By now, some of you have come to dread meetings, even more than usual.

If you’re part of the 50% of people who work remotely at least once a week, then you’ve likely seen the circus that is people adjusting to remote meetings.

Between IT problems, interruptions, and other things, you’re probably been going through the growing pains of adjusting to remote meetings.

Many of these problems are likely to go away with time, except for one: Being talked over.

It’s been reported as the most common problem in meetings, with 67% of people complaining about it, and it’s unlikely to go away with time because it fundamentally challenges the way we communicate.

So to fix it, we need to re-evaluate what we learned in grade school.

The science of turn-taking

Turn-taking is a type of organization in which people speak one at a time in alternating turns.

It’s a skill we’ve probably learned through grade school: we’re taught to raise our hands, wait for the other person to finish speaking, or make sure to finish speaking.

So why is it failing so often in remote meetings? Well, because of the science of turn-taking is a little bit more complicated than that.

A person’s turn consists of three parts:

• Opening, which is how the conversation is connected to the previous turn
• Content, which is the message you want to get across
• The ending, which signals that your turn is ended and another turn can be taken

These things are crucial in determining how turn-taking occurs and whose turn it is. The speed at which this happens in-person is so quick and automatic that you may not even realize it happened until you went remote.

The main issue lies in the third part, the Ending. When in-person, we use both verbal and non-verbal cues to suggest that our turn is done and that someone else should speak.

But that’s something that our remote meeting technology doesn’t support.

#science #meetings #communication #productivity #remote-working #data science