Article · 2022
Companies with the least effective meeting culture use the meeting chat most. That is no coincidence. By Edouard Gruwez.
As a consultant I attend many meetings at corporate clients worldwide. It strikes me that the companies with the least effective meeting culture use the MS Teams chat most. And bad meetings cause waste, bad decisions and frustration.
Chat apps such as WhatsApp and Messenger have been part of our private lives for more than a decade. They are practical for short, informal or urgent communication. But institutionalising the chat function in business meetings is a very bad idea. It is inefficient, short-sighted, unfair and risky — and my advice to all companies is to disable it as the standard setting.
Ample research confirms that we cannot listen and read simultaneously — it is why slides without full text lead to better understanding than slides crammed with text. A separate chat discussion is worse still. And when we split attention between the discussion and the chat, our comprehension gets distorted: we unconsciously hear what confirms our opinion and drift away when we disagree — the bias of selective perception. Finally, any good manager knows not to allow parallel discussions in a meeting; the chat invites exactly that, often several at once.
Whenever we hear an opinion, we feel the urge to express our own — it is how our brain is wired, and it takes self-control to listen first and form an opinion after. The formal setting of a presentation forces that discipline; a chat stimulates the opposite: immediate, reactive comments — at best loosely organised, at worst totally out of context. As Napoleon Hill put it: "The habit of expressing loosely organized opinions is one of the most destructive of habits."
Imagine presenting a project you worked on for weeks. In the middle of your presentation, someone stands up, walks to the other side of the room, starts commenting on your performance and opens a discussion — while you cannot hear it, let alone respond. Using the meeting chat is exactly that, times ten. It also creates a political arena where the goal becomes getting individual opinions across rather than reaching the best common decision. I'm not surprised that highly political companies over-use the chat: the focus is on short-term individual achievement rather than long-term collective success.
A good meeting is one where everyone can speak freely — which requires that what is said in the meeting stays in the meeting, with only agreed conclusions published afterwards. In a chat, everything is written and stays visible long after; Teams even lets the discussion continue when the meeting has ended. Complex and sensitive subjects — which is what most meetings are for — leave too much room for misinterpretation in writing. And there is the danger of accidental publishing: writing something in the wrong chat happens easily, precisely because chats are reactive and quick, with several windows open at once. It can kill a deal or a relationship.
All in all, the chat function destroys more meetings than it improves. Unfortunately Microsoft enables it by default. In a meeting: More (…) → Meeting options → Allow meeting chat → Disabled. Your IT administrator can change the default for everyone: in the Teams admin centre, under Meetings → Meeting policies → Participants & guests, set Chat in meetings to "Turn it off for everyone".