Have you ever thought about how brain chemistry affects your workplace and performance across your teams? Of course the way our minds work impacts our effectiveness and ability to work with others. How could it not? Everyone’s brain is different. We all have unique experiences, thereby we respond to stimuli differently. We could experience the same event, yet our perception and response to it could be drastically divergent based on our unique neurological makeup.

“There are deep-seated, neurologically-based differences in our perceptions, assumptions, and selection of which stimuli we act upon and which ones we overlook.” – Karen Gordon, the CEO Magazine

This is an extremely important concept to keep in mind when it comes to working effectively with others. In order to get the best performance from each individual in a team, we must first understand that no one mind thinks alike. Secondly, it is critical to understand what drives our own impulses as well as the impulses of others in order to work cooperatively.

“When collaborating with coworkers, we must remember that people at all levels work in different capacities on different tasks, and it’s less about strengths and weaknesses than it is about identifying the areas an individual has the most energy for. This is where productive collaboration can improve, particularly in how you manage a team and build culture. By pinpointing the areas in which you and your team, staff, or managers can easily complete tasks or work together on projects (but still feel fulfilled and challenged), you can create a team environment that avoids burnout, fosters positivity and success, and offers pathways for communication between colleagues that were previously unknown.” – Karen Gordon

How does the cocktail of various brain chemicals impact how we get work done? When you have a better understanding of how the brain works, you are more skillfully equipped to design meetings that get the most out of their attendees. 

Utilize Brain Science To Increase Team Collaboration 

Be Inclusive

While you can’t control the way people think, there are scientifically proven ways to create the conditions necessary to foster collaboration and optimal team performance. 

Brain science tells us that inclusion brings out the best in people. Being included drives trust, productivity, and collaboration with others. “Humans have a fundamental need to belong,” said Dr. Nathan DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. “Just as we have needs for food and water, we also have needs for positive and lasting relationships. This need is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history.” 

Multiple peer-reviewed studies have found that the brain registers exclusion the same as it registers physical pain. “Being excluded is painful because it threatens fundamental human needs, such as belonging and self-esteem. Again and again, research has found that strong, harmful reactions are possible even when ostracized by a stranger for a short amount of time.” -Dr. Kipling Williams, Purdue University psychologist 

To make your team feel included, offer ample opportunities for group cohesion, skill-building, and team development. To increase inclusion in meetings, allow all participants an equal opportunity to participate and contribute. Create a safe environment where everyone feels comfortable to speak and be heard. 

Pro tip: Use our Workshop Design Template for MURAL and Miro to consider everyone’s needs and maximize participant potential during your meetings.  

Avoid Information Overload

Too much information delivered all at once can cause cognitive overload. Don’t overwhelm participants with too much information, too quickly. People need time to process and digest information if they are going to properly retain it. Serve meeting attendees bite-sized information. Contextualize it with a hands-on activity that allows for engaged learning and personal connections. Always be sure to debrief during and especially at the end of a meeting to make sure that everyone is on track and nobody needs further clarification. 

Increase Productivity: Trigger Brain Chemicals

“Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins are the quartet responsible for our happiness. Many events can trigger these neurotransmitters, but rather than being in the passenger seat, there are ways we can intentionally cause them to flow.” –Thai Nguyen, Huffpost 

Make brain chemicals work for you by intentionally stimulating them. Low dopamine levels are linked to low motivation. Increase dopamine levels in your meeting by incorporating an energizer or icebreaker for a fun blast of energy. Play uplifting music during group work sessions. Research shows that listening to music can reduce stress, increase feelings of pleasure, and improve mood.

Pro tip: JQBX is one of our favorite remote working tools at Voltage Control. It’s like a team jukebox that allows you to listen to music together with your team while working apart. Also, check out our comprehensive Design Sprint playlist to listen to while you work.  

