“What a ridiculous waste of time”?

Meetings have such a terrible reputation exactly because of these moments.

The worst thing about not taking meetings seriously is that everyone starts associating them with being a waste of time.

People don’t think they’re worth anything, so they don’t bother preparing. They turn up to meetings already checked out, treating them as if they’re taking a break from work. Participation is negligible, if not completely non-existent.

The person running the meeting, often the manager, gets frustrated and annoyed. It’s all a downward spiral and the worst meeting culture you can have.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Characteristics of a good meeting

Every meeting is an opportunity.

People gravitate towards success and effective meetings are a much better way to achieve that. On the banal, basic level: time saved is money saved.

Remember that a one-hour meeting with five people in it isn’t just a one-hour meeting at all. It’s really a five-hour meeting. That meeting has to be worth five hours of productivity for it to be effective.

Having multiple bad meetings in a row can be both demotivating and mentally draining. The people involved get stuck with a feeling of no progress, no sense of accomplishment, and no enjoyment in their work.

A great meeting is about as far away from that as you can get. Good meetings are hubs of creativity, motivation, and affirmation. They’re essential for clear communication, making sure that everyone is on the same page and understands what the next steps are. They can help you get unstuck and push forward with a project or a task if bouncing ideas off other people or getting clear direction is what you needed.

Meetings are one of the best opportunities to not just exchange information but to engage with your colleagues and interact with them. Those are the kind of meetings that are worth having and working towards.

Here is how you can achieve that.

7 strategies to adopt for good meetings

1) Never schedule a meeting without a clear outcome in mind.

The purpose of a meeting should be crystal clear to you, as the person scheduling it, and to every participant. Why are you all here? What are you trying to achieve?

You have to figure this out and communicate it clearly.

There’s a huge difference between trying to make a decision, keeping everyone updated, or having a coherent discussion. They call for different kinds of meetings and different styles of moderation. Having a clear outcome in mind is even more important than having an agenda because the outcome is what dictates the agenda.

Possible desired outcomes are things like:

• Agreement on the next steps of a project
• Exchanging information so that everyone knows what everyone else is up to
• Involving people in a decision that has multiple stakeholders
• A space for social interaction and team-building

If you get invited to a meeting and you aren’t clear on what the desired outcome is, ask! It’s better to say “I’m not actually sure what the purpose of this meeting is” than to sit there and think it.

2) Avoid starting a meeting without an agenda.

This is an old-school favourite.

Agendas are one of the easiest ways to give a meeting structure.

Agendas can rarely be judged as “good” or “bad”. A bullet point list of topics is enough to work with, in the vast majority of cases. Having a standing document where you just jot down topics whenever they come to mind is a good start. That’s a simple solution for recurring meetings.

Sometimes, you should put some effort into crafting an agenda e.g. for long meetings.

• Do you need an icebreaker at the start, so that people relax and can get into a topic?
• Should you set the scene or present background information to make sure everyone’s on the same page?
• If you’ll be covering multiple topics, what’s the best way to structure them, so that conversation flows naturally from one topic to the next?

Not every meeting has to have an agenda.

Having an agenda for any kind of social meeting is a good way to ruin the meeting.

3) Only invite people who have to be there.

Sometimes people prefer to invite everyone, even if they’re only peripherally involved, on the off-chance that one of them would feel left out or miss important information.

In those situations, it’s better to document and consciously update people than to have them involved in the discussion, if they don’t need to be.

A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself if it’s possible to achieve the outcome that you’ve set out without this person’s presence. If yes, would it be the optimal outcome?

What you want to achieve is a meeting where everyone is engaged and everyone is participating.

Having people sit there who aren’t paying attention because they don’t feel like their input is necessary brings down the whole atmosphere and is a waste of their time.

The only way to avoid that is to structure the meeting in such a way that it brings value to every person in the invite.

4) Give all participants guidance on what to prepare.

Most people show up to meetings with full faith they can wing it and, honestly, that can work. Sometimes.

But does it often limit how effective a meeting can be? Definitely.

If you’re meeting to come to a decision:

• It’s much better to prepare pros and cons before,
• Ask everyone to think of any additional ones,
• And to sort out their own thoughts and figure out how to articulate them before they even walk into the room.
• You’ll spend a lot less time in the meeting with long pauses because people need time to process and think about something.
• People will have the time they need to come up with good feedback.

