Episode 29: Pioneering Tech and Social Development in Meetings

A conversation with Nicole Baer, Global Head of Marketing for Logitech’s Video Collaboration Business

This article was originally published on voltagecontrol.com

“Part of what we’re looking at is what you’re describing with meeting airtime and inclusivity. There’s also a whole other element to how AI can support the right behaviors in meetings and be able to, for example, not only take in information around who’s talking, but things like voice level. When people are getting heated, when their body level changes, they shift from leaning in, to sitting back. Even temperature in the room, is it starting to literally get heated? We talk about conversations getting heated, but that actually has an impact on the temperature in the room that you’re sitting in.”

Nicole Baer is the Global Head of Marketing for Logitech’s Video Collaboration Business. She’s well versed in non-verbal communication and perception with regards to connection in meetings. Perceptive and empathetic, Nicole brings humility and awareness to every conversation and invites other facilitators to do the same.

In this episode of Control the Room, I speak with Nicole about AI personal assistants, fighting the daily burden of cognitive load, and interjecting levity into the mundane. Listen in to see how she showcases the necessity of including aspects of normal social dynamics into our virtual environments.

Show Highlights

[1:48] Nicole’s Prior Experiences & Social Perspective

[3:11] The Intersection of Tech & Meeting Participation

[9:15] Overwork & Cognitive Load

[12:20] AI in Facilitation

[23:52] Mindful Meetings

Links | Resources

Nicole’s LinkedIn

Macro (Zoom Airtime Tracker)

About the Guest

Nicole Baer, Global Head of Marketing for Logitech’s Video Collaboration Business, joins us on the show today and brings the unique duality of her experiences as a deeply involved mother pursuing executive positions. She’s operated in virtual workspaces long before the pandemic and pioneered collaborative efforts through digital mediums.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web

Contact Voltage Control

Podcast Sponsored by MURAL

Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out. All in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

If you’re listening to this podcast, there’s a good chance you’d be interested in checking out our 3rd annual facilitation summit. Due to the pandemic, we’re going virtual this year, and we’ve got some really awesome things waiting for you. We have 18 master facilitators, each day 6 of them will be sharing 20 minute lightning talks in the morning, and facilitating workshops in the afternoon. Each attendee will get to see 18 talks and 3 workshops over the course of 3 days; there are plenty of networking opportunities to connect with other attendees, plus games and prizes. I’d also like to thank MURAL for exclusive conference sponsoring. MURAL is an online collaboration tool that we’ll be using during the conference. We hope to see you there, register today at thevoltagecontrol.com/events.

Today, I’m with Nicole Baer global head of marketing for Logitech’s video collaboration business, a market leader, and one of the fastest growing businesses at Logitech. Welcome to the show, Nicole.

Nicole Baer:

Thank you, Douglas. I’m thrilled to be here.

Douglas:

So let’s get started with a little bit of background on how you found your way into a company that focuses on hardware and software solutions for better meetings.

Nicole Baer:

Well, it’s always been, remote work has been a topic that I’ve been passionate about for most of my career, as someone who has had different flexible work options earlier on in my career, had children and still had to deal with black hole conference calls all day long, virtual meetings and remote work have been a topic that’s been super interesting to me. So when the opportunity came along to lead global marketing for Logitech in their video collaboration space, it was a really interesting way for me to bring an interest and a passion that I had around how remote work really creates inclusivity in the workforce and gets us out of very difficult conference calls where it’s like a black hole of decision making because you can’t really interact with people the way you would in person. It brought together what I noticed in the behavior in meetings with something that I was passionate about from a social perspective and really brought those two things together in one role. So that was fortuitous.

Douglas:

Yeah, I love this. I love this notion of this social aspect of meetings and just the dynamics at play there. And you mentioned the inclusivity of these tools versus the black hole in a conference call. What inherently makes this more inclusive?

