Side Chats During Online Meetings: A Minefield for Leaders

“One conversation in the room, please.” We’ve all heard, or said, something like this during in-person meetings. Hushing side discussions helps reinforce the best parts of face-to-face meetings: the opportunity to be attentive, be aware of eye contact and body language, and focus everyone on a single topic.

“One conversation” reminders work for in-person gatherings, but virtual meetings bring a new set of challenges. The digital medium and tools mean that virtual meetings are no mere copy of in-person gatherings. Online platforms offer the opportunity for participants to send typed messages to coworkers privately — to have side chats that the meeting facilitator will never see.

Indeed, in virtual meetings, the days when we can call for one conversation have passed. Instead, we have the ability to engage in layered, rich, and sometimes fraught side conversations alongside the “official” main discussion. While side chats can enhance a participant’s connections to colleagues during work meetings, they also have the potential to diminish constructive conversation.

Leaders need to understand all of the ways that side chats are being used and, when thinking about how to manage this behavior, take the benefits, risks, and leadership opportunities into consideration.

Useful Types of Side Chats

Popular versions of chat technology have been around for decades — remember AOL Instant Messenger? Now, with online meetings so ubiquitous, such tools are more present than ever. As one corporate collaboration company puts it, “Chat is at the center of everything you do.”

Side chats can either be public — that is, visible to all meeting participants — or private, involving only a few. It’s common in many online meetings for participants to have several active chats simultaneously — open to the whole group, a subgroup of attendees, or just one person.

Chats can be extremely effective for garnering quick responses, and there are many positive types of side chats. They include the following:

“Here’s the source” chats. The ability to use side chats to link to germane documents, sources, and background materials heightens the quality of many meetings. Rather than waiting until after the meeting for additional ideas or follow-up items, dropping links inside chats supports information-rich, fast-paced conversations.

Clarification chats. Simple questions of clarification can function well in meeting side chats. These questions can provide useful information to the questioner without interrupting the flow of the speaker.

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