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The factors contributing to risk in meetings
As part of our analytic process in Phase II, we extracted from our research participants’ stories those factors that seemed most salient and productive as resources for ritualization, particularly those that seemed associated with increasing attendees’ sense of risk.
Table 1: list of factors affecting individuals’ assessment of social risk in meetings
| Cluster | Factors |
|---|---|
| General Meeting Characteristics |
|
| Meeting moment |
|
| Individual’s place in the meeting and moment |
|
Table 1 provides a rough summary of this analysis, along with a provisional organizational framework. One set of factors, which we termed “general meeting characteristics” are perhaps most salient, and certainly most commonly referenced in stories from our interviews. These include the number of participants in a meeting, the ostensible purpose of a meeting, or the level of hierarchical difference among attendees. Meetings involving large numbers of people, meetings with customers or superiors, or people with whom one is less familiar, are all considered higher risk.
“Our most important meetings are the client review meetings, and the business development meetings… These are where we focus on the relationship with the client.” (P2-15)
Technology breakdowns in meetings involving either superiors or clients were considered most consequential. Some participants explicitly noted that the same breakdown may have completely different social consequences depending on who is in attendance:
“If that happens in a stakeholder meeting it’s catastrophic. If it happens during staff we just laugh about it.” (P2-12)
“Meeting moments”
Despite the salience of relatively static features of context such as meeting type or status of attendees, a significant number of our participants pointed out that breakdowns are more consequential at certain moments within a customer meeting.
“Like when you’re right in the middle of an important exchange with a customer, and you drop, it just totally kills what you’re trying to do. You miss some key clues to what they’re saying. That [rapport] is hard to get, and then…it’s just lost.” (P2-14).
Though none of our participants ever used the phrase “meeting moments” (as we came to call them), the idea surfaced in many of our interviews, and not simply because of technology breakdowns. Many of our participants, reflecting an intuitive understanding of ritualization, recognized that meeting moments are created through practice, for instance, by shifting the social framing of a meeting from the business at hand to something more focused on camaraderie.
“We usually end our meetings with a few minutes of loose chat, the water cooler chat that we no longer have. We’ve tried to integrate that into the [remote] standup.” (P2-4)
They also note that technologies can introduce risks is by undermining such practices. Multiple participants described to us how they were once able to seamlessly accomplish such shifts in meeting moments, and how they have struggled to do so since COVID:
“When you’re at the office, you have all kinds of opportunities for chit-chat…We don’t get that anymore. Our manager has a time set aside for personal updates at the end of every weekly staff meeting but mostly it’s just painful.” (P2-13)
P2-13 explained that such moments felt more like “an interrogation…Everyone has to take turns telling the manager what they did over the weekend.” This points first of all to the fact that “informality” is as much a reflexive accomplishment as “formality” (cf., Irvine, 1979). It also points to how technology may itself shape the kinds of resources that groups can use to fluidly create different modes of interaction on the fly. In this case, by enforcing what Goffman (1966) called a “central situational focus” for all participants, along with distinct structuring of turns at talk, remote meeting technologies undermine “chit chat” and turn it into a more formal and moderated interaction. This reshaped interaction increased a sense of awkwardness and social risk, making it “painful.”
APPLYING OUR ANALYTIC FRAMEWORK: TWO EXAMPLES
In this section, we look at the process of ritualization more closely, with a particular focus on how the mediation of technology in remote or hybrid meetings may support or interfere with individuals’ attempts to establish the power of an event or produce social outcomes through communicative practice. We focus specifically on a question of “visibility”, to show how different meeting circumstances can drive widely divergent technological needs and experiences.
Example 1: technology, visibility, and the performance of trust
Some meetings or moments are notable for the extent to which both communicative performance and the very structuring of the work within the meeting are explicitly focused on producing a social outcome. Such a situation was described to us by one of our research participants (P2-8) whom we will call Tabitha for the sake of narrative.3 Tabitha is the deputy director of labor relations for a mid-sized municipality. Her job is to negotiate contracts with the city’s labor force. COVID created two acute problems for Tabitha. First, it dramatically reduced the city’s operating budget. The city urgently needed to find ways of saving money, so Tabitha was tasked with meeting representatives of the city’s various employee organizations (which she refers to as “bargaining units”) to collaboratively find ways of saving money through concessions in salaries or benefits. Tabitha’s second challenge was how she had to do this negotiation: in online meetings, a tool she hadn’t used for this purpose prior to the pandemic. It is important to note that Tabitha’s objective in these meetings was not simply to find ways to save the city money, but to preserve the relationship of trust and good faith she had built up with the city’s employees over many years. She now had to do this using a new medium. Perhaps not surprisingly, she described the current negotiation process as “very challenging.”
A key element of Tabitha’s performance in negotiation meetings is the sharing of financial spreadsheets. Sharing of digital documents is obviously a common part of many meetings, providing both a resource for structuring activities and facilitating collaboration. For Tabitha, sharing spreadsheets was not just about conveying information, but also to facilitate the creation of trust, by demonstrating transparency and accountability, and providing her negotiating counterparts with the opportunity to actively interrogate different financial scenarios.
We just share the financial information…show them our numbers. This has always been done in person. We came up with different numbers for the different bargaining units, and showed them – we need to save two percent. If you don’t want to take it out of salary, we gave them this spreadsheet and they could plug in numbers so they could go play with it. We didn’t want to dictate to them how to get to that. (P2-8)
Negotiation meetings, which typically include anywhere from four to eleven participants, had transitioned to Zoom during the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, Tabitha would have conducted these meetings face-to-face:
I’ve been doing this a long time. People have a tell – the way they ask a question helps us understand what they’re thinking. It’s really about being honest and transparent. That’s why we put that out there. Really just being able to understand what’s that question about and being able to answer it clearly for the other side. (P2-8)
Tabitha’s performance of good faith negotiation depended not only a shared workspace that can be jointly interrogated, it also depended on her own ability to clearly see her counterparts and their reactions to different contingencies. The use of online meeting technologies precluded this. For Tabitha, this presented a major difficulty.