Nicole Baer:

Well, I think first of all by turning cameras on, in virtual meetings in particular, it allows for face-to-face engagement, which is so important with humans. Human decision-making, human interactions, that’s how we as tribes of people, whether it’s in a meeting or out in the world, that’s how we come to decisions. And so if you miss out on that element of being able to interact, face-to-face really from any location, you miss all of the nonverbal communication that just cannot be underscored as how important it is. We’re just programmed as humans to take in a lot more information than what people are saying by watching them as they’re saying it. Catching inflections in voice, but also micro facial expressions, et cetera. So, I think it’s so important that we have the ability to interact face-to-face, drive decision-making, drive collaboration, but not have to have that be physically in person. And of course that’s something that has become incredibly important to all of us during the pandemic.

Douglas:

You’re touching on something that’s near and dear to all of us facilitators. We talk about this notion of human connection and what are the signals that we have available to us. And I think that when you look at it in real life, you’re right, that we have lots of practice. Picking up on all these signals that sometimes we don’t even think about it, right? It’s just second nature. These things come in, we process them and we make use of it to think about understanding others or bring others in. And in the virtual setting, it can be quite difficult. I recently was comparing it to this idea in the early days of e-commerce. I’m sure you can remember in the early 2000s-

Nicole Baer:

Yes.

Douglas:

When everyone was trying to figure this out, right?

Nicole Baer:

Right.

Douglas:

I feel like we’re in that moment right now where companies like Logitech are there figuring this stuff out and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible so that we can get better signals and we can understand each other better. And I think the pandemic forced that hand a bit to move a little bit quicker on some of those things.

Nicole Baer:

Yeah. No, I agree. And even some of the things that we’re doing that are very forward-looking at Logitech and some other interesting companies are looking at too is how do we really create equal participation in meetings? A lot of the societal evils, like gender bias and racial bias come out in meetings and you see that through unequal participation of all parties. And that’s a really interesting avenue to explore, using people analytics around meetings, and being able to feed that information back to managers, so they better understand their behavior and how they can improve HR, DNI teams, et cetera.

Nicole Baer:

I think that’s something that’s super interesting and the next thing we’re talking about waves of technology. That’s something that’s super interesting that I think we’ll start to see more of soon. And there’s also in addition to the social aspects, there’s also just the human element of people who are more introverted, more extroverted. And how do you ensure that all parties have a voice in a conversation and bring the diversity of opinion, so that you’re actually having really productive, differentiated meetings by bringing everyone into it. And that’s a challenge I think for all managers to do and facilitators.

Douglas:

A couple things you said they were really intriguing. And the first one is this notion of, I would say, it’s not the same for everyone, right? There are folks that have a really amazing home setup.

Nicole Baer:

Right.

Douglas:

Maybe they have the latest, greatest Logitech stuff, or they have the camera, they have the microphone. They have that, and have all the tools. There’s others that it’s not for lack of resources, but they just don’t have space in their home. Then you ladder in stuff like the pandemic is different than people deciding to work from home. There’s a lockdown in place. There’s childcare is not available.

Nicole Baer:

Right.

Douglas:

And so you’ve got these dynamics where people are … I’ve been in workshops where people have had their mics muted and not participating because there’s construction in the next room and they’re telling me to be sensitive to others. And so I’m really fascinated about what happens next when we can take what we’ve learned and the understanding that it is possible to work in this way and allowing our teams to be remote. It’s totally fine. But we don’t have this extra burden of worrying about educating our children right after the session or whatever, yeah.

Nicole Baer:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah absolutely. Well, I mean there’s been definitely, I should say solutions to try to address distractions. That’s definitely been accelerated during the pandemic. Like of course, Logitech makes webcams that will auto frame. We make headsets that will keep noise distraction out. But then companies like Zoom and Microsoft and even anyone who really has a brand these days that they would like to have behind someone in a meeting or providing things like virtual backgrounds, so that you really can work anywhere. And if you have the right tools, it doesn’t matter what’s in your background. And as long as you have a webcam and a headset, you can remain as focused as you can be given the other factors that you said, like dogs that bark at every Amazon delivery. I’m using my own personal example, or children who have math questions.

