Efficient and humane online meetings

We have all become experts in online meetings. Or so we tell ourselves. In reality, most teams simply moved their old habits onto a screen: the same agenda, the same people invited out of politeness, the same person talking for twenty minutes. What was lost in the move is everything that used to happen around the meeting - the hello in the corridor, the raised eyebrow, the coffee afterwards where the real decision was actually made. On screen, that connective tissue disappears, and nobody notices until the team starts to feel strangely flat.

This is why we insist on the word humane alongside the word efficient. The two are not in tension. A meeting that opens with thirty seconds of "how are you, really?" is not a meeting that runs late; it is a meeting where people say what they think, where disagreement surfaces early instead of festering in a private chat window. Psychological safety is not a soft extra you add when there is time. It is the thing that makes the following fifty minutes worth having.

So we put together the checklist we use ourselves, and that we give to the teams we accompany. It follows a meeting through its six moments: before, general structure, relationship agreement, check-in, the meeting itself, check-out, and the personal review afterwards. Some of it is deliberately mundane - a bottle of water, a cable, a note on the door. Some of it takes more courage: naming a two-minute rule, asking who takes the minutes, saying a specific thank you to each person at the end. Social isolation is compensated, in part, by active recognition.

Download it, print it, put it next to your screen. Try one thing from it in your next meeting rather than all of it at once, and notice what changes in the room - even when the room is fourteen small rectangles. If you want to go further, the Crisis Canvas for Teams and the Mood Enhancer are available on request.