If what you’re looking for is a laid-back exchange, someone to bounce ideas off, then you can forego the preparation.

The ideal and perfect meeting culture would be one where it’s expected that you prepare for every meeting and those situations are the exceptions that prove the rule.

5) Make the meeting interactive.

Assume that everyone who’s in the meeting cares about the topic and wants to participate. You want to give them opportunities to do that.

If you’re finding it difficult to get engagement, think about how you can change the style of the meeting to facilitate it.

Putting in just a little more effort to prepare something closer to a workshop, like bringing in models or sketching out a mindmap, can completely change the atmosphere.

It’s also likely to give people the impression that they learned something new. That’s one of the best feelings to walk out of a meeting with.

6) Moderate! Be strict.

The idea of a moderator is to have someone present in the meeting whose primary responsibility is to lead the meeting.

Good moderation is extremely complex. It takes a long time to learn but everyone has to start somewhere.

Moderating involves:

• Directing the discussion so that the desired outcome is achieved.
• Cutting off anything that will derail the meeting. This includes off-topic discussions, as well as getting stuck on very small details that aren’t important.
• To step in if things get too heated for a rational conversation.
• Prompting participants whose opinions are valuable.
• Interceding if there’s an awkward pause or if everyone “gets stuck.”
• Reading the language of the room. Is everyone bored or still listening? Does someone obviously disagree with something but isn’t speaking up? Are people starting to look out the window or at the clock? This is how you assess if the meeting is on track or if you need to shake things up.
• Making sure that the meeting ends on time.

Moderating can be difficult. Achieving the right balance between letting the discussion flow naturally and knowing when to step in doesn’t come naturally. Cutting people off too often is frustrating for the people in the meeting. Letting a discussion go on too long can derail the meeting and make it difficult for people to come back to a topic.

A moderator has to toe the line between those two.

You need to become comfortable with interrupting people and asking them to stay on topic or to leave a topic for a later time. This feels terrible the first few times but it’s better to be strict.

This is also why having a moderator who is mainly interested in participating can be quite risky. It’s very easy to forget to do all those things because you get caught up in the discussion. The moment your focus is on what your opinions are and what you want to say is the moment you’ve stopped moderating.

Keep in mind that it’s better to end a meeting early or to stop for a break in the middle than to ignore the body language of everyone participating.

It’s also better to jump in and address moments of conflict than to let everyone notice certain behaviours and not comment. If, for example, someone rolls their eyes at what a presenter says, it’s better to ask them to speak up than to let it go. All of this is something that can be brought in through having a moderator.

7) Only schedule a meeting if it absolutely has to be a meeting.

Meetings are often the easiest and quickest solution that comes to mind when you want to talk to someone.

Scheduling a meeting for every discussion is often the first resort.

This lends itself to an environment filled with distractions, where meetings take over the entire workday. That isn’t an environment that’s conducive to real productivity.

A better way to think about meetings is that they’re great when they’re necessary.

And only when they’re necessary.

If a discussion can be resolved in written form, then it’s better to send an email, a Slack message, leave a comment on a Google document, or whatever method is most commonly used in your company.

Lots of discussions are too complex to have through writing, need to be resolved more quickly, or involve too many people for a different channel to be ideal.

Those are the situations in which you can and should schedule a meeting.

Good meetings enhance leadership

Meetings are likely a big part of your everyday responsibilities as a manager, in a remote environment.

Investing time in getting great at them will change how your team views your leadership and how much value you can get out of working with your team.

Zoom meetings (that is, video calls) are different in that you can’t read body language in the same way and you spend a lot of time over-compensating for that.

Your intonation gets a little more exaggerated, the way that it would if you were on stage, or you focus a little harder on the ground dynamic and interactions because it’s much more difficult to avoid interrupting people.

Casual conversation and small talk feel more forced and harder to get through. Awkward pauses where no one knows what to say feel even more awkward. It definitely calls for a different way of communicating and that’s more mentally taxing because most of us are used to in-person interaction a lot more.

What causes Zoom fatigue?

Zoom fatigue is a type of mental exhaustion that can occur after spending extended periods of time on video calls. It is characterized by symptoms such as difficulty concentrating, feeling drained, and having headaches.

