Many people spend a lot of their time at work in meetings. Meetings between colleagues in different roles and of varying seniority levels can provide spaces for sharing information, asking questions, raising problems, and suggesting new priorities or ways of working.
When are in meetings, we don’t necessarily notice the details of what is going on in a live interaction. For example, what strategies are people using to get others to listen to them? How do people reject particular suggestions? What does consensus look like?
Recording meetings, and then analysing the recordings and transcripts, gives us rich insights into what people do in these interactions, and to what end.
We are currently seeking willing participants to record their workplace meetings in which environmental and social factors are discussed (e.g. strategy meetings, project meetings…), to better understand how sustainability issues are negotiated in workplaces. See the ‘get involved‘ page for more details.
In example below, taken from a recording of a meeting between procurement professionals and sustainability professionals (Heriot-Watt Social Sciences Ethics Committee approval #2024-6358-9199), we see how the participants in the meeting bring a discussion point to a close, by signalling agreement in different ways. The meeting chair proposes a solution to issue being discussed, that is, how suppliers will be asked to report their actions regarding modern slavery mitigation. After a long four second pause, several meeting participants produce agreement gestures (thumbs up and nodding), and ‘procurement professional 2’ explicitly states ‘I think that’s a great solution’, to wrap up the decision before moving onto another point.
This coming to agreement may not seem noteworthy – however, research has shown that explicitly making decisions or reaching consensus is actually quite rare in meetings. More often, people put forward and discuss different perspectives and options, but final decisions are either deferred until later, or made by the chair.
Chair: how about we just ask the question quite bluntly like ‘are you legally required to publish a modern slavery statement’ and if yes (0.4) give us the R- URL if no (0.8) then that gives your small SMEs the like the out (0.4) and but you can still have the follow up question follow up questions like well (0.3) you know how are you (1.0) actually mitigating any risk within your supply chain and if they then don’t answer it (0.7) then that’s just something for you to follow up during contract management rather it flagging up a red (0.9) flag (0.9) >how’s everyone feeling< about that (4.0)
Procurement professional: ((thumb up gesture))
Sustainability professional: ((nodding))
Chair: (Procurement professional 2)
Procurement professional 2: yeah just to come back on no it’s it’s completely separate from this because I’m ha- I think that’s a great solution