Nicole Baer:

So, yeah, I mean, we definitely have seen an acceleration of everything that has to do with the ability to work from anywhere in ways that we never could have imagined over the last, let’s call it six to nine months. It’s the biggest remote work and remote meetings experience ever. No one could have engineered this. And it’s also interesting to see, what we see in Logitech and some traditional industries who have really resisted having people work from home, coming around to the fact that you can trust people to be productive. If anything, the bigger problem is more around overwork and burnout.

Nicole Baer:

We’ve been working with a professor, Dr. Joe Allen from the University of Utah who has the vaunted title of being a PhD in meetings. He’s actually an industrial organizational psychologist. And some of his recent data shows that we’re spending, managers are spending nearly 90% of their time in meetings now. And people are just working nearly an hour more than they did pre-pandemic. And it’s interesting to see how concerns about working from home have pivoted to concerns about overworking from home and concerned about having too many meetings and people being in too many meetings is another thing that’s definitely, I think being raised among management and traditional industry is that this was a non-issue before like financial services. So it’s pervasive across industries. It’s not just technology, for example.

Douglas:

Yeah, I think it disrupted a lot of our habits and we started to reform new habits. It’s like the need to drive in or commute on the subway or whatever broke up the day.

Nicole Baer:

Right.

Douglas:

And it forced us to go through almost like Superman getting into the telephone booth and having to transform into this other role. But the boundaries between being a parent versus being a worker, they start to blur.

Nicole Baer:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I can speak as someone who is a parent with two children learning from home right now, it definitely creates a new cognitive load to have to switch between modes constantly. People talk about the cognitive load of Zoom because we are working harder as humans. Zoom or Microsoft or whatever software platform you use. It creates more of a cognitive load for us to meet virtually versus in person, because we have to work harder to read the signals that I was talking about earlier. But there’s also a cognitive and emotional load of having to switch between work and engaging with work. And then also having your children need lunch, or you need to go get a package on the doorstep. Things that you really wouldn’t be experiencing if you weren’t home all the time. So yeah, it’s definitely, it’s an interesting time that we’re in.

Douglas:

Yeah, I agree. And I think part of it is like you say, the fact that we haven’t had as much experience being in virtual meetings. I mean, we’ve been doing in real life gathering since we were, as soon as we could walk. I mean, even before then we were being carried to them.

Nicole Baer:

Right.

Douglas:

And so we’ve had a lot of time rehearsing and learning how to do those things and the technologies. If you look at the technology space, I mean, we’ve been doing in real life meetings since the cave days, right?

Nicole Baer:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And cave paintings, and so this 10, 15, 20, however long you want to count it on this teleconferencing stuff, it’s going to pale in comparison to our techniques and approaches we have. So ,it’s amazing how far we’ve come, but there’s still a lot of work to do there. And I’ve just been really amazed at how far some of the things have been. And one thing I’m noticing is there’s an open source tool called Jitsi that has tracking that will track the airtime. So how much each person’s been talking.

Nicole Baer:

Yes.

Douglas:

And then there’s a Zoom wrapper that you can, in their marketplace, that you can get. I’m blanking on the name right now, but I’ll have to put that in the show notes. But, one of the coolest features that does for the facilitator is show you the distribution. And I think when you come back to that inclusivity piece, and if there’s a mindfulness to how you approach it, then you can draw out those folks that aren’t talking as much or the ones that are over-talking, maybe ask them to dial it down a little.

Nicole Baer:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s part of what we’re looking at is what you’re describing meeting airtime and inclusivity. There’s also a whole other element to how AI can support the right behaviors in meetings and be able to, for example, not only take in information around who’s talking, but things like voice level. When people are getting heated, when their body level changes, they shift from leaning in, to sitting back. Even temperature in the room, is it starting to literally get heated? We talk about conversations getting heated, but that actually has an impact on the temperature in the room that you’re sitting in. And we’re talking about in real life gatherings, of course, at this point. But yeah, I mean, I think that we’re going to find that out of this time, we’re going to have developed so much more thinking around meetings and will really advance and accelerate some of these analytics that can help people change their behavior in meetings.