There are a number of factors that can contribute to Zoom fatigue, including:

• Increased cognitive load: Video calls require more cognitive effort than face-to-face interactions because you have to process more nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions and body language. This can lead to mental fatigue, especially if you are on multiple video calls in a single day.
• Constant self-monitoring: When you are on a video call, you are constantly aware of how you look and sound. This can lead to increased self-consciousness and stress, which can also contribute to fatigue.
• Lack of mobility: Video calls can be physically restrictive, as you are typically limited to sitting in one spot. This can lead to muscle fatigue and stiffness.
• Unnatural eye contact: On video calls, everyone is staring at each other all the time. This can be unnatural and stressful, especially if you are not used to it.
• Increased distractions: Video calls can be more distracting than face-to-face interactions because there are more things to look at, such as other people’s faces, your own face, and the background. This can make it difficult to focus on the conversation.

How to battle Zoom fatigue

The best solution to Zoom fatigue is shaking up your methods of communication across your company and making them more suitable for remote work. That means:

• Letting people report to you without necessarily having to sit in a meeting for it.
• Looking at every video call you set up and really asking yourself if it’s necessary. Could you achieve the same outcome by having shared project management tools that you work to keep updated?

You can’t get rid of all meetings and that’s fine. Some aspects of work will always be more efficient or more fun with synchronous communication.

Being successful at working remotely means leveraging the unique aspects of remote work that are actually helpful for people. You can’t take advantage of the freedom it offers you if your environment is so heavily regimented.

Investing in asynchronous communication and reducing the need for video meetings, to begin with, will always be the best, long-term solution.

That doesn’t work in all scenarios though.

If you’re onboarding people remotely you should invest heavily in video calls because that will help you build relationships in a way that just isn’t the same in pure text or asynchronous communication.

It’s incredibly hard for someone to feel like an integrated member of the team and like they have the opportunity to ask questions continuously if you don’t dedicate that time.

You might have some weeks or months that will just always include a ton of time in Zoom meetings and there’s nothing you can do to avoid it. These are some of the ways you can manage that.

Recognising the symptoms of exhaustion

Zoom fatigue can be characterised by any of the following signs:

• Plain and simple exhaustion.
• Feeling burnt out and worn down.
• Struggling to focus during the meetings themselves.
• Struggling to focus after meetings because you feel harried or rushed like you’re getting pulled in too many directions.
• Losing your ability to interact with your full presence and attention or feeling like you have to force yourself to speak up during those meetings.
• Tiredness of your eyes or tension headaches.

I barely notice the symptoms when I’m actually in a meeting.

Depending on how engaging the meeting is, I tend to have an easy time ignoring my tiredness and focusing on the meeting itself, which works as a good distraction.

It really sets in afterwards, when I notice the number of Slack pings I have, when I find myself staring at my screen and struggling to make progress, or when I turn off my computer at the end of the day and just want to close my eyes for an hour.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is that these symptoms will build up and get worse over time.

If you start feeling like this and don’t see an end in sight, that’s a red flag that you should try to change something about your environment.

Spend time outdoors

This is by the far the most underrated way to manage not only Zoom fatigue but any other source of stress in your life.

Spending time in nature, getting as far away from your everyday routine, breathing in the fresh air: all of these are incredibly simple and incredibly powerful ways to reduce your stress levels across the board.

There’s something about spending time outside that feels like a balm on very raw nerves after spending a longer period of time over-compensating in your tone of voice and body language over a video camera.

To make this very effective, try to go outside during your workday.

Exercise regularly

Exercising here isn’t about exhausting yourself even more.

Some people might find high-intensity exercise energising after a hard workday but most people will find that piling on physical exhaustion on top of mental exhaustion isn’t the best solution.

Movement is incredibly soothing for your body though and will make you feel better.

Look for activities that you can do lightly, with focus and concentration and spend that time exploring your body and different aspects of a movement.

Take regular, short breaks

Short breaks throughout the day will definitely help, especially if you can pair it with either of the above.

It’s easy to feel like you need to just power through and it’s easy to underestimate how much taking a break can help. Sometimes just having ten minutes in between meeting marathons where you don’t have to talk, engage with anyone, or look at a screen is already enough to let you recover just a little bit before you switch back on.

Cluster meetings together

In a day with multiple, spread-out, shorter meetings, the most you can get done is replying to some emails in between or small, menial tasks. That generally makes Zoom fatigue worse.

Clustering meetings together instead means you can maximise the time you spend outside of meetings.

This assumes that you’re able to prepare for those meetings comfortably in advance or that those meetings aren’t the type to require a ton of preparation. If that isn’t the case, spreading the meetings out and just focusing on having great, productive meetings might be a better solution for you.

