Share of Voice

In general, I don't like meetings.

So I thought I'd put something out into the world in the hopes of making meetings slightly better.

I want to talk about a feature that I think all virtual meeting tools should have.

If you're reading this and have any influence over the design of any of these tools, please, consider this.

The Idea

Suppose there are six people in a virtual meeting.

Pick your favourite tool, Teams, Zoom, Meet. It doesn't matter.

Let's say you have an hour-long meeting.

The feature I'm looking for would ideally work like this:

At the end of the meeting, all the participants would receive an email.

The subject line of the email would be, "Share of Voice for: [Insert Meeting Name]"

The email would contain one thing, a pie chart.

That pie chart would list all six individuals in the meeting and show the number of minutes (or seconds) they each spoke for.

That's it.

Considering most of these tools can generate transcripts already, I can't imagine it's very hard to actually do the math on how many minutes (or seconds) someone spoke for.

Why This Matters

I can think of two reasons:

1. It brings factual awareness to the dominant voices in a meeting.

2. It allows the group to question if the dominant voices should have dominated that meeting.

The first point makes the second possible, and it's the second that really matters.

If the answer to the question is, "No, the dominant voices should not have dominated that meeting," then you can transparently remedy that by seeking input from those voices you did not hear.

You may argue, well shouldn't any good meeting host really be doing this in real-time anyway?

Sure. But I think good meeting hosts are rare.

Many of us were forced into becoming hosts during the pandemic without any real training on how to be a good one.

If after reflecting on the pie chart your group says, "Yes, the dominant voices should have dominated," then you might ask whether the silent voices even need to be present for future meetings.

Evolving the Idea

In a real dream world, the meeting tool builds the pie chart in real-time and displays it to all participants in the meeting.

That would turn us all into good hosts.

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Until the tool exists, just pretend it does.