Side Chats During Online Meetings: A Minefield for Leaders
Leaders can’t escape the reality that people will have side conversations in typed chats during virtual meetings. But whether these chats serve useful purposes or breed mistrust depends on how leaders handle them.
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“One conversation in the room, please.” We’ve all heard, or said, something like this during in-person meetings. Hushing side discussions helps reinforce the best parts of face-to-face meetings: the opportunity to be attentive, be aware of eye contact and body language, and focus everyone on a single topic.
“One conversation” reminders work for in-person gatherings, but virtual meetings bring a new set of challenges. The digital medium and tools mean that virtual meetings are no mere copy of in-person gatherings. Online platforms offer the opportunity for participants to send typed messages to coworkers privately — to have side chats that the meeting facilitator will never see.
Indeed, in virtual meetings, the days when we can call for one conversation have passed. Instead, we have the ability to engage in layered, rich, and sometimes fraught side conversations alongside the “official” main discussion. While side chats can enhance a participant’s connections to colleagues during work meetings, they also have the potential to diminish constructive conversation.
Leaders need to understand all of the ways that side chats are being used and, when thinking about how to manage this behavior, take the benefits, risks, and leadership opportunities into consideration.
Useful Types of Side Chats
Popular versions of chat technology have been around for decades — remember AOL Instant Messenger? Now, with online meetings so ubiquitous, such tools are more present than ever. As one corporate collaboration company puts it, “Chat is at the center of everything you do.”
Side chats can either be public — that is, visible to all meeting participants — or private, involving only a few. It’s common in many online meetings for participants to have several active chats simultaneously — open to the whole group, a subgroup of attendees, or just one person.
Chats can be extremely effective for garnering quick responses, and there are many positive types of side chats. They include the following:
“Here’s the source” chats. The ability to use side chats to link to germane documents, sources, and background materials heightens the quality of many meetings. Rather than waiting until after the meeting for additional ideas or follow-up items, dropping links inside chats supports information-rich, fast-paced conversations.
Clarification chats. Simple questions of clarification can function well in meeting side chats. These questions can provide useful information to the questioner without interrupting the flow of the speaker. While some clarifications may be shared with the entire group in the public chat, others can occur in private chats. These chats offer the ability to deepen engagement during meetings and keep participants from feeling lost.
Sidebar chats. We have all been in meetings that have gotten sidetracked by off-topic conversations. Thoughtful use of side chats can confine such potential disruptions to the chat interface, freeing the main meeting to focus on the agenda.
Heads-up chats. Private side chats can be used to alert someone that a question will be coming their way, which is especially helpful in larger, high-stakes meetings. This warning allows participants to have more thoughtful preparation and usually results in a better meeting flow. This kind of chat also reinforces collegiality and teamwork.
Compliment chats. Virtual work does not allow for serendipitous in-person connections in which colleagues might share a compliment about a recent accomplishment. Side chats can be positively used for quick compliments or collegial check-ins that build a supportive culture. These need to be used sparingly, though, so that they don’t veer into longer, distracting conversations.
“Taking the temperature” chats. This is almost a different category of chat because it engages the entire group in typed conversation. Many virtual meeting platforms offer the ability to survey meeting participants in real time. For meeting hosts who come well prepared with quality questions, these polling tools can provide helpful, immediate insights. When used skillfully, they are the next-level equivalent of asking for a show of hands.
Risks of Side Chats
No technology is neutral. As with any new tool, virtual meeting platforms and the side chats they enable present opportunities for misuse that can stifle effective collaboration.
The more negative aspects of side chats include the following:
Distraction. Who among us has not witnessed — or personally experienced — a moment in which a meeting attendee was so focused on side conversations that they lost focus on the actual meeting content? Awkwardly, these moments become obvious to all who see the panicked look on a participant’s face when called upon. Given the body of research suggesting that we vastly overestimate our ability to multitask, any side chatting should be considered risky for those participating, for the very fact that it distracts focus from the primary conversation. Even for those trying to fully focus on meeting content, side-chat pings can cause split attention. (These notifications are above and beyond the work-related and personal alerts people get throughout the workday from a whole host of messaging channels — Slack, iMessage, Snapchat, you name it.)
From the perspective of speakers or presenters, proliferating side chats among meeting attendees can divert from the intended focus of the presentation or discussion. It can be quite frustrating to give a presentation when one has a sense that participants are more engaged in the content of side chats than in the presentation itself.
