Web Worker Daily had an interesting blog posting about outlawing laptops at meetings. Summary: if people don’t find a meeting important enough to pay attention, they shouldn’t be there. Remember the intellectually snobbish character, Martin, from Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”? This is the guy who spent most meetings 97% disengaged from the group, while pounding away at his keyboard like a concert pianist. We’ve all been there (hopefully on the other side of the laptop), but this is certainly a serious business problem that should at least be generating discussion, if not actual policies.
My point in bringing this up is as a Web conferencing provider, I think we can get to the root of the problem, which is that meetings (online or in-person) need to be more effective or people won’t pay attention. There are three ways we can help:
- Provide Tools That Engage Meeting Participants - All conferencing technology providers should be looking for innovative ways to create more interaction in session beyond application sharing or audience polling.
- Help Meeting Leaders Know When They Are Losing Their Audience - If online meeting participants are “off doing other things,” our technologies need to alert the leader, so he or she can re-engage the group and bring the focus back to the topic at hand.
- Use Our Technologies to Help Make Meetings More Productive - Several common problems plague any bad meeting. Someone doesn’t show up or shows up late; there is no agenda for the meeting; or nobody takes notes for action items. All of these can be fixed by leveraging (not limiting) technology.
A laptop at a meeting is just a symptom of the real sickness. All meetings need to be relevant and productive or they just shouldn’t be. I say we can provide a cure with Web conferencing technology innovation.
Posted under Industry Buzz, Web Conferencing
This post was written by admin on March 26, 2008
