Why your staff give you the silent treatment in meetings

Zoom is a “disaster” if you want to conduct meaningful meetings with your staff, but even the face-to-face version can be tricky these days.

A Sydney University business professor has new ideas about why employees are keeping quiet in meetings. Picture: iStock

Zoom is a “disaster” if you want to conduct meaningful meetings with your staff, but even face-to-face discussions are tricky as today’s employees increasingly opt for the silent treatment — present but not contributing.

That’s the view of Sydney University’s Professor Betina Szkudlarek who says, contrary to popular opinion, it’s not fear which holds people back during work meetings but factors like opportunism, convenience, ineptitude and detachment.

She says people often focus on their careers and “self-interest outweighs organisational goals and leads to people not seeing value in contributing to organisational change”.

Other factors identified in her research were convenience — a desire for an uncomplicated working life; ineptitude — the belief that only a few people can lead and speak up in meetings; and detachment — a close relation to the phenomenon of “quiet quitting” in the workplace.

Professor Szkudlarek, who works in the university’s business school and is also attached to Sweden’s Lund University, says: “A lot of research around this domain focuses on the fact that people are scared. But our research found that you can’t use that as an excuse. It’s very easy to blame the system, but in fact it’s quite often about self-interest, the idea ‘what’s in it for me?’. Then there’s the convenience issue of ‘I just want to have an easy life, I just want to have a nine-to-five job and I can’t be bothered to engage’.”

She says while her research with Mats Alvesson from Lund University relates mainly to face-to-face meetings, the factors are amplified on Zoom because it is easier for participants to be multi-tasking and less engaged during a virtual meeting.

Professor Szkudlarek says dominance of non-Asian respondents and the absence of younger, more junior workers means reluctance to speak up could not be blamed on cultural factors or the anxieties of new employees.

The research was based on interviews with 18 academics at a top Western business school. All were in the 40-plus age group and only one had an Asian background.

“We purposely didn’t include younger people because they have the excuse of, ‘I’m new to this organisation’,” she says. “We were targeting people who had stable employment, they had nothing to fear.”

She says employee commitment to an organisation — and the willingness to contribute at meetings — has decreased in recent years because of changes to employment.

“In the past we had employment patterns where people were staying much longer in one organisation,” she says.

Organisations hold too many meetings, she says, and they’re often too big: “People spend disproportionate amounts of time talking about things that don’t matter. It’s really important to keep the meetings focused.”

She suggests one solution is to appoint someone as a “devil’s advocate” to draw out the silent participants.