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Excuse me, can I interrupt?

Before we ever started Textio, I was publishing data about workplace communication patterns. I eventually became known for uncovering bias in performance reviews and resumes, but the first study I did that broke through to the mainstream wasn't about text at all; it was about conversational interruptions in workplace meetings. I found that men interrupted more than women, that women were interrupted more than men, and that more senior people interrupted more junior people.

I also looked intersectionally, with perhaps surprising results: The biggest interrupters of all were not senior men, but senior women. I resemble that pattern.

This year I am updating that research and adding some new dimensions. I'm considering:

• Race and ethnicity, in addition to gender and seniority
• How things differ in co-located meetings, distributed meetings, and hybrid meetings
• Whether team usage of certain AI tools changes the patterns

So far I've collected more than 150 hours of meetings from 40 different organizations. Over the course of the year, I'll be publishing insights from this data set.

First up: Interruptions in a hybrid world.

Hybrid optimizes for not making people mad

Warning: Hot take coming!

Look, I get why co-located work is awesome for teams. Real people, in person, have great collaborative energy. Impromptu connection and brainstorming can be magic.

I also get why distributed work is awesome for teams. Save people's commuting time. Reach great talent anywhere. Being closer to your customers can be a major accelerator.

I may be the last holdout, but I do not get why hybrid work is awesome for teams. I get why individuals like it: you retain all your flexibility, with a theoretically vibrant office culture you can tune into like Netflix whenever you want. But as far as teams go, I've always suspected that hybrid creates weird pockets of inclusion / exclusion, where the people who are mostly together in the physical room have a relationship and visibility advantage over those who are not.

You can boo now, it's ok. We can still be friends.

I'm mentioning my hot take upfront because it informed my curiosity about how hybrid meetings work.

Apples-to-apples data about hybrid meetings

Hundreds of hours of meeting data can include about a zillion variables (that's a technical term). I constrained the initial data set to try to minimize confounding factors. This week I looked at:

• 25 hours of hybrid meetings from 20 different teams, all with cameras on from all meeting attendees
• Meetings with 5-10 people in total, with only one person dialing in to the meeting and everyone else co-located
• Attendee groups with no more than 60% of any one gender or race among participants
• Meetings in English, but fun fact: I have collected some hours of Spanish and French meetings too, and will be able to do some cross-linguistic comparisons in a later post

Within these constraints, I wanted to know: What happens to the person dialing in?

The best way to interrupt: Be the boss

When I collected data about co-located teams in 2014, I saw that, all else being equal, more senior people interrupted more often, and more junior people got interrupted more often. But I also found that gender mattered more than seniority, so I was prepared to find the same in this new data set.

That's not what I found.

When the lone person on video is the most senior in the room, they are able to cut in 92% of the time they try.

By contrast, when the person on video is trying to interrupt people who are their peers, they're successful just 15% of the time, and just 9% of the time when the people in the room are all senior to them.

In other words, it's almost impossible for the person on video to get a word in when they're the only one outside the physical room. But there's one surefire way through this: being the boss.

Only the boss is able to hold the floor when people in the room try to interrupt them.

We've all been in those meetings where the one person on video is talked over constantly by a group that is otherwise sitting around the same table. In fact, when the person dialing in is junior to those in the physical room, 94% of the attempts to interrupt them are effective. But when the person dialing in is the most senior, only 16% of the attempts work.

Other demographics do not change these patterns!

For me, this was the big shocker. Here's a list of factors that do not change the above data in any significant way:

• Interrupter / interruptee gender
• Interrupter / interruptee race
• The extent of demographic diversity across the group
• Whether the person ostensibly running the meeting is in the room with the big group or the one on video
• The meeting structure (tight moderation vs. organic conversation)

I saw some initial data that the above factors may change the degree to which meeting attendees attempt to interrupt in the first place. I'll probably write about this later on. But, once the interruption is attempted, not one of these factors significantly changes interruption success rate.

Not one of these factors disrupts the massive impact of participant seniority.

Back my my hot take

I know, I know, y'all love your hybrid workplaces. And hybrid does seem to be the way forward for many organizations.

This interruptions data is major food for thought, though. Maybe it's just directional data for now, but the direction is super strong. When the person on video is outnumbered by people who are co-located, the one on video is at a huge disadvantage in contributing to conversations. The only way around that disadvantage is to be the boss.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading!

Kieran

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kieran@nerdprocessor.com
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