High serotonin levels are associated with confidence, self-esteem, and a sense of purpose. They’re also crucial to combatting the stress hormone cortisol. Spike serotonin levels amongst your team by acknowledging team members’ good work. Recognition of achievement is key to creating serotonin in the body. Simply thanking your team for their work and commitment does wonders for getting the juices flowing. 

Oxytocin is correlated to trust and bonding, and it reduces stress levels as well, which leads to feelings of contentment and security. Bring your team together and start your meeting with a moment of gratitude, wherein everyone shares something they’re grateful for–work-related or not. Check-in with your team during and after the meeting to see how everyone is doing. Even if no one needs anything, they’ll feel seen and taken care of knowing you’re concerned for their wellbeing. 

Create Psychological Safety

Fear and anxiety can shut down the brain as people enter into fight or flight mode. Keep this in mind as you are designing your meetings. If people feel closed off, they are unable to perform at their best. In order to get all attendees optimal performance, it is crucial that they feel completely comfortable sharing their thoughts and feelings in a group setting. Set ground rules at the start of a meeting to encourage a healthy environment. Let participants know that their ideas are not only welcome but essential. If an individual is speaking over other participants, gracefully remind them that the group would like to hear from everyone or simply ask “who haven’t we heard from?” Instead of putting quiet attendees on the spot by demanding their participation, invite them to join an open discussion. It can also be helpful to prompt the group with a question to consider quietly before anyone speaks, giving individuals time to think through their responses. 

Intentional planning is the easiest way for you to make an immediate difference in the impact of your meeting outcomes and the experiences you deliver to your meeting participants. The use of science-backed methods will help you cater to individuals’ neurology and ultimately tease out your peak meeting performance. The more productive your meetings are, the better your team and overall business will be.

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Culture of any kind is complex and multi-faceted. Meeting culture is no different; there isn’t one silver bullet that will completely transform your team’s meeting culture, as it is made up of a lot of little pieces.

Fortunately, those little pieces can be organized inter larger buckets to make tackling them bit-by-bit less overwhelming. Here’s Voltage Control’s recipe for a better meeting culture. 

Psychological Safety

Collect Feedback Often (and Anonymously)

Collecting and implementing feedback is one of the most important things you can do to make your meetings better. Good meeting culture is not one-size-fits-all; different teams need or desire different environments and expectations. Sometimes finding the right fit for your team is going to take some trial and error. Feedback is how you turn the error into a learning opportunity.

Collect feedback often, and do it anonymously. Teams who are given opportunities to provide feedback regularly become more comfortable with the practice, thus giving better feedback. Anonymous feedback is particularly valuable because it can uncover major issues with psychological safety or flaws in the system that team members may be uncomfortable calling out publicly.

Everyone’s Input is Equal (Not Just Management’s)

The unspoken assumption on any team is that management’s opinions are the ones that matter and everyone else is just there to do their job. This dynamic damages the work of the team by limiting their room intelligence and stifling diversity of thought. The only way to fight against it is to openly state that this assumption is untrue – and then follow through on valuing the input of every team member.

Lay Out Expectations for Handling Conflict

Good meetings where real, deep work is happening are bound to result in disagreement, which sometimes breeds conflict. Your team knows this, and it may result in hesitance to contribute with confidence (or contribute at all) during group discussions or collaborative work. This can cause circular conversations in which no one wants to take a real stance or – worse – great ideas to never be spoken.

By laying out clearly defined expectations and procedures for handling conflict, disagreements will be less daunting for your team. They will know exactly what to expect from conflict and be given peace of mind that escalation will not occur. Pre-established expectations for conflict will turn disagreements into an expected, routine part of collaboration rather than an unpleasant social interaction to avoid at all costs.

Ask Your Team What They Need

Just like good meeting culture, psychological safety is not one-size-fits-all. The best thing you can do is ask your team what they need to feel safer, more confident, and more heard.

Clearly Outlined Procedures & Expectations

Meeting Mantras

Here at Voltage Control, we live and die by our meeting mantras. They are our holy grail for successful meetings at our company. Implementing a short list of meeting mantras within your team helps keep good meeting habits top-of-mind. Post them on the walls of your meeting rooms (virtual or physical) and reference them until they are second-nature.

