How Collaboration Agreements Lead to Better Meetings
Whether online or in-person, it is not uncommon for meeting participants to be doing anything but focusing on the topic at hand. And I get it. It is often worthwhile to take a hard look on the purpose and process of the meeting itself.
However, there's another side to the story that has nothing to do with us feeling like we'd rather be doing something else. It's just that we get easily distracted. We get a notification banner about a new email, glance at the text, and suddenly our thoughts are being carried away from the discussion and into our inboxes. All of it happens mostly on autopilot. We don't even think about it. Nowhere in that chain of events do we make a conscious decision about shifting our attention elsewhere.
One way to avoid these quirks of human nature and to have better, more focused meetings with artful participation and without coercion, is to take a little time and create a collaboration agreement for the meeting.
Simply put, ask people to discuss in pairs "what behavioural rules or principles should we all agree to, so that our time together will be productive and well spent?" A few minutes later, you can ask people to share what they discussed with the rest of the group.
I've run this exercise dozens of times in the beginning of workshops and important meetings, and every time people bring up the same things:
Focus on the topic at hand.
Close unneeded programs.
Put the phone on silent and out of sight.
Listen to what others have to say.
Don't be afraid to ask questions and clarifications.
Manage your own well-being (i.e. if you need to take a break, you can do it respectfully and the others can also recognise your need for a break with empathy.)
When someone proposes how we should act in the meeting, ask the rest of the group how they feel about the proposal. You can do this, for example, by calling a Roman vote where everyone puts their fist in toward the group (or the camera) and shows either:
Thumb up, indicating agreement with the proposal
Thumb sideways, indicating consent or agreement to move forward
Thumb down, indicating disagreement or concerns with moving forward
You can even do a quick Forms poll in Teams meetings to gauge initial reactions to the proposal. If there are no thumbs down, the proposal gets recorded into the collaboration agreement. Otherwise those concerns need to be addressed. Ask, for example, "what would need to change for the proposal to work for you?" After further discussion and refinement you can call in another vote to check for consensus.
The beauty of this method is that it is not the person leading the meeting who dictates to others how they should behave. Instead, everyone agrees together. This is what it means to create consensus. By starting a meeting in this manner, people also learn immediately that they have a voice in the shared meeting process.
It takes about 10-15 minutes to run this activity, so it's not beneficial for very short meetings. Unless those meetings are recurring. In that case you can do the collaboration agreement once, spending a little more time on it. Then at the beginning of every future meeting, you show the collaboration agreement as a reminder of what has been agreed together, and ask if anyone wants to propose changes or new items to be added.
Happy 2022! May your meetings be energizing and productive!