Chit-chat helps meetings

When people gather for a meeting, there’s invariably informal chat before the meeting officially starts. The pre-talk helps set the tone of the meeting and provides an opportunity for people to get comfortable. There are four types of pre-meeting talk and interestingly, only one significantly enhances the effectiveness of the meeting itself.

Three researchers studied how the few minutes of pre-meeting discussions affects the perceived effectiveness of the actual meeting. In the study, 252 employed adults were surveyed on a recent meeting. To qualify to be in the study, respondents had to attend at least one meeting per week (on average, participants attended three meetings per week). In the survey, participants were asked the extent to which they discussed 29 named topics prior to the official start of the meeting. Unbeknown to survey respondents, the 29 factors covered four types of pre-meeting discussions:

1.?????? Small talk: non-work-related topics such as hobbies, sports, a movie or the weather.

2.?????? Work talk: work topics not related to the current meeting.

3.?????? Meeting preparatory talk: topics related to the current meeting such as the agenda and expected outcomes.

4.?????? Shop talk: talking about the organisation, its culture and office politics.

Of the four types of pre-meeting talk, only small talk (or chit-chat) has a significant positive connection to the perceived effectiveness of a meeting. That is, when asked about the nature of pre-meeting talk and the meeting that followed, small talk is the one that stands out most strongly as positively related to meeting effectiveness. ?

The effectiveness of small talk was even more pronounced for participants who are less extroverted; the small talk seems to make introverted people more comfortable in the social setting and more inclined to participate in the sharing of ideas and information during the meeting.

From the perspective of human nature, there’s a fundamental reason why small talk has this positive impact. Small talk or chit-chat is the way humans bond and the way we maintain those bonds. We have carried that form of bonding with us through the long journey of human history and didn’t drop it from our nature with the relatively recent move into workplaces. Chit-chat helps people be more comfortable with each other, triggers positive emotions and fosters a sense of belonging; all of which helps people work together more effectively. ?

Some leaders who have attended our workshops, before becoming aware of the significance of human bonding, associated chit-chat with time wasting. But invariably those same leaders, when they become aware of the science of bonding, realise the critical role of chit-chat. Back on the job, equipped with this fresh insight into human nature, they’ll encourage a few minutes of chit-chat before a meeting formally starts. Investing that bit of time in small talk enhances the effectiveness of the meeting that follows.

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(Reference: Allen, J.A., Lehmann-Willenbrock, N.K., Landowski, N., (2014), ‘Linking Pre-meeting Communication to Meeting Effectiveness’, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 29)