Meeting mantras should help your team improve their efficiency and be more intentional during meetings. Our meeting mantras are a great starting point, but allowing your team to collaborate on a list of their own may yield better results. Team members will be more likely to take the mantras to heart and adopt better meeting habits if they have a hand in creating them.

Send Agendas Early

Your team should never walk into a meeting room unsure of what they will be doing. Send meeting agendas with enough time to give everyone a fair chance to read them over. Participants who are able to look over the agenda in advance will have ample time to prepare; this may mean familiarizing themselves with tools, reading up on a subject they are unfamiliar with or preparing thoughts on a particular project or issue.

Sending agendas early will also give the meeting host an opportunity to receive feedback on both agenda points and chosen invitees. If a participant feels that very on the agenda is relevant to them or their work, they will have an opportunity to suggest another team member who may help the participants do better work than they could. If participants do not understand how agenda points are in service to the goal of the meeting, they will have the opportunity to give that feedback, allowing you to make adjustments to your agenda (or clarify the meeting’s objective).

Distribute Debriefs With Next Steps

Directly after a meeting ends, a debrief should be sent out to all participants reiterating next steps. Any tasks or responsibilities assigned to team members should be clearly listed with the time frame that they need to be completed in. Key discussion points and decisions should be recapped. If applicable, instructions for providing anonymous feedback regarding the meeting should be shared.

Meetings Are Opportunities, Not Obligations

No Unnecessary Meetings

No more meetings that could have been an email. Meetings are opportunities to collaborate, to reach important decisions, and to harness room intelligence. Unnecessary meetings are a waste of both time and money, and they put a bad taste in the mouths of the attendees. Before a meeting is called, the host needs to perform a Should We Even Have a Meeting Test.

Invite the Right People

It can be tempting for a host to invite everyone they can think of to their meeting, but this is a mistake. Participants who are invited but have nothing (or very little) to contribute will feel frustrated at having their time wasted; they will also hold others back from doing deeper work.

That isn’t to say that only the people closest to the work being done should be in attendance. Inviting people outside of your core project’s team to workshop an idea or prototype can be a wonderful way to challenge your team. Inviting others that can see what your team can’t is great for providing a fresh perspective and refreshing enthusiasm for the work. Just be sure that every invitee will bring something valuable to the table.

Make Meetings Optional

Even the most carefully-crafted invitee list can’t account for every variable. Sometimes we are unable to bring our best selves into a room. If you leave it up to the individual whether they will be a valuable asset to a meeting, you can empower everyone to bring their best selves. A team member who is distracted with a more pressing matter or unable to focus due to a personal matter will not be engaged, creative, or responsive.

Optional meetings are amazing for participation and productivity. Team members who feel obligated to be at a meeting are much less enthusiastic about contributing than team members who feel that they are there by choice. Making meetings optional may seem like an unconventional choice, but it is almost guaranteed to result in more engaged, more productive meetings.

Want to learn more about how to run better meetings?

Join our upcoming Virtual Facilitation Workshop to facilitate all of your online meetings like a pro. In this fun, fast-paced, hands-on class, you’ll sharpen your facilitation skills through practice and peer feedback. Sign up today!

The post The Recipe for a Good Meeting Culture appeared first on Voltage Control.

I was working with a group recently and afterward, someone told me it was one of the most powerful experiences they’ve ever had.

I asked them to explain which tools and activities were most helpful, but they said more important than the tools or workshop design was the human connections made during the event.

In a follow up survey, someone else commented:

I felt safe to share my thoughts and feelings. I felt my unique perspective was celebrated in a way I don’t always feel on a day-to-day basis.

When we have the opportunity to facilitate a workshop or a gathering of people, we have a great responsibility. The gift of escaping a normal work schedule to discover new ways of creating and thinking together certainly begins with protecting time and space to work and learn.

