Be Social -- Call a Meeting

My four-year-old daughter is a Disney Pixar fan, and one of her recent favorites to watch again and again is Wall•E, a futuristic story of a hard-working little robot who saves a spaceship full of humans from an evil computer, kind of like Stanley Kubrick for pre-schoolers.  The humans spend their days communicating with each other via touch screens that float in front of their faces.  Even when seated side-by-side, they have no personal contact.  Golf games, conversations and social activities all take place in a virtual world.

Now, if you take a look around your office, you’ll probably notice that we’re not far from that today.  How much of your communication at work is electronic compared to face-to-face?  Do you have MSN running?  Do you have Facebook up?  Are your friends helping you farm?  If you want to join a colleague for lunch, are you more likely to send a text message, or to walk over to her desk and ask face to face? 

Yes, it’s true that electronic media and social networking enable you to keep in contact with all of your friends, but the face-to-face element, especially on your job, is minimized.
 
This is why I think face-to-face business meetings during your work day deserve a better reputation than they have.  Meetings are your opportunity to reestablish human contact with your colleagues and experience human interaction face to face.  Subtle nonverbal communicative signals that are lost in cyberspace can be enjoyed face-to-face.  Emotions absent from text and difficult to express in written words can be interpreted immediately simply by reading a facial expression.
  

The reason why business people view meetings as tolerably useful at best and agonizingly wasteful at worst is because we’re losing the idea that a face-to-face business meeting is an opportunity for social interaction.  Instead, we’re thinking that meetings take us away from our ‘real work’, which takes place on the screen back at our desks.
 
Perpetuating these ideas may lead to social disaster.  Decades of psychological research confirms that interpersonal contact is essential for normal human existence.  Social isolation is harmful, and business meetings offer the opportunity for us to be social with each other during our workday, even though the topic of discussion may be business.

Dr Richard Arvey of the National University of Singapore points out that Facebook’s popularity suggests how people may be hungrier for social friends than can be satisfied in their present day-to-day work and personal lives.
 
And I’d like to suggest that realigning your attitude towards business meetings will not only make you grateful for social interaction with your colleagues, but will also make your meetings more productive.