By Pauline Calme
Atlassian, the giant Australian-owned tech company, conducted a study last year revealing that team meetings are ineffective 72% of the time.
Simply put, since I moved to the beautiful suburb of Otford with the opportunity to work from home, I’ve never seen my neighbours jumping for joy after I told them I had to go back to an online meeting. The word itself — meeting — is attached to the bitter taste of wasted time. And if you tell me you gotta go because you’ve got a VC (Virtual Call), I am most likely to empathise with you rather than be happy for you.
My question is... Does it have to be that way?
Let’s have a look.
Here is my best guess on why meetings are draining our energy:
Firstly, expectations are unclear. The description of the meeting has little or no desired outcomes. We meet, but we’re not sure why.
Secondly, the person who runs the meeting doesn’t have training in public speaking. They ignore the fact that they are in front of an audience. Maybe they hate speaking in public, but they have to do it.
Thirdly, participants are too polite. They’ve been invited to what appears to be a meaningless meeting, and yet, they are politely going to show up on time, say nothing, keep their cameras off, and wait for it to pass.
In the last decade, I have been on stage in front of an audience more than 150 times. Something that I know is that meetings are live performances.
Stage skills are completely transferable to the context of a work meeting.
There is 1) an audience, 2) a topic, 3) a starting time, 4) an end time, and more importantly, 5) expectations.
I am well aware that acting and public speaking is not everyone’s cup of tea. The good news is that with only minor adjustments you can transform boring meetings into memorable ones that might save you from burnout; and even turn you into the employee of the year (true story, happened to me!).
About the writer
Pauline Calme works at Netflix Animation Studios, leveraging four years of experience coordinating talent programs for hundreds of employees across Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Sydney. With ten years in improvisational theatre, directing, performing in 150+ shows, and teaching 500+ people, she brings deep expertise in creative collaborations and is obsessed with building healthier work cultures through the science of play.