But perhaps more important, and often missed, is the opportunity to be together in a new way. Working together differently is difficult enough, but learning to be together differently is an art the most intentional facilitators are able to master.

As you’re planning workshops or meetings asking yourself, “Can we do something different together to accomplish our goals?” is a great starting place — but we can take it further.

Asking yourself, “Can we be together in a new and meaningful way?” is how we create transformative and life changing gatherings.

A mentor of mine says all business and work really is is an excuse to be with one another — and we get distracted by the doing.

So how do we ensure everyone’s voice is heard and recognized so we can create a productive and powerful meeting? How do we make sure people feel seen and respected for who they are and what they bring?

This is the real work.

Google made some powerful and important discoveries in their search for what makes the most effective teams in what was dubbed Project Aristotle. They now host a conversation called re:Work about the principles they discovered.

Chief amongst the most important principles for healthy and productive teams is a sense of Psychological Safety — which is best summarized by ensuring each member of the team feels safe to take risks, ask questions, challenge authority and admit mistakes.

They then identified three key behaviors practiced by the most Psychologically Safe, and thus, most effective teams. They are simply:

Equality in Conversational Turn-Taking

If each person speaks roughly the same amount, that team is more likely to succeed.

Ostentatious Listening

Show team members you’re listening by repeating what was just said, or closing your laptop to pay attention.

Average Social Sensitivity

The ability to intuit how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.

How common sense are those? Your grandmother told you these things.

But we humans like to do what we humans like to do — which is overcomplicate priorities and optimize the heck out of human interactions in order to acquire with the idolized feelings of predictability, certainty and control.

Though certainty is alluring, I like what Craig Groeschel says about leading people:

You can have control or you can have growth, but you can’t have both.

If ensuring Psychological Safety matters on our dedicated teams, it’s equally if not more imperative as facilitators to ensure we’re creating workshops and experiences where people feel OK being themselves so they don’t feel compelled to prove or hide out of fear (hat tip to Chris McAlister).

When leading a session we’re not only asking people to do work in ways unusual to them, we’re asking them to do it in a rapid and high pressure environment. The tactics are sexy, but we must remember our chief responsibility as facilitators is to cast a vision for a temporary place where we’ll co-create something together using methods we’ve never used before.

This can be intimidating and scary.

Safety is our responsibility.

Including everyone is our responsibility.

As you’re gearing up for your next workshop, here are a few guiding principles you can use to implement the wisdom from Google’s re:Work research to create Psychological Safety so everyone can get the two things we most need (in order of importance):

1. A chance to feel safe, included, valued and integral
2. Real traction on an idea or initiative that will have real results on their work after the session is over

What do do before:

Prep yourself internally- Remember the workshop isn’t about you doing something to a group of people — it’s about you being with them and helping them get what they need. Success is not adhering to a structure, but as our Liberating Structures friends like to say, unleashing the potential inside of each person.

Survey the group- Use a Google form to ask a few questions about the work to be done and ask a few questions about how people are doing like:

• In a word or short phrase, please describe how you feel about your work right now…
• What contributions are you proud of in your work?
• Where do you feel stuck in your work?
• When you’re doing your best work, what do you feel like?
• What makes you feel validated by your team?
• What makes you feel under appreciated by your team?

How to begin:

Have an activity in the beginning of your session to ground everyone in the room in gratitude where each person shares something going well in their work or lives. This sets the stage by letting everyone share and puts the principle of Equality in Conversational Turn-Taking front and center.

Remember we must have an emotional connection before we can have an intellectual connection. My friend Chad Littlefield calls this Connection before Content.

Lay out the plan for the day, and then pause and allow others to offer their insights on what else might be important to cover. Make sure the whole group is invested in where you’re going.

During the workshop:

Allow for different ways of participating- Prepare activities that vary from between individual reflection, small group reflection and large group conversation to ensure people who process differently have opportunity to digest and share throughout the workshop.

