Open meetings with social time

Put relationships on the agenda

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the New Corner Office,
the podcast where we share strategies for thriving in the
new world of work, one where the location and ours
are more flexible than in the past. Today's tip is
to start all your meetings with a few minutes the
formal scheduled social time. This is a good idea for

(00:27):
all meetings, but it's particularly important for those done virtually.
When you walk into an in person meeting, there is
naturally a minute or two of social time as people
figure out their seats. Note if someone is just back
from vacation or complain about the cafeteria being out of coffee.
This is human nature, and there's actually nothing wrong with it. Indeed,

(00:48):
few individual meetings accomplish much more than nurturing the relationships
between the people who attend them. But a lot of
people don't see it that way, and a lot of
meetings are poorly run. So what winds up happening is
that the social chit chat either extends way too long,
which is frustrating for people who've got long to do lists,
or else someone snarls that no one has time for

(01:09):
this chit chat, and the meeting starts from a bad place.
The better option is to purposefully schedule a few minutes
of directed social time at the beginning of every meeting.
Whoever is running the meeting should take charge of doing this.
I like opening with a question that everyone gets to answer.
Sometimes the question is obvious, like what people did over

(01:29):
the weekend if it's Monday morning, or if there was
a major power outage in your area the night before,
how people dealt with that. Sometimes you need to be
a little more creative and come up with an icebreaker
type question your favorite restaurant or favorite author. The key
thing is that everyone goes around and answers. This makes
everyone feel included and gets people used to hearing everyone's voices,

(01:53):
and by keeping the social chit chat focused, you get
the upsides without the downside of falling behind on timing.
With in person meetings, there is naturally social time, but
it's even more important to do this if you're meeting
virtually A lot of people have had their maiden Zoom
meetings over the last few weeks, and as you might imagine,
there have been a lot of awkward experiences. But this

(02:15):
isn't inevitable. People just have to learn to run meetings differently.
So if you are running the meeting, plan to open
with a few minutes of social discussion and most important,
plan to direct it. You can't leave this to chance
when people aren't in the same room picking up on cues.
So I make sure to call on people Joe, what

(02:35):
did you do on Saturday? Mary? How about you? If
you don't do this, people will talk all over each other,
which leads to frustrating video conference whiplash. And I know
this isn't intuitive for social things. If you're sitting in
a bar with a group, you would never direct a
social discussion this way. You'd feel too much like a
fourth grade teacher. But different times call for different approaches.

(02:58):
When everyone has heard and everyone has a chance to connect,
you are going to have a great meeting, whether virtual
or face to face. So if you've got a meeting
coming up to day, think about how you could open
with a few minutes of social chit chat. And if
you've got great opening questions for your virtual meetings, I'd
love to hear about them. You can email me at

(03:19):
Laura at Laura Vanderkam dot com. In the meantime, this
is Laura. Thanks for listening and here's to succeeding in
the New Corner Office. The New Corner Office is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, visit the
i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

(03:40):
your favorite shows.