I want to see people – I want to be able to read them. If we all met in a room we’d just be having a conversation. We’re talking about this – this is what we’re doing. Especially when they have questions – they might ask questions about their bargaining unit, why we are asking for this (P2-8)
Available technologies provide Tabitha with an adequate resource for performing transparency, but fail to provide her with the ability to see her interlocutors and their responses to her. This was most acute in the moment of joint decision-making, when agreement on cuts would result in both short term gains for the city and a long-term sustaining of the city’s relationship with its workers. It was striking in Tabitha’s story how inseparable these two outcomes were, and how much they were affected by technology.
Example 2: technology, invisibility and the performance of engagement
Tabitha’s example demonstrates the desire for and utility of mutual visibility. This allows rich signaling and inferencing that helps interlocutors build a common sense of purpose and trust. In other cases, such rich visibility was clearly undesirable, at least to some meeting participants. This came up in the stories of many of our participants, but nicely articulated by one in particular, (P2-3) whom we will call Tom. As with many of our participants, Tom noted that in large, routine and formally structured meetings, such as his weekly update meeting, it is useful to be invisible:
“It’s probably about 70 or 80 people. I speak in this one as little as possible. It’s not interactive. The CFO has his video on. It’s put the meeting on, and listen, but have coffee. …Our video culture is essentially have as little video as possible… You don’t want to have video on, nobody wants to have video on.” (P2-3)
Such meetings are noteworthy for their asymmetry with respect to the way one’s role in a meeting shapes one’s desire for visibility. Speakers, as earlier quotes in this paper have attested, naturally desire audience feedback. But, in the case of larger, routine, formal meetings, audience members often prefer to go undetected. They mute their microphones and disable their cameras. This is not only to avoid potentially embarrassing over-sharing, as described above. Many of our participants said they remained invisible so they could multitask. They described overwhelming demands of both work and home life as primary drivers of multitasking behavior – along with a sense that their time spent in low-engagement meetings could be better spent on other activities. This tendency is clearly echoed in other research (Cao, et al, 2021). While people may multitask in response to pressures associated with productivity, the desire for invisibility while doing so has more to do with meetings as rituals. Well before COVID, Wasson (2006:114) recognized that “the pervasiveness of multitasking in virtual meetings thus requires us to reconsider the Goffmanian definition of meetings as involving a central situational focus.”
Wasson’s insight highlights that multitasking is ritual transgression. It needs to be done discretely and without disrupting that central situational focus, using indicators such as a mute icon or obviously inactive camera – what Goffman(1966) has called “interaction shields.” The behavioral norm for remote meetings is still one of central situational focus.
“I am a huge proponent of video conferencing etiquette. If we are on the phone, spending everybody’s time, we need to be engaged and give the respect that’s due and ensure that we are paying attention, that we are there.” (P2-16)
This was explicitly stated by only a few of our participants, but clearly the practice was ubiquitous as described for us by others. A common anxiety among those who engage in shielding is being caught in their inattention: “… there have been times when I hear my name and I have to say ‘sorry, can you repeat that?’” (P2-20). Yet, despite that anxiety, it is better to be caught out this way than to be obviously inattentive.
There are yet other reasons for remaining invisible. Activating one’s audio and video in a larger meeting may be interpreted as an inappropriate attempt to perform hierarchy. As many participants told us, managers and leaders more often activate their video than those who report to them.
“Anyone with a leadership position will keep their cameras on. They are used to being in the spotlight and the center of attention.” (P2-4).
Managers themselves suggested they do so to demonstrate their heightened interest or engagement:
“I turn on video on so people can see me – I think it helps with feeling connected.” (P2-10).
Activating audio or video among those not in a leadership position might thus be perceived as pretentiousness – roughly akin to claiming a seat at the head of the table. As Tom describes it, people should remain invisible in meetings…
…unless you are trying to suck up… if you want to impress the boss, you’re there, you’re in a tie for some reason, you’re looking very sharp, you want to impress the boss ‘oh very good point sir.’ That’s the kind of person.” (P2-3)
Even this did not entirely explain people’s reluctance to activate audio and video, however. Some participants noted that being on camera ultimately requires a performance of engagement (e.g., by constantly looking attentively at their screen) that feels both inauthentic and unsustainable. As one subject put it: “I just feel too exposed with video on, especially in larger meetings.” (P2-7). Sustaining this kind of performance across many meetings per day or week can be exhausting. Surprisingly, this insight has received little attention in the extensive recent discussions of “Zoom fatigue” (Lee, 2020; Bailenson, 2021; Wiederhold, 2020). Giving employees the option to disable the camera amounts to giving them a modicum of agency in the face of what may amount to overwhelming demands to continuously perform alignment and engagement.
That simple insight lies at the heart of our connection of meetings, rituals and resilience and provides a simple but useful way of thinking about technological design: by focusing on the work associated with the many, diverse modes of socially consequential performance in meetings, perhaps we can create technologies that make meeting participation both more sustainable and rewarding. This demands both appreciating the types of social risks that workers face, the complications that technologies introduce, and the possibilities that we might imagine. In the section that follows, we build on the examples of Tom and Tabitha, discuss possible solutions that emerged in group ideation sessions, and explore how feedback to the resulting concepts deepened both our understanding of how to manage the social riskiness of meetings and potentially improve resiliency.