Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  A Day in the Life

  Her early days at AJM, Lister recalls, were marked by many conversations without an agenda. There was the time with Berger, of course, but there were also long lunches and late nights in the cafeteria. The young lawyers would call out for food as they worked on cases. Lister remembers their conversations as wide-ranging. Now, she observes that junior associates tend to work alone in their offices even when they are all working late. Everyone is at a screen. Lister isn’t even sure they are working. “They may just be taking some personal catch-up time, some quiet downtime alone with their email.” These days, when we think of downtime and reducing stress, we don’t usually think of relaxing with peers but of getting some control over the crowd that the net brings to us.

  Lister remarks that the new office practices (fewer informal meetings, less time in the cafeteria, more time alone at screens) impact her firm’s sense of community. Speaking of the lawyers she began with, Lister says, “We helped each other. We were competing but we became devoted to this firm. That doesn’t happen anymore. You never used to see partners being hired away from our firm. You see that now.”

  She is right in her intuitions about the business impact of time spent in conversation. Studies show a clear link between sociability and employee productivity. But these days at AJM, screens are getting in the way of sociability—and courtesy. It is common practice for lawyers, even at the most senior level, to keep phones and tablets out during meetings. Lister comments that she was recently asked to give a presentation on intrafirm communications, and “I gave my presentation to a room of people who on and off were texting and emailing.” The irony did not escape her. She had been asked to talk about better communication and few were listening. “It made me think,” she says, “‘Why did I bother?’”

  Lister does all she can to encourage her firm’s young associates to meet face-to-face. For example, she asks them to join her in her office when she has important calls with clients. She wants them to hear her negotiate, to learn how to shape a conversation. Lister says she will often put a client call on mute so that she can talk to her junior associates and explain her strategy. For her junior colleagues, sitting in on one of these calls is a master class as well as an opportunity to build closer relationships with her and each other. But increasingly, the junior associates tell her they would rather listen to the call in their offices. Lister knows why: If they are alone, they can listen to the call and continue to work at their screens. They will miss the face-to-face conversations but they’ll be able to multitask.

  No longer surprised when her invitations are turned down, Lister recognizes that young lawyers believe that what maximizes their value is multitasking at their computers. This means that they set aside far less time to talk.

  At AJM, the tendency to avoid face-to-face meetings now cuts across generations. Many partners no longer entertain clients by taking them out to meals or sporting events. At the holiday season, instead of having dinner with a client to celebrate a good year, a chance for a conversation, the lawyers are in a last-minute rush to buy a gift, something expensive. Younger associates (of course, with fewer funds available to them) also hold back from entertaining. Lister notes that to be fair, clients hold back as well. She says, “Everyone—including clients—prefers to send emails rather than be on the phone, prefers to send emails rather than go out to lunch.”

  For a time, the partners at AJM were divided as to whether all of this online activity was the future of legal practice or simply bad practice. Finally, the firm got curious about the relationship of face-to-face meetings and money. It turned out that the lawyers who spent more time with clients face-to-face brought in the most business. Now, how much lawyers socialize is part of their performance review. And now, Lister says, “people think twice when they put off having lunch with clients so they can work alone at their screens.”

  Lister’s firm is not alone in recognizing the power of face-to-face conversation. Ben Waber, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, designs technology to study collaboration. With MIT Media Lab professor Alex Pentland, Waber developed a tool he calls a “sociometric badge.” The badge allows researchers to track employees’ movements through an office as well as a range of measures about their conversations: who they talk to, for how long, on what topic, with what pace of speech, with what tone of voice, and how often they interrupt each other. The badges can analyze intimate aspects of conversation such as body language, interest and excitement, and the amount of influence people have on each other.

  Waber quantified the previously unquantifiable, and his results were stunning. To sum up a large number of studies, face-to-face conversation leads to higher productivity and is also associated with reduced stress. Call centers are more productive when people take breaks together; software teams produce programs with fewer bugs when they talk more. And Waber’s studies had disappointing news for those who equate email and talk: The “conversation effect” doesn’t work the same way for online encounters. What matters is being together face-to-face.

  Waber stresses that it is hard for people to really believe that for productive work, conversation counts, or at least as much as it does: “We think of productivity as . . . sitting in front of the computer and banging out emails, scheduling things; and that’s what makes us productive. But it’s not.” What makes you productive is “your interactions with other people—you know, you give them new ideas, you get new ideas from them; and . . . if you even make five people a little bit more productive every day, those conversations are worth it.”

  I visit Waber when I learn of his work, and he explains that his findings are not always received as good news. They complicate the lives of businesses that have tried to cut costs by breaking up their “brick-and-mortar” operations and whose employees work mostly from home. And they complicate the lives of individuals who feel most productive when they sit alone in front of their screens or who find this the best way to feel in control of their time and information overload. Supported by the impression that this is when they are doing their “real work,” many employees feel justified in avoiding face-to-face conversation. And because they avoid it, they don’t understand what it can accomplish. Leadership can break this cycle. Fortunately, those who would lead a culture of conversation in the workplace now have research on their side.