Nicole Baer:

Because if you think about how much a manager, as I was mentioning, a manager is now spending nearly 90% of their time in meetings. That is really where you’re behaving. That’s a lot of where your behavior is happening, is within meetings. So if we’re not feeding back good insights on what’s happening in meetings, we’re missing a huge opportunity to really describe to people how they’re behaving in concrete terms. And also have AI help with that. Have AI not only monitor what’s happening in a meeting, but be able to give cuing. You can imagine, it’s a hokey example, but you can imagine Alexa in a meeting saying, “Let’s get back on topic.” Alexa reading the agenda, knowing that we’ve gone off topic or knowing that we’re not really getting through what we need to in the meeting and getting cues like that. I think that’s something that is very real. It really could happen in the near future.

Douglas:

Yeah, it reminds me of, there was a product called Crystal Knows that you could take a personality test and then it would make a profile of you. And then it’s reading your email and giving you tips on how to respond to the emails to make sure your response masters with the personality or the sentiment of what’s coming back.

Nicole Baer:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And it’s like the real-time version of that. It’s happening in the meeting so that we have cues on this person might need to hear this version of the message so that you can tweak it so that so much disagreement and conflict comes from perception and how people … the intent doesn’t matter.

Nicole Baer:

Right, right.

Douglas:

Even microaggressions, what if an AI could tell you what you said might’ve been even mildly offensive. It’s like, “Oh, I should be aware of that.”

Nicole Baer:

Yeah.

Douglas:

If it just came out and I didn’t even realize it, like now I can have that feedback could be huge.

Nicole Baer:

I agree. And it’s 100% possible to do. So, I think we’re going to see some really interesting things come on the market soon around this. And I think it’s going to be incredibly helpful for companies and individuals.

Douglas:

I agree. And you got me excited. I’m now looking forward to this. So, another thing when I come back to my comments around just the amount of time that we’ve spent just understanding and designing in person meetings. I think that’s another thing that’s a big drain on folks, because another reason why so many of these meetings aren’t quite as effective is because the virtual meetings take more time to plan and prep. Because we’ve got extra tools we got to bring in. We can’t just rely on… using an empty whiteboard is often pretty acceptable. But an empty mural or murals, that’s more problematic, right?

Nicole Baer:

Right.

Douglas:

Because there’s wayfinding and people understanding where to go and what’s expected of them. So I think that’s something that should not be underestimated, and I think maybe we’ll see more tools support our ability to just have ad hoc meetings and not have to do as much planning on.

Nicole Baer:

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. The ability to have more water cooler type conversations, that’s part of what’s adding to the meeting load is that those informal meetings are not happening, at least in the same way they did before. Where you could just spin your chair or you go walk over and you chat with someone and now that’s become a meeting. You have to schedule a meeting for that. And of course there are lots of ways to not have to make something a formal meeting. But I think it’s the default. If you have a question you need to get answered, if it has any degree of complexity, then you default to thinking it needs to be a meeting. But, one of the things that we ask about a lot, and I know this would seem paradoxical because we are all about virtual meetings at Logitech.

Nicole Baer:

But, a question that we ask ourselves a lot is does this need to be a meeting or can it be an email, or can it be a chat, or can it be a Slack? Because a lot of meetings really are not required. Meetings should be around complex topics that require diversity of opinions to drive decision making. But oftentimes it can be an email or it can be a short note and it doesn’t have to be a full-blown meeting because you’re right. If you’re going to schedule a meeting, it really needs to … there have to be some guard rails around it to make sure it’s productive and a good use of people’s time.

Douglas:

Yeah. It was a BBC study that came out, gosh, it was maybe almost a year ago now. And I remember the headline just made me chuckle. It said, most pointless meetings are actually a form of therapy.

Nicole Baer:

That’s probably true.

Douglas:

And it’s really profound if you unpack it because it means that people need that water cooler time.

Nicole Baer:

Yes.

