Small talk looms large
Do you like cocktail parties? I hate them. Especially for mostly-introverts like me, the networking mixer is the worst part of every conference. I've learned to fake it, but tbh I'd rather hide in my hotel room with room service.
I feel the same way about unstructured small talk at the start of team meetings. The more time I have to spend hearing about Bob's nephew's football game, the less engaged I become. But give me strong meeting facilitation with a purpose, and I will run through walls for you.
Just me? This week I decided to find out.
Back to the Big Meeting Corpus we go
This year I've collected over 1,100 hours of recorded meetings from over 150 teams. I've published many insights from the aggregated data, mostly showing that people both participate and constructively disagree with each other more in person.
This week, I'm focusing on 60 hours of team meetings run by 10 different managers, all with teams of 5-7 people, from a single organization. Half of the meetings are in-person, and half take place over video. I wanted an apples-to-apples comparison of meeting data to figure out:
- Do people participate more in the substantial part of your meeting if you start with unstructured small talk?
- Do managers who start with small talk get higher ratings from their teams?
- Does small talk work better in remote or in-person settings?
My hypothesis was that the more time a team spends on small talk, the less productive, happy, and engaged the team is overall.
tl;dr: I was right.
When you start with small talk, some people check out and never come back
Look, I get why managers are tempted to begin team meetings with chit-chat. Maybe you're waiting for that one straggler to arrive before kicking off the main agenda. Maybe it's Monday morning and you're trying to ease people back in after the weekend. Maybe you think it humanizes you and you're trying to be the fun boss (but you're wrong).
But across all 60 hours of meetings and all 10 managers, the more time you spend on small talk, the less engaged people are. If you wrap up small talk within three minutes, 75-85% of team members stay engaged and participate throughout the meeting. But if small talk lasts more than five minutes, participation rates drop to 40-50%.
A few months ago, we saw that people participate more actively when meetings are in person than when they're remote, and that held up in this week's data too. But small talk has a similar dampening effect on participation in both remote and in-person settings.
The bottom line: When meetings start with more than five minutes of small talk, half the team stops participating and they never come back.
The highest-rated managers use the least small talk
Because I focused on data from a single organization, I was able to compare each manager's meeting style with their overall employee engagement rating. Many factors contribute to how an employee rates their manager, but I wondered if the amount of time spent on small talk would predict overall team engagement.
The managers with the highest ratings use the least small talk. In particular, the managers with top ratings all take responsibility for leading the meeting within three minutes of starting.
Rather than starting with unstructured small talk, it is common for the higher-rated managers to kick off their meetings with facilitated prompts like these:
- "What's one word that summarizes how you're feeling about the week ahead?"
- "Has everyone seen the new case study? I'll give you a minute, but let's go around the room and everyone suggest one place you might use it this week."
- "Which do you prefer: Co-working space, coffee shop, or working from home?"
Notably, these structured prompts don't diminish later meeting participation the way unstructured small talk does. People engage more throughout the meeting when the manager takes responsibility for providing a professionally relevant structure right out of the gate, even when the meeting begins with warm-up conversation.
The bottom line: I love this manager rating data. It shows the reality of what people are mainly looking to their managers to provide: leadership with a point of view.
If you like casual chit-chat, great! Take your team to lunch. You water down both work and connection by trying to merge small talk with your real working sessions.
Thanks for reading!
Kieran
Are you serious about building exceptional teams? I wrote down three of my tried-and-true prompts for team meetings and offsites that drive team connection and performance. Ready for your next team meeting, no big budget required.
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