  There is a business case for conversation. But there are significant roadblocks to reclaiming it. For one thing, we are all tempted by meetings that are not quite meetings because we can be both at the meeting and on our phones. In response, sophisticated organizations design physical and social environments that support face-to-face conversation. But the most artful design will be subverted if a work culture, at its heart, does not understand the unique value of conversation.

  Meetings That Aren’t: The Hansel and Gretel Experience

  At ReadyLearn, a large international consulting company, face-to-face meetings are increasingly rare. Over the past ten years, in an effort to streamline operations, ReadyLearn has reduced office space wherever it could and asked employees to work from home whenever possible.

  Caroline Tennant, a vice-president at ReadyLearn, reports to a physical office three days a week. The other two days, she has Skype meetings from her home. Whether she is at home or at the office, she participates in eight to ten meetings a day. Sometimes, on “home” days, Tennant wakes up at four in the morning for a Skype call that involves an international team. She notes drily that men are always at an advantage at these meetings because she feels the need to put on makeup before she takes her position in front of her computer. Technology makes it possible for Tennant to schedule a full day of international meetings. But the pace doesn’t leave her time to think. She says, “The technology makes me more productive, but I know the quality of my thinking suffers.” It’s a telling formulation. What she is saying is that technology makes her feel more productive despite a lower quality of thought.

  E
ight to ten meetings take up Tennant’s entire workday. So, to meet the demands of her job, every day Tennant has to pick two or three meetings where she will do other work. The question simply becomes which meetings. The obvious contenders are conference calls. At these, Tennant explains, she tries to say something from time to time, but her mind is on her email. She is not alone in this practice; at ReadyLearn, it is assumed that when you are on a conference call, you are available for email and messaging on the side. Increasingly, the assumption of divided attention is also made for in-person meetings, particularly status meetings where people catch up with ongoing projects. There, Tennant says, team members show up, greet each other, and soon turn to their email. At ReadyLearn, there are a lot of meetings that are not quite meetings.

  Tennant describes her behavior at a status meeting. It is a workplace variation on the college students’ “rule of three,” where friends try to keep conversations going by making sure that some small quorum is participating at all times in a kind of round robin. Tennant says, “The meeting leader knows that she is speaking to a roomful of people doing email. . . . As for me, I try to do my part . . . to look around and make sure that the meeting leader is speaking to someone.” In other words, no head down for her unless she sees some heads are up.

  The situation at ReadyLearn is not unusual. The world’s largest conference call provider, used by 85 percent of Fortune 100 firms, studied what people are doing during meetings: 65 percent do other work, 63 percent send email, 55 percent eat or make food, 47 percent go to the bathroom, and 6 percent take another phone call.

  Darius Lehrer, a thirty-six-year-old manager at ReadyLearn, sums up meeting etiquette: “You come in, get some coffee, work on your laptop, listen for your name to be called, make your contribution, and then go back to your computer. A good meeting leader will give you a ‘heads-up’ signal about five minutes before she calls on you so that you can close out your email and get ready to speak.”

  At AJM, Audrey Lister asked herself why she was bothering to present to colleagues who were doing their email. At ReadyLearn, Lehrer has come to the same question: “The system is demoralizing for the meeting leader. And if you are presenting, there is little motivation to do a good job. You’re saying to yourself, ‘What’s the point of my even doing anything? No one is listening.’ People are speaking ‘for the record.’” When people speak for the record, they usually don’t listen to what comes before or after. Meetings are performances of what meetings used to be.

  Nelson Rabinow, a forty-four-year-old manager at ReadyLearn, talks about how he handles the “falling away” of attention that characterizes most meetings. “At a meeting, I know that other people are dropping in and out, not just me, so when I speak, I make sure to summarize the little that I’ve heard and I encourage other people to do the same.” In other words, Rabinow suggests that a group of people not paying full attention try, in effect, to collaborate on a project in collective intelligence. If all the people at the meeting contribute a summary of what they have picked up, hopefully, some “meeting markers” will rise to the surface and become the group’s shared memory. Like Hansel and Gretel, you drop bread crumbs and hope they will be found.

  Rabinow says the meeting markers can be “summary slogans.” Or people can create markers by sending around photographs or other images that stand in for ideas. A trail of images—a meme track—can help communicate the high points of a meeting during which people have slipped in and out of attention. Sometimes the meme track can serve as more than simple bread crumbs. Sometimes, they are how people expect to contribute to the conversation.

  At HeartTech, a large Silicon Valley software company, employees I meet in focus groups complain about overprogrammed meetings. So much is on the agenda that it is hard to get a chance to speak. I discuss this with a group of HeartTech managers, and they point out that alongside what is said aloud at any meeting, there is almost always a meme track, that parallel online visual conversation. The meme track allows people who have no way to participate in a conversation to keep up with it and make their presence felt. It gives them a way to critique the proceedings and other participants, even those senior to them. They can use humor, expressed in funny photos and cartoons.

