Air Time
One problem with meetings is that some people may talk far more than others. Other people may be so accustomed to this that they don’t speak up even when they have valuable points to make.
You can combat this by giving everyone three sticky notes at the start of the meeting (or coins, or paperclips—anything inedible will do). Every time someone speaks, they have to give up one sticky note. When they’re out of stickies, they aren’t allowed to speak until everyone has used at least one, at which point everyone gets all of their sticky notes back. This ensures that nobody talks more than three times as often as the quietest person in the room, which completely changes group dynamics. People who have given up trying to be heard suddenly have space to contribute, while the overly-frequent speakers realize how talkative they have been.
Learning the hard way
I first encountered this technique when someone on my team used it on me. No matter how many people were in the room, I seemed to think I should be talking half the time; I still do that sometimes, but I’d like think I’ve gotten better.
Another useful technique is called interruption bingo. Draw a grid and label the rows and columns with the participants’ names; each time person A interrupts person B, add a tally mark to the appropriate cell. Look at the results Halfway through the meeting: in most cases it will be clear that one or two people are doing all of the interrupting, and that they’re always interrupting the same people. After that, saying, “All right, I’m adding another tally to the bingo card,” is usually enough to get them to throttle back. If it isn’t, well, you just learned something about your teammate…
Unevenly distributed
One thing interruption bingo often reveals is that people who interrupt almost always interrupt down, i.e., they only interrupt people they believe have lower social status than they do. People who do this also often use interruption to establish social status: if I can cut you off mid-sentence, I must be more important than you are. In the worst case two people will waste everyone else’s time trying to out-interrupt each other, which a colleague of mine used to refer to as lekking. Please don’t do this.
Online meetings provide special challenges for regulating how often individuals speak. [Troy2018] discusses why online meetings are often frustrating, and points out that in most online meetings, the first person to speak during a pause gets the floor. As a result, “If you have something you want to say, you have to stop listening to the person currently speaking and instead focus on when they’re gonna pause or finish so you can leap into that nanosecond of silence and be the first to utter something. The format…encourages participants who want to contribute to say more and listen less.”
The solution is to run a text chat beside the video conference where people can signal that they want to speak; the moderator can then select people from the waiting list. Text chat is better than the “raise hand” feature most video conferencing tools offer because the person who wants to speak can indicate why. For example, they can type “question about budget” rather than just “question” so that the moderator can group related questions together. Again, [Brookfield2016] is a useful, well-organized catalog of techniques like these.