Fight me!

Earlier this year, I began collecting recorded workplace meetings from as many different teams as I could. I now have over 1,100 hours of meeting data from more than 150 different teams, and have published lots of insights about it:

• In-person meetings are more inclusive than remote ones
• Women love to tell other women "I told you so"​
• ​Everyone take's credit for women's ideas
• ​Your boss is the only one who can interrupt in hybrid meetings

This week, we're diving back into the Big Meeting Corpus to look at another aspect of in-person and remote meeting settings: In which setting are people more likely to disagree with each other?

In-person vs. remote, episode 81,374

For this analysis, I included 200 hours of meeting data: 100 hours of meetings that were fully co-located (i.e. everyone in the same physical conference room), and 100 hours that were fully distributed (i.e. everyone dialing in via video). All meetings had between 2-10 attendees.

I analyzed the meeting data to answer two questions:

1. Are people more likely to disagree with each other in person or over video?
2. Are people more likely to disagree in bigger meetings or smaller ones?
3. Does hierarchy make a difference?

In prior work, I found that more people participate more consistently in person, so I was expecting to find some impact this week too. But the strength of the findings surprised me.

People disagree more often in person

First, some potential confounding factors: meeting type and facilitation style. As in, brainstorming meetings are more likely to spark different views than status meetings, and facilitators who ask for differing opinions generate livelier conversations. I controlled for these factors.

In the end, across all meeting types and styles, people are more likely to disagree with each other when they meet in person.

I wasn't surprised to find that people disagree more often in person, since we already saw that in-person meetings have higher participation from more attendees. But I was surprised at how big the difference was: people meeting in person disagree with each other 1.5x more often than people meeting over video.

Five people is the sweet spot

In both in-person and remote settings, meeting size changes how often people disagree with each other. But the effect wasn't linear! The data has kind of a bell curve. Meetings with five participants include the most disagreements.

Productive disagreement is not only ok, it's actually essential for teams and projects to succeed. To surface as many contrary opinions as possible, you need enough people in the room to represent a range of perspectives -- but not so many that most people default to silence.

But don't worry, your boss disagrees with you in every setting

Remember when we saw the boss effect in hybrid meetings, where the boss is the only one who can cut into conversation over video? Same deal here. Whether remote or in person, the most senior person in the room is equally comfortable putting in their two cents. On average, they express disagreement more often than anyone else in the meeting.

The bottom line: All else being equal, people are more willing to disagree with each other in person than over video. Of course, we know that all else is not always equal. Meeting structure, team culture, and demographics all (probably) matter.

Still, if you're trying to foster a culture of healthy disagreement, it's easier to do so in person. If you're remote, you gotta work a lot harder to elicit the opinions you need.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading!

Kieran

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kieran@nerdprocessor.com
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