Fostering Inclusiveness Through Clear Meeting Standards

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.’” - Dave Barry

“Clear is kind.” - Brene Brown 

To achieve true inclusion and belonging, you need to provide clear operating instructions for your team. It’s one thing to declare your company’s values and aspirations (“differences are celebrated!”), but people need to understand how to live up to those values and aspirations on a day-to-day basis. And since we spend so much of our time in meetings, spelling out your expectations and standards around how to meet is a powerful place to start. 

Here at Phase2, we recently rolled out new meeting standards and have already seen the transformational impact on our employees’ feelings of inclusion — not to mention, their sense of empowerment. Our director of brand, Caitlin Loos, described the scope of our meetings initiative in a blog aptly titled Fewer, Better Meetings. Here, I’d like to highlight just a few of the ways those specific changes have impacted our team, based on interviews I conducted with a diverse cross section of employees.

Meeting standard: We label every meeting invitation as one of five standard meeting types. Each meeting type comes with standard agreements that all employees have committed to uphold.

Impact on inclusion and belonging: 

• Knowing what to expect from each meeting type — whether it’s a meeting where the goal is X, for example, or Y — helps Catharine, who is deaf and utilizes a cochlear implant, feel more prepared, and therefore less anxious. 
• In the past, it was hard for her to always track when the idle chit chat at the start of a meeting was ending, and the core of the meeting was starting. By establishing a “salon” meeting type that is explicitly social, she now knows when to show up ready to socialize, and when to expect to get right down to business. (And yes, we have a meeting type devoted to socializing, because we know how important it is to our team’s feelings of connection and belonging, and to our culture.)

Meeting standard: In most of our meetings, we ask that no one speaks a third time until everyone has spoken at least once.

Impact on inclusion and belonging: 

• Marcus is a structured and focused manager. Because he likes to home in on the task at hand, he was often quiet in meetings if people were talking over one another, venting, or taking tangents. This often resulted in frustrating meetings with no real outcomes or progress. As an African American man, he understands the pressure that so many people of color feel in workplaces — to perform twice as well (or talk twice as much) in order to experience the same level of inclusion. With guidelines and expectations placed on how people interact and staying on task, he can be sure that his strong viewpoints are now considered by the entire group, enabling his teams to make more informed and healthy decisions.
• For Dan, who leads a group of developers, this standard felt forced at first. Many of the people he manages have strong opinions, and yet are uncomfortable speaking in meetings. He worried about how to get everyone to participate until he discovered the magic of polling. Now, everyone can participate by voting as a precursor to conversation; he finds this helps his technical team ease into actual conversation. He wouldn’t have landed on this approach to engaging his team without the nudge that this meeting standard provided.

Meeting standard: At the end of each meeting, we ask people to rate the meeting as a way of offering candid, real-time feedback.  

Impact on inclusion and belonging: 

• Sedona said that being asked to share feedback was incredibly empowering for her, a younger woman. By asking for her feedback, the meeting organizer signals that they respect her time and value her contribution. Plus, sharing feedback is vulnerable — and being willing to reveal your needs is a form of participation that fosters inclusion. 

Think of clear meeting standards as a kind of scaffolding that holds up the kind of culture you’re trying to create. When it comes right down to it, inclusion is about people knowing how to make a meaningful contribution, so they can feel valuable. But too often, we expect employees to be mind readers, intuiting how we want them to show up, in order for us to perceive them as contributing value. 

The process of spelling things out is, in large part, about taking our implicit expectations and making them explicit. It’s also about holding ourselves accountable for naming the kinds of behaviors that will turn our aspirations into lived realities, rather than simply values listed on a website.

As Brene Brown writes, “Not getting clear with a colleague about your expectations because it feels too hard, yet holding them accountable or blaming them for not delivering, is unkind.”