Colleagues don’t contribute to our weekly meeting

We have a major team meeting every week. I’m a manager in this team and I, along with my management peers, have noticed that we seem to be the only ones doing the talking. This wasn’t always the case. We think it’s partly to do with the fact that the meeting has finally returned to in-person after several years of being online.

How can we encourage other members of the team to contribute?

It sounds like this is an important meeting and I understand your frustration that just a few leaders are the only verbal contributors. But I have a couple of questions that might get to the heart of the problem here: what do you want non-managers to talk about in these meetings and why?

I’m not trying to be obtuse or pose a “gotcha” question. But, having attended – and often not spoken in – hundreds of meetings myself, and had many conversations with friends, colleagues and Work Therapy readers, I’m always surprised by how loose the conventions and expectations around meetings tend to be.

There’s so often an assumption that everyone has experience with work meetings, so everyone should know how to participate in them. And on a very basic level, that’s true.

We all know you don’t talk over the top of other people, you try to stick to the topic at hand, you stay within the time allotted. But not all meetings or workplaces are the same, and something as simple as the make-up of the team can have a huge influence on how meetings run.

Are you proposing something unpalatable? Or unwanted? And if so, why?

If, say, you have a team of six, three of whom have been at the organisation for years, and three who haven’t been there long at all, a loose meeting may naturally be dominated by the more experienced team members.

And the same goes for things such as extroversion and introversion, or familiarity with the subjects of the meeting or any number of other things, in including, as you mentioned, a shift in format.