Notice the energy of the room- If folks are discouraged or lethargic, pause and take a walk around the building, or circle everyone up for one of my favorite improv games, Stretch and Reflect. To do this, get everyone in a circle and have each person lead the group in a new stretch, while in the stretch, invite them to share a reflection on the day so far. Make it around the whole room to get everyone’s blood flowing and refocus the group on the task at hand. Beware of experienced yogis in the group! We don’t need an injury due to poorly executed Crow Poses!

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Another way of shaking things up throughout the day is to pause for a period of personal connection. Have people share personal stories about their lives in small groups they’ve never shared. I like to use the We! Connect cards to prompt meaningful conversations to deepen relationships.

Affirm dissenting opinions- Be willing to pause if the group seems stuck on an idea or it seems the meeting would be better served if you veered from your initial plan. This gathering is less about you getting your agenda right and more about giving the team what they need. Sometimes this means attending to thoughts or emotions that arise. Shutting them down reinforces the negative idea not all opinions are valued.

Interventions:

• Throughout the session be sure to monitor the contributions from participants. Are there a few folks who speak more than others? Thank them for their contributions and announce to the room you want to hear from everyone equally — this is Equality in Conversational Turn-Taking at work.
• When individuals are speaking make sure you’re listening intently and be an example for others in the room. It’s OK to ask folks to put devices away — I like what Jake Knapp says: “When we’re distracted by our devices, the whole room gets dumber — we need everyone’s attention to make progress today.” If there are side conversations, guide the room toward Ostentatious Listening by inviting them to give the floor to whoever is speaking.
• Notice if individuals are quiet or reserved by practicing Average Social Sensitivity. If someone seems down or unengaged, the greatest insult would be to ignore it. Perhaps it’s not best to call them out in front of the group, but chat with them during a break to let them know their contributions matter and you’d love to hear from them.

How to close:

Give everyone a chance to call out what mattered most to them from the day. I like to say, “Let’s go around the room and have everyone share something they want to make sure we don’t miss — a thought or insight you believe is important for everyone to remember from our time together.” Document what everyone says in front of the room — this ensures minority opinions have equal weight as popular opinions.

Another way of closing is to have each person write down their responses on sticky notes to the following prompts:

• I liked…
• I wish…
• What if…

These prompts are also powerful:

• I saw/heard…
• That made me think/feel/wonder…
• Now I want to…

Have each person read their responses aloud and place sticky notes on the wall so everyone’s reflections are seen and heard.

How to follow up:

When you send outputs from the meeting, be sure to include all opinions expressed throughout the day. Offer your own insights to leadership about your honest assessment of the culture of the group and what they might try as a team to continue including everyone. Don’t be afraid to be a bit polarizing — they enlisted you for your unique perspective!

If possible, ask if you can write a follow up email to all participants thanking them for participating, acknowledge their commitment to the work (this stuff isn’t easy!), and remind them how continuing Psychological Safety on their team will enable them to accomplish the work you began together.

If you can send a follow up survey, keep it simple. Ask questions like this:

• On a scale of 1–10, did you feel like your ideas and opinions were heard?
• On a scale of 1–10, how confident do you feel about momentum continuing after our workshop?
• Have you or will you change anything about the way you do your work? If so, what?
• Have you or will you change anything about the way you interact with your colleagues? If so, what?

What a great task ahead of us to create new and inclusive spaces for people. For us to create such spaces, it’s important for us to remember what Bill O’Brien says about the responsibility of leading a group:

The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.

When we take the time to align ourselves with the larger purpose of belonging, we’re able to share that with others. And by remembering the importance of Psychological Safety in our workshops we get what we were after all along: A more inclusive and a more effective experience.

Resources:

• re:Work by Google — the research behind Psychological Safety and effective teams
• Liberating Structures — a fantastic treasure chest of easy to use activities
• Improv Wisdom — a wonderful book about the power of improv and play in business
• We! Connect Cards — a great tool to help participants have meaningful conversations and connect on a personal level

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