Erosion of trust. Private side chats can inadvertently be displayed when a virtual meeting participant shares a portion of their screen that gives attendees a glimpse of their side-chatting activity. If something critical or embarrassing is unintentionally disclosed, it can instantly erode trust between the presenter and other team members. Additionally, when side chats are verbally alluded to, meeting participants may feel that those chats are minimizing open dialogue.
Undermining goodwill. Side chats have the potential to bring out the worst in people. When used as a space to privately snark or complain, side chats can breed negativity. I’ve been part of side chats that feel, in retrospect, akin to unkind inside jokes. They brought entertainment to a few of us but did not further the work of the team as a whole. These types of chats can occur either on workplace-sanctioned platforms or, potentially more perniciously, in text messages on personal phones. (Indeed, it’s probably no surprise that posts on Sidechat, a social networking app for college students, are completely anonymous.)
Energizing dissent. Side chats that are focused on critiquing the presentation can animate participants against the perspectives of the meeting leader or presenter. These chats can become vehicles for supercharging opposing, though still hidden, viewpoints. Interestingly, there is little to no parallel to in-person meeting habits. During in-person meetings, where people are accountable to each other as active participants in one conversation, debate and disagreement have to be addressed more directly.
There may be a time and place for certain forms of energized dissent in side chats. For more reticent voices, or for those operating in environments that discourage opposing viewpoints, this practice may help a participant test a perspective or think through a counterargument in a way that does not disrupt the flow of a meeting. On the other hand, if these comments are not eventually voiced in the main meeting, these side chats can lead to the creation of negative subcultures. In other words, side chats can become less of a means to seek shared perspectives and more of a way to channel, or even give rise to, discontent.
To be clear: The existence of dissenting voices themselves isn’t a problem. Rather, it’s problematic when widely held below-the-surface dissent builds up and is never expressed publicly to leadership or to those beyond a certain side-chat group.
Leading Virtual Meetings: A Modern Skill to Master
The challenge of navigating side chats presents an opportunity for leaders to reinforce what a healthy culture means in their organizations. Leaders, therefore, would be wise to approach side-chat practices head-on.
First, leaders should acknowledge the reality of side chats. While it may seem like a small step, publicly recognizing that the rise of virtual meeting platforms has shifted meeting practices, side chats among them, is key to opening up a team dialogue. Showing an interest in the practicalities of leadership and meeting practices demonstrates relevance and empathy for colleagues’ experiences. Many employees may not have stopped to reflect on practices like side chats, even if they engage in them every day. Acknowledging the new reality is the first step for productive reflection and analysis.
Second, leaders should gather community insight about how their teams might use virtual meeting platforms effectively. In reviewing feedback, leaders may discover that their team members are particularly frustrated with some of the more negative chat practices. Or, they might find that the team would like to take advantage of the more beneficial aspects. Broadly, this openness may expand into a fuller discussion concerning virtual meeting best practices in the organization, such as camera use and recording norms, and even whether certain meeting topics should be reserved for in-person sessions.
Third, leaders should welcome and encourage side-chat experimentation. Given the shifting culture around virtual meetings in general, most of us are still forming our habits and trying out different options. Maybe teams would like to experiment with replacing a regularly scheduled meeting with an asynchronous side chat instead. Maybe a meeting leader will decide to mark a section of a meeting agenda as “focus time” and request people’s full attention, with no side chats. Maybe the schedule could be modified to make time for participants to privately side-chat with each other in order to connect on a relevant question or even to discuss something more personal to build rapport. Leaders can embrace opportunities to express curiosity, especially when they sense that a meeting may be in the midst of energizing dissent, by saying something like “Let’s pause and check in. Are there any side chats to address openly? Can someone share a perspective that’s different from what we’ve heard so far?”
Finally, as with all leadership, let actions do the talking. Leaders should take care to model the positive side-chat practices they hope will flourish and avoid engaging in the more disruptive, negative aspects. Leaders who stray can show humility by acknowledging the mistake and recommitting to better practices. Leaders who find themselves in a more detrimental side chat can change the tone with a comment like “I’m getting drawn away from the meeting content, and I’m going to refocus. Let’s connect later.” Leadership includes the small practices, habits, and behaviors in side chats just as much as the more center-stage moments.
Ultimately, the ability to master the side chat has become a modern business skill to foster. Perhaps we will come to think of virtual meeting skills in the same category as emotional intelligence, given that the digital meeting room affords opportunities to build relationships, navigate conflict, and communicate effectively.
Over time, we may also shift from our current period of unwritten side-chat rules to more prescribed practices or even policies. For now, business leaders must recognize that proliferating virtual side chats means there is no longer a single conversation in any room. It’s time to acknowledge the downsides and embrace the opportunities of the side chat.
