Well designed meetings are a vital and powerful tool for transforming the negative effects of stress into positive energy and excitement
This article is part of our series on stress resilience and mental health at work..
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Is stress inevitable?
Challenges are always present. They are what provide us opportunities to add value, to pull together, and to shine. It is challenges that provide us with learning and fulfilment and rewards. But they also involve stress.
So how do we prepare our people to work with that stress so that it doesn’t adversely affect mental health at work? In other words, how do we equip them to use it as a motivator, and not be overwhelmed by it? And how do we ensure the stress is a positive influence and not a negative one.
The need for better meeting design
Typically, the biggest factors in how our people approach challenges depends upon:
- Their understanding of the challenge and its context
- Their skills, capabilities and confidence to rise to that challenge
- The level of support they can expect in tacking the most difficult bits
- The sense of purpose and meaning the challenge has for them
- The insight, ideas and creativity that they can bring to the challenge
- Their attitude and beliefs about themselves and their team in relation to the challenge
- The appreciation and acceptance they feel in tackling the challenge
Greater levels of these things help reduce stress. But where the levels are low, stress grows, and has a negative impact on mental health at work.
So how do we deliver these factors to the individuals who are tackling the challenge? The answer to that is most likely the meetings that take place around the challenge. Big meetings, small meetings, one-on-ones. To good effect or bad.
The greater the positive influence of these things, the greater the likelihood of success, and the more the challenge seems like an adventure. But if these things are missing, or badly handled, the challenge can seem overwhelming. As a result, its impact on us and the organisation can be damaging.
Meetings are key. However, this is somewhat of an irony, because many of us don’t see meetings in that light.
Meeting stress
There is overwhelming anecdotal evidence that people see meetings as an obstacle rather than an enabler. All too often, and for too many people, meetings seem (and perhaps have become) a distraction to simply getting on with their work.Instead of meetings being a means to handle and reduce stress through the means defined above, people find that many meetings add further stress. And this meeting stress is totally unnecessary, and the result of lack of meeting design. Such meeting stress is a major cause of issues in mental health at work.
And there is good reason for this. We have somehow lost sight that the value of a meeting is the difference it makes to those who attend it. We couch meeting objectives in terms of inanimate deliverables. But the only thing a meeting CAN change is how people act as a result of it. All that it can do effectively are deliver the bullet points above.
the value of a meeting is the difference it makes to those who attend it
A decision is sterile and impotent without the understanding and commitment of those required to effect it. The fact is, if your people do not need to change, even in a small way, then you don’t need a meeting. And if they do need to change, then that is what the meeting needs to deliver. The content is simply a means to achieve that. In a well-designed meeting, the people do not so much work on the content, as the content works on the people.
We need to begin to see meetings as a means to change people to what they need to proceed. Then we will start to design meetings as journeys in which we address what is missing (from the bulleted list). Our objectives would reflect skills, attitudes and shared understanding. And people would not only see their value, they would eagerly engage with them to play their part in that journey.
The value of your meetings depends not only on the journey, but the extent to which people engage with that journey. Their adoption of what is needed is much more likely if they are actively involved in developing it. For that reason, your meeting (especially if it is virtual) should use participative tools wherever possible.
Steps to better meeting design
So for your meeting design, here are some practical things to think about:
- Do you know what they need in respect of the above bullets? If not, can you talk to them to find out?
- How much of what is required can be delivered through interaction with their colleagues in a well designed meeting?
- What did they feel about the last meeting in this regard, and why? Can you raise the bar for this one?
- How will you use participation to build personal and team ownership and support?
- How can you better engage their insight, ideas and creativity in the plans that you want to build?
- Where can you authentically express your appreciation and acceptance for what they have achieved already?
expectations on people are not getting any easier
The expectations on people are not getting any easier. The challenges to which we refer are increasingly frequent, perhaps even daily, occurrences. Better meeting design is all about systematically rethinking our everyday meetings until they better equip people for those everyday challenges. If people in our organisations do not like meetings, it is a very clear indication that they are poorly designed. And if they are poorly designed, we are handicapping ourselves and our people in a competitive race for the future.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
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Relevant Links:
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Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
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Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
The problem is that our heads were not built to handle all of this stuff in this way. And the more we rely on our heads to do so, the more likely we are to forget important connections, and make mistakes, and find we have to rethink things – which creates further stress. Or worse still, we ignore those mistakes, and create problems for people ‘down the chain’. This creates further stress for them, and is the main cause of silo behaviours.
In the past, things were reasonably stable, and strategies could be cascaded down from the top of the organisation. Jobs remained fairly static, and people could pretty much get on with them year on year in the same way. The key connections the organisation required were largely integrated into routines and habit.
Much of the routine in people’s roles will be automated with bots and AI. Which is good, because that will give them more time to spend on thinking through the bits that aren’t routine. The increasing level of internal requests, and product/service changes. The technology that is evolving with each update. The special projects where they need someone with your experience. The requests for new ideas. The new agile ways of working. The scrums and self-managed work groups.
Because now change is happening so fast, they cannot cope with making all of the decisions from the top. There are too many. And it takes too long to cascade them down. People need to see the opportunities for themselves. They need to make their own decisions. They need to respond, and adapt, and fit in to fast changing configurations.
So, since the early 1960s, Engineers have been devising design tools to handle all of that complexity for them. To structure complexity, and enable them to then focus on specific subsets within that. In this way, the overall system of connections can be complex. But the application of human thinking and creativity can be simplified. The design tool enables the engineer to work at different levels of abstraction. The structure of the tool breaks down complexity, but maintains the relationships. It keeps all of the connections as context and simplifies (decouples) the problems within it.
In the West, workplace stress and problems with mental health at work now accounts for over half of all lost time.
Not only is the general trend getting worse, but the causes of stress and poor mental health at work are also increasing. Faster change, greater competition, more complexity, longer exposure, increased uncertainty.
Because the fact is, that these stresses and the risk of mental illness is also affecting us. In many ways the impact of change is having its greatest influence on the leadership. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we too are increasingly busy. More and more, we are handling complex and ambiguous situations. Many of us are feeling it a struggle to keep up, and are unable to find time to ourselves.
So what are the causes of stress for your organisation?
Unsurprisingly, these events are connected with fundamental human needs for security, affection and control. Three things that are echoed in Maslow’s hierachy of needs.
It also ties in with what we need to be successful as we cope with the demands and opportunities of our work. The things we need to rebuild our mental health:
What happens in this ‘internal space’ holds the key to how people handle stress. It also determines the extent to which that has repercussions for the mental health of their colleagues and the overall system.
In fact, it is rare to encounter an organisation which is wholly red or wholly green in this. That said, given the relative business and people benefit of the green descriptions over the red ones, there is always merit in actively seeking to become more green.
Do people know the extent to which meetings within their organisation have a positive or negative influence on the factors in this stress map? Most executives would not have any data on the proportion of meetings which fell into each category. Or whether there was any meaningful patterns within that. This, in itself, is part of the problem.
All extrapolations of how work will change over the coming decade highlight the extent to which routine will be automated, and people’s roles will be inherently about change. As a result, levels of collaboration will continue to increase. And continuous learning will become the key business skill for those who will thrive in this emerging future of work.