Douglas:

They need that moment together. So then they just throw meetings on the calendar, just so that they can connect with people. But the problem with that is it’s non-intentional. It means that we don’t, maybe are we doing too little of it, too much of it? We don’t know because we’re not measuring. We’re not intentional about it.

Nicole Baer:

Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. And I think one thing that I say to my team in an effort to mitigate all of our meetings, we have real working time, which is so important, is a phrase that I picked up from my last boss, which was no agenda, no attenda. And it’s caught on out of my team too. But if you don’t have an agenda, which is what industrial and organizational psychologists would call procedural communication, which I mean exactly what you’re describing. The formal aspects of needing to set up a meeting, whether it’s the actual setting up, getting yourself in place to have a virtual meeting, deciding what’s going to go into the meeting.

Nicole Baer:

That part of procedural communication is super important, even just by following some basic stuff, like having an agenda. It lifts the effectiveness of your meetings in the low double digits. I mean it’s insane. And that doesn’t seem like a huge number. 12% doesn’t seem like a large number, but at the same time if you think about how many meetings we all have, that would be a gigantic improvement just to consistently have an agenda if you are going to call a meeting and then leverage other things like you were describing. The informal chat, Slack, email, et cetera, when you really don’t need a meeting.

Douglas:

I think also even putting an agenda together, make sure you think a little more deeply about your purpose, which clarifies that goal. And then that is goodness as well. And often someone is sitting down pen to paper or trying to make an agenda and they’re struggling. There’s a chance they might just cancel the meeting or just say, “Let me just send an email. This agenda is so much work. I might as well just type this email.”

Nicole Baer:

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I’ve seen within my own team behaviors where people will cancel the one-on-ones that they have with me, because if they can’t put together an agenda, they move over to an email. Take the time off of our calendars and make it an email, and that makes me extremely happy.

Douglas:

Yes. Canceled meetings is always fun.

Nicole Baer:

It’s a gift, sometimes.

Douglas:

Yes.

Nicole Baer:

Yeah, sometimes.

Douglas:

So I was also thinking about this notion of 3D audio and as a potential solution for serendipity. Because it’s one thing to put yourself out in some random room that has to be topical or conceptual in some way. I guess you could have a chat space where you just go into a random hallway or something. But this notion of this visual layout where it’s almost like you’re in a game interface and you just wander off to the spot that you would, and then someone else could be wandering around and you could potentially bump into them. And then even this notion of walking.

Nicole Baer:

Yes.

Douglas:

I think everyone’s conceptually, I think we placed ourselves in these boxes and most often they’re these Hollywood square boxes in Zoom, but nonetheless, they could be conceptual boxes. And I think breaking out of that could really serve as well. And I think technology will start to allow us to do that more and more. And, I even think like what if walking around somehow simulated-

Nicole Baer:

Yeah.

Douglas:

Some tech could realize you’re walking around and realize someone else is going on a walk and maybe connect you for an informal chat.

Nicole Baer:

Right, right.

Douglas:

Could some of those things start to happen or even AI figuring out that based on what they’re doing and saying and talking about right now, I think these two people need to talk.

Nicole Baer:

That would be so, that would be really interesting. Just being able to read email for example, and know that they need to actually have a conversation, the opposite of using email. Instead of having a meeting, sometimes you really need to have a meeting and just speak to each other.

Douglas:

Yeah, because you don’t know that until you bump into each other at the water cooler.

Nicole Baer:

Right.

Douglas:

But if the AI is figuring that out … it reminds me of the Abundance 360 conference,. his name is Dia Mondez, right? And he had, I think he did a Kaggle competition. It’s one of those machine learning sites, right? And he did a competition to write an algorithm to look at all of his participants and figure out how to pair people up.

Nicole Baer:

So interesting

Douglas:

And so when people showed up at the conference, each person got a name for someone they were supposed to go meet.

Nicole Baer:

Wow.

Douglas:

And the AI had figured out who had the most probability of working together well. But it just dawned on me that it would be based on this stuff that you’ve been talking about. It would be so cool to be able to detect these opportunities.

