David McQuillen on bit literacy in meetings

David McQuillen gave a great talk last September at euroGel 2006 in Copenhagen. He's VP, Customer Experience at Credit Suisse in Zurich, and he thinks a lot about bringing customer experience thinking into his organization.

Here's a video clip of his euroGel talk, and here's a Fast Company piece on his work at Credit Suisse.

Today David wrote a piece about bit literacy in meetings. Though it wasn't titled explicitly as such, the column gives some excellent advice about how, and why, to let the bits go during an in-person meeting, thereby raising productivity and lowering stress.

David writes...

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You're not reading this while sitting in a meeting, are you?

The other day, I was at a conference and doing my best to listen to the presenter. A woman in front of me was typing furiously on her laptop. She had her head down, face in her screen and didn't once look up at the presenter. The tap-tap-tap of the keys was distracting and I could see by the agitated fiddling of the others around her that they, too, were a little frustrated. Eventually, it all got too much and I tapped her on the shoulder, asking her if she could stop typing. She looked at me with a wide, shocked expression that gave way to anger. "I'm taking notes for my boss. I've been doing this for two days and nobody has said anything so far! I'm not stopping."

Now, let's stop this right here. She wasn't taking notes, but chatting with someone on Yahoo messenger and checking her email. Although she was sitting in the conference, she was not in the conference. Of course, she wasn't alone. There were others in the conference doing the same thing. And this wasn't unique to that conference. In the past week alone, I've been in two meetings where members of the audience (nearly 25% in one group) had their laptops open and were busily doing something other than participating in the meeting. We even see this in our Experience Labs, where observers are supposed to be watching a client use a website, but rather are watching their own laptop screen. What are they doing? By and large, they're checking email or reading documents for some other meeting they have to attend. There may be a few who are really are taking notes, but I've yet to see it.

There are two ways to look at this trend:

• First, you can, I suppose, be impressed by the masterful multi-tasking of these folks: the ability to be in a meeting, read emails, passively listen to the speaker, respond to emails, make comments in the meeting from time to time (which they expect the others to pay full attention to) and read more emails.

• Or, you can think this is rude. It's distracting to the presenter and the audience, not to mention disrespectful. It is saying to the meeting organiser, the speaker and the audience: "I have more important people to communicate with and more important things to do than be in this meeting." It's also inefficient - if people aren't fully focused on the meeting, then things take longer. This creates a bad meeting experience which wastes time for everyone.

I'd like to humbly suggest a rather obvious statement about meetings: If you're in a meeting, you should be in the meeting - not in your inbox. (This means no laptops, no emails, no Crackberries). If you can't do this, it means one of the following:

• Whatever else you're doing really is more important than the meeting. If so, you shouldn't be in the meeting.

• The meeting is too long or too boring for you. If that's true, then give some feedback to the organiser.

• You are so busy that it is impossible for you to handle all your work and must multi-task like this. If that's true, talk to your boss.

The benefit? If everyone pays attention, it means we have the right people in the room, the meeting will be more focused, the discussion will be more concise and we can all get out of there faster...and back to our inbox.

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...thanks again to David for sharing his thoughts with us.

And again, you might like the video clip of his euroGel talk.

P.S. If you're intrigued by Gel, watch other Gel videos or sign up for Gel 2008.

• Jul 25, 2007
• IN: Bit Literacy
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