  The meme track begins as a compensation for not being in a conversation, but some at this meeting describe it as being just as important to them as the conversation itself. Or more important: “Perhaps it’s even more expressive than talking.” “It’s good for those who might not be comfortable speaking up.” “It’s incredibly on point and provocative. . . . When you consider memes and traditional conversation, I wouldn’t want to choose one exclusively over another.”

  The conversation about memes—at HeartTech as elsewhere—follows a familiar pattern. A technological possibility—such as using memes to create a communications sidebar—is first offered as a substitution, something better than nothing. In this case, it responds to a problem: Meeting time is short and not everyone gets a chance to talk. But then, this accommodation is given new status. In this case, I hear that employees who might not be comfortable with the give-and-take of conversation now have a chance to participate. And then people fall back on the adage. Pictures are said to be more powerful than words. The meme track is deeply pertinent. “Perhaps it’s even more expressive than talking.” Better than nothing is perhaps simply better.

  I recall the enthusiasm about memes among the students at the Boston focus group who asked me to share their WhatsApp channel so that I could “see” what they were thinking. Like the HeartTech managers, they claimed that the images they shared were as important as the words they said. But this was among a group of young people who admitted that they weren’t comfortable with telephone conversations or face-to-face talk. Do the memes do the job—or do they do a job we can’t do?

  In any organization, there are some kinds of ideas that only words can convey. There are some kinds of conflicts that only words can parse and resolve. We have to think about preparing our students and employees to participate in these conversations. No matter how rich and even subversive, the meme track can take them only so far.

  Attendance: Who Is Present?

  The president of a New York cultural foundation tells me that at a recent board meeting one of her members had spent the time consumed with a stream of images on his iPad. The board member seated next to him had been mesmerized, watching him shop online for a new car.

  We all attend meetings during which we multitask and our minds are elsewhere. It turns out to be a stressful elsewhere. The multitasking life puts us into a state similar to vigilance, one of continual alert. In that condition, we can follow only the most rudimentary arguments. So multitasking encourages brevity and simplicity, even when more is called for. And the harm that multitasking does is contagious. We’ve seen that someone multitasking on a laptop distracts everyone around the machine, not just the person using it.

  And we still call them meetings, after all. I get together with the director and production staff of the Seahorse, a small mid-Atlantic theater company. As we begin, with seven of us at the table, Claire Messing, the director, realizes that her phone is vibrating. She blushes but says, “I’m not sure I can continue until I deal with this.” We had gathered to discuss how technology affects the work of the theater. It has taken us months to coordinate our schedules. And now, we are finally together, all staring at Messing’s phone.

  At the Seahorse, it is standard practice to bring phones and laptops to staff meetings. Messing encourages this in the hope that technology will allow her staff “to stretch their time together.” So, during a staff meeting, one person might be online to review budget numbers and another might scan job applications from lighting designers. Messing’s idea is that if something important comes up online, the group can discuss it “live” while they are all in the room together.

  But the strategy does not work. Once laptops are open, there is the temptation
to look at email and attend to urgent messages. The director of education says that the meetings-with-devices make it almost impossible for her not to “cheat,” by which she means that she reads her email while others are talking. “So at a meeting, I’m not as present because I’m always cheating a little bit.” These are meetings that give the illusion of collaboration with all the drawbacks of distraction.

  Messing describes the irony: “Even though we’re in the business of creating live performance, we don’t take advantage of our time with each other to have a conversation with each other.” She imagined that technology-enhanced meetings would multiply productivity, but everyone goes off in a different direction.

  Messing had another idea for how to use technology to multiply productivity: The staff would prepare for meetings by reading materials in Dropbox, a file-sharing application. Messing leaves them scripts, biographies of potential actors, and financial reports. To begin with, her staff thought this was a good idea, but soon they were all leaving materials in Dropbox. Everyone agrees that Dropbox has encouraged magical thinking: If it is in Dropbox, it has been read. “Dropbox,” says the publicity director, “creates the fantasy that some of the work of a meeting has already been done.” But it hasn’t been done. The publicity director says that she herself comes to meetings exhausted from trying and failing to read what’s in her Dropbox. It’s come to the point where she resents being asked to brainstorm at meetings. “I can’t brainstorm . . . I’m too exhausted to brainstorm.”

  Another Meeting That Is Not Quite a Meeting

  Alice Rattan, a manager at ReadyLearn, is teaching the business value of unitasking. She is no longer surprised that her young consultants want to multitask during meetings. They grew up on it; they have to learn better ways. But she is always surprised that her clients want to multitask when their accounts are being discussed. And they want her to multitask as well. Rattan explains that clients expect quick turnaround on matters that she should take time to think through. She has to teach them that she intends to work for them with the attention that their problems deserve.