Nicole Baer:

Yeah, Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s super interesting. And I was just thinking about what you were saying about that tech, the matchmaking tech, like that would be great for just networking in general. We struggle with that as marketers. How do you set up the best opportunities to network with people in real life or virtually, and that technology sounds like it’s a really interesting solve for that problem. I mean, we certainly say at Logitech, we’re trying to mix up the way that we meet. There are different policies that we have across different teams or different door openers for communicating and collaborating.

Nicole Baer:

So one of the managers I work with has something called, if the green dot’s on I’m on, or something like that. I can’t remember. It’s something catchy. But it basically means that if the green dot of availability is there, anyone can reach out to him in whatever medium they want to. So whether that means calling him or they want to chat with him or whatever it is, it means he’s available for water cooler type conversations. And I think that that’s smart. We’ve also started doing, because walking meetings were definitely a thing. I did when we were still on campus and this is certainly not new, we definitely did do quite a few walking meetings for one-on-ones and I really enjoyed them. So on my team, we’ve started also doing our one-on-ones at time and walking so that we can just get up and take a break and get away from a screen, which is good for our eyes. It’s good for our brains and just mix up the ways that we’re communicating. So it doesn’t just feel like an endless stream of meetings all day.

Douglas:

Yes. I think that varying the setting, the place, the context, the structure, all really good stuff.

Nicole Baer:

Yep, great.

Douglas:

And you have a talk coming up at Zoomtopia around mindful meetings.

Nicole Baer:

I do.

Douglas:

I’d love to hear, can we get a sneak peak on what you’re excited about talking about?

Nicole Baer:

Sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we started exploring this concept of mindful meetings, pre-pandemic. It seems like a long time ago now. But we had a really interesting gathering of thought leaders across a variety of different disciplines around how to have better meetings and really solving that big, chunky problem. And we brought together faith leaders and coaches, since coaches have gatherings all the time of their players. We had neurosurgeons. We had psychologists, et cetera. We brought this group together to try to solve this nut of how to make better meetings.

Nicole Baer:

And out of that meeting last October, we came up with this idea of mindful meetings. How do we bring in mindfulness into meetings, so it’s not just a hamster wheel you get on. You look at your calendar and you just go for the day. But how to be more present in meetings. How to make sure that you’re communicating to others that you’re present and engaged in the meeting. How to do the right sort of procedural communication, which I was talking about before. Having an agenda, making sure that you’re respectful of cultural norms around what is an acceptable amount of lateness? Understanding how late can one be before you’ve really torpedoed the meeting and made people resentful.

Nicole Baer:

So, it’s really about understanding the impact on others that you have in meetings. Understanding how to have better meetings and understanding when to have a meeting. And so that’s really, all of that goes into the pot of having more mindful meetings. So I’m really excited to delve into this more at Zoomtopia, which is October 13th and 14th.

Douglas:

Yeah. It reminds me when you were talking about “mindful”, it reminded me of just intention and how we can just not throw meetings all over someone’s calendar and usurp our coworkers time, et cetera. Then use that word mindfulness. And it really jumped out to me because when we do our facilitation training, we talk a lot about mindfulness and being intimately aware about your internal conditions and what you bring into the room. And there’s a quote from O’Brien from Theory U where he says, “The success of any intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.” And knowing what we bring in is so powerful because not only as the facilitator, but also every attendee.

Nicole Baer:

Right.

Douglas:

If we’re totally checked out or really upset about something else, we’re not going to necessarily be great facilitators or great participants.

Nicole Baer:

Exactly, yeah. It’s having intention for the meeting. It’s showing up on time for the meeting. It’s allowing people to talk and participate fully. Coming full circle back to inclusivity. Making sure that there’s a structure of what we want to talk about. It gets resolved. And even things like we talk about as part of mindful meetings, having a closing breath for everyone. And I know that sounds hokey, but it really provides a way to have closure on the meeting and for the people that just collaborated to feel a sense of, we just accomplished something. So we’re practicing a closing deep breath by everyone at the end of a meeting. And it’s amazing how much it helps also prepare yourself and transition into the next thing that you’re working on, rather than feeling this frazzled feeling of just going from thing to thing. Just taking a breath, closing the meeting as a group and moving on.

