It happens quite often that the most charismatic extroverted people can take over your meetings. I do this quite often myself. Async meetings grants people an equal voice. Over the years I’ve tried to improve my listening skills and I’m slowly but surely getting better.
There is a problem with people speaking truth to power. As a business leader, people don’t always feel comfortable speaking the truth. I don’t mean that people are telling lies far from it. It’s more about the silence on certain matters and the lack of confidence to speak out.
You can change this by changing your approach. In a world full of back-to-back video calls a fresh alternative is to go asynchronous. The one thing that you’ve got to change is to send a link to a screencast, video message or voice note and to allow people plenty of time to respond. To ensure the actual meeting takes place you simply add a hyperlink to your screencast, video or voice note instead of a live meeting link.
Having tested this over the last 3 years at Webanywhere we have found some interesting results. Now I’m not saying that you should conduct async meetings all of the time. When it comes to building relationships or escalating issues you should go with a live video call.
There are however distinct advantages for the async meeting approach. And firstly it allows you to have multiple meetings at any one point in time. There are days when our diaries are rammed packed full of meetings and there simply isn’t room for another one. Going a sink with your meeting allows you to conduct a conversation without the overhead of diary coordination. It means instead of pushing a meeting back in the diary and having to wait conversations happen.
In summary, if you have to escalate an issue or build a relationship then async meetings are not the way forward. Where are you can try and default to async meetings. You get more honest feedback and the untold stories come out. It also gives people more thinking time and the ability to pause. Taking a pause aids preparation and elevates the quality of conversations. All of this helps you get to the customer truth. The above picture looks like a live video meeting but it’s a work video message being played! Watch and Learn is a new work communication tool, helping people get their message across through instantly shareable videos. Video messaging for work offers an alternative to live video calls and traditional emails.