meeting is digital or takes place in an office?

There are many questions that we can study better in face-to-face meetings. For example, we are interested in non-verbal behavioral patterns and that is more difficult online. Sometimes the camera signals are delayed, sometimes the sound is choppy, and thus we perceive entirely differently than if we were together in a room. Furthermore, in virtual meetings, the social processes are often unnecessarily inhibited due to the convention of turning the microphone on only for the speaker. Active listening and smooth interaction becomes difficult to impossible.

And leadership and the dynamic processes between staff work differently in virtual contexts and hybrid settings. One important reason is familiar to anyone who worked or still works at home during the pandemic: at virtual meetings, only a fraction of our attention is on the meeting itself. It’s inevitable because the temptation to write mails on the side or do something else is just too great.

We know from the research that the bigger and longer the meeting and the less you speak, the greater the probability that someone will multi-task. So the challenge is to set up the virtual meeting to allow for maximum interaction.

What makes a digital meeting successful?

A successful digital meeting is one in which only those people participate who need to be there and not those who perhaps just want to listen or who have been randomly invited. And at the end, it shouldn’t be just the person who headed the meeting who says it all went well. The participants should also have the feeling that their concerns were addressed.

Incidentally, everyone at the meeting is responsible for this. It is often implicitly or explicitly assumed that the person overseeing the meeting is responsible for its success. But this is just one side of the coin. As a manager, I can want to do everything right, but if nobody is listening or if they are writing emails at the same time, then you are knocking your head against a wall. Everyone is responsible for what happens at a meeting. This can also mean creating a list of measures everyone can agree to at the end of the meeting. Especially given how much work time goes into these meetings, everyone should be interested in using the time wisely.