Douglas:

I love that. One of the speakers at Control the Room last year talked about a team breath. And so that’s your version of a team breath, but specifically at the end of a meeting and closure is so critical. Because if we just have a simple, “Oh, yeah we’ve got some action items. Okay, see you tomorrow.” It’s way different than if we come together and into a ceremony or a ritual that really has some poignancy to it that gives us that sense of closure.

Nicole Baer:

Yep, agree.

Douglas:

It also reminds me of- we have so many meetings and we’re just marching from meeting to meeting often with no breaks in between. And that sense of closure is really important. Also, how we start up meetings is also an area for design as well because if we expect that people did close the previous meeting, we might be wrong. There might be stuff still running through their heads around what just happened.

Nicole Baer:

Right. Yeah, and it’s so important to give us time to process, whatever happened before, when you come into the meeting, which is also … I think it’s really important to not just launch into what’s in the agenda. Spend that time connecting with the people in the meeting, asking how their day is going. It also helps, I think, understand what people are bringing into the meeting. If they’re coming in really hot from a meeting that maybe had considerable conflict in it or had technology disruptions, and so they’re frazzled. Those are good things to know coming in. it’s good to spend the first two minutes of the meeting, having those normal human interactions to get a check on where people are in the room too, because that’s really helpful information. And then at the end of it, having a similar moment of closing it together and then moving on.

Douglas:

Yeah, I love that. Just that check-in at the beginning and I usually coach people to make that part of the agenda. Honor it enough to say that this is like, “I’m going to put some time reserve to it. I’m going to think about how I approach it and even look into new ways.” Because there’s always new, people are always coming up with new warmups and new ways to draw people in. And I think that’s really spot on advice just to make sure we have time for the team to feel heard and just to ease into it a little.

Nicole Baer:

Yeah, I agree. And I think it also connects back to not being late. Because if you’re coming in late to a meeting, which can be a byproduct of having too many meetings. Just getting to the point of your prior meeting toward the end, and so you’re scrambling to get whatever you want to get accomplished, accomplished. But even if you’re coming in late, still taking a minute to connect with the people in the room is really important.

Douglas:

Absolutely. And it reminds me of some of the stuff we talk about in Magical Meetings, which is thinking about before the meeting, during the meeting, after the meeting. Because there’s not only stuff to do during the meeting, which I think gets a lot of focus. That’s just the knee jerk, right? There’s stuff that we can do ahead of time to help people do better. You talked about sharing the agenda. There’s other expectations, some setting things or things that we can prep and get ready for folks, so that even if it’s like an asset that we might react to, or that we might collaborate on. If we have that ready and prepped, then it just makes things go a lot more smoothly.

Nicole Baer:

Yeah, I agree. And then I think for particularly things that are particularly complex, making sure the people in the room understand what the expectation is of what their role is going to be in terms of what input they need to provide. So they’re prepared. There’s nothing worse than going into a meeting and having someone say, “Can you tell us about that data?” You’re like, “I didn’t even know I needed that data.” So I think it’s good to set that expectation too and that helps with inclusivity to say, “I’d like for you to make sure you’ve brought this data and I’d like for you to make sure you provide your point of view on X topic,” whatever it is. Also so that people are really prepared to come and talk. I mean, of course not all meetings can you be that planful about. But to the extent that it’s something that’s really important and you want to drive decision-making, those things can be hugely impactful.

Douglas:

Yeah. And when you talk about inclusivity, I mean, there’re some people who will look at a chart of numbers and immediately see the patterns. Some people look at a chart of numbers and they’re just like, it freaks them out and then they need to set it aside, come back to it an hour later and look at it a little more. Maybe scribble some math on the side or whatever, and make some circles and extract the patterns. And if you really want to tap into a broad perspective, just throwing a chart at people is only going to get input from a certain group.

Nicole Baer:

Yeah. No, I totally agree. As someone who I love data, I love working with data, but I also like to have some time with it before. Making sure that you get to know your team and you get to know the people you’re working with. Do they prefer a pre-read? If they prefer a pre-read and that’s what’s going to help make the meeting more effective, send things out as a pre-read. It’s like there’s no downside in doing so.

Douglas:

I like that point you made around roles and expectations as well because I think so many times it’s easy to fall into the trap of having a notion of how a decision is going to get made. And if you don’t communicate that, then other people don’t know. And so a classic trap leaders get into is when they just want some advice and they bring people together and they don’t make it clear that I’m just asking for advice, but I’m going to make this decision, regardless of what you tell me. But I really want to know what you have to say. And then if they go and make a totally different decision, then people can get upset because they’re like, “Why didn’t you listen to my advice?”

Nicole Baer:

Right.

Douglas:

And it could have been totally avoided by setting the expectations up front. And the dangerous thing about that too, is that if that’s done too many times, then people stop contributing. Even when you are going to give them, when you’re going to delegate, they don’t even want to make the decision because they’re like, “You’re just going to undo it.” That’s the perspective that’s been planted, right?

Nicole Baer:

Yeah. No, I totally agree. I had a boss like that once who oftentimes would take the pulse on a decision that was already made, just to make sure there were no gotchas. But that’s okay, as long as that is you’re clear that I’m looking for gotchas. I’m going to tell you what I plan on doing and I might veto this if there’s a really good reason for me to do so. But otherwise this is the decision and being clear that that’s really what you’re asking for can be important too.

Douglas:

Absolutely. So as we’re coming up on time here, I want to just, I want to ask you one of my favorite questions, which is what is your facilitation superpower?

Nicole Baer:

I would probably say two that are related, humor and humility. I mean, I think the further I get into my career, the more that I understand that bringing some humor into a meeting and there are meetings that are not lighthearted by nature, right? They’re just not. But, it just helps to break up cognitive load. And I think that having some humor, trying to enjoy the experience, bringing some lighthearted moments to others really helps with the engagement in the meeting, and it helps with connection and it helps people really bring their full brain to what you want to talk about and do their best work. So, I think humor’s important. It’s not about just telling jokes. It’s just taking the moment where you can … I poke fun at myself all the time. I’m often the victim of my own humor in meetings.

Douglas:

Highly effective, highly effective. And it goes along with the humility piece, right? Because no one wants to … everyone wants to support the person who is willing to show their weakness. And if someone’s the hero then, I don’t know, can be off-putting.

Nicole Baer:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think that the humility piece is oftentimes you start to lose sight as leaders that others, especially that might be more in the beginning of their career, can be intimidated. I remember being a 22 year old with a VP in a meeting and it was intimidating, and making sure that I bring humility into the conversation. I’ll make sure people are talking, I’ll engage with folks asking them to contribute and valuing their opinion. I think that goes a long way to having full participation in meetings and just with work in general.

Douglas:

So, when you think about the listeners and what we’ve discussed today, is there anything you’d like to leave folks with to think about as they walk around with what we’ve been talking about?

Nicole Baer:

I think that we’re in such a unique time in history and it’s a really important moment in time to develop some skills that we really might not have had the opportunity to do before, around how do you act as a good meeting facilitator when it’s virtual, it’s not in person? How do you encourage full participation in meetings? How do you make better meetings? These are all things that we can experiment with when we’re working from home, and we’ve had our complete paradigm shifted in the way that we work. So it’s really the time to experiment. It’s time to acquire new skills. It’s time to get maybe comfortable with technology that you have not maybe been comfortable with before and come out the other side of this pandemic feeling like you’ve learned a new gear with meetings and with work.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, it’s been great chatting with you today and best of luck on your talk at Zoomtopia. I’m sure it’s going to be great.

Nicole Baer:

Thank you. Nice speaking with you, Douglas.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.