Create blockers for focus time

The ultimate secret to breaking up an endless streak of meetings is to block out time in your calendar.

If you’re so busy that you can assume gaps in your calendar will be filled up by your colleagues, consciously block out time for yourself to focus on other tasks.

This generally prevents Zoom fatigue from even setting in because it forces you to limit the amount of time you spend in meetings.

Blockers are a great way to indicate for other people that you simply aren’t available for a video call. Events in your calendar tend to be respected in a way that empty space just isn’t, although this perhaps depends somewhat on your company culture. If you are in the lucky position where you can generally tell when you’ll have a hard week, you can already try to schedule a couple of these blockers as a commitment to yourself to limit your time in meetings.

Dealing with virtual fatigue

Reducing your fatigue will increase your productivity, and your sense of connection and motivation towards work.

The extra effort to mitigate and reduce those symptoms can make you (and your team!) happier at work.

While it may seem complex in theory, the process is straightforward.

The crux lies in actively recognizing outstanding performance, whether individual or collective. Express appreciation explicitly and directly. When team members question your perception of their performance, it indicates uncertainty about their standing. Small gestures imbued with this spirit can go a long way.

Overuse of praise can diminish its impact. Avoid generic, routine accolades. If everyone anticipates an annual post-peak season party, the specialness factor diminishes. Celebrate selectively, at meaningful moments.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Celebrating achievements and motivation

Celebrating achievements plays a crucial role in influencing motivation by fostering a positive work environment, boosting morale, and reinforcing desired behaviors.

Here’s how:

1. Reinforces desired behaviors: Recognizing and celebrating achievements sends a clear message to employees about what behaviors are valued and appreciated within the organization. This positive reinforcement encourages employees to repeat those behaviors, leading to improved performance and productivity.
2. Boosts morale and engagement: When employees feel their hard work and accomplishments are recognized, it uplifts their spirits and increases their engagement in their work, which creates a more enjoyable and motivating work environment.
3. Enhances self-efficacy and confidence: When employees receive recognition for their achievements, it boosts their self-efficacy and confidence in their abilities. That can motivate them to tackle more challenging tasks and pursue higher goals.
4. Strengthens team bonding and collaboration: Celebrating team achievements fosters a sense of camaraderie and shared accomplishment, strengthening team bonds and fostering collaboration.
5. Promotes a growth mindset: Recognizing and celebrating incremental progress and small wins encourages a growth mindset, where individuals believe that their abilities can be developed through effort and dedication. This growth mindset fuels motivation and resilience in the face of challenges.

How to celebrate accomplishments at work

Define an achievement

The easiest way to start is to brainstorm what kinds of achievements you think are worth celebrating to begin with.

There are three simple steps to that:

• Brainstorm what kinds of achievements you think are worth celebrating.
• Consider individual and team performance.
• Set goals and track progress.

The key thing to remember is to hit the right balance.

You can use the regularity of that to judge if you’re toeing the line the way that’s most valuable.

If your definition of an achievement is so low and easy to hit that you “achieve” something every day or even every week, then any celebration you do will not be meaningful.

But if your definition is so high that it’s almost impossible to actually hit it, then you need to lower your standards. There’s no general yardstick for how often you should celebrate something.

Once a year is fine, every few months works too.

It depends on the rhythm of your team’s work, the normal stress level on a day-to-day basis, the types of goals you set and so on. You can only look at your own environment and rely on your judgement to see if it’s too often or too rare.

Give public recognition and appreciation

Celebrations are great because they often give people public recognition and appreciation.

Depending on the type of person, recognition can be a huge motivator in and of itself. It’ll also help battle insecurity and self-doubt (or impostor syndrome) like nothing else.

It’ll push people to keep achieving at that level because not only will they feel personal pride in their work, but they’ll feel that other people around them appreciate it as well.

• Recognize achievements publicly.
• Appreciate individual contributions.
• Celebrate project milestones.

Small gestures go a long way

It’s important to remember that celebrating achievements isn’t necessarily about big, grand gestures that require large investments from your company.

Some of the most meaningful ways that I’ve found to recognise someone’s contribution to the company has been around using my available time in company-wide meetings to give them a shout-out.

Maybe you can offer extra time off, have small team events that are just about hanging out and having a good time, or just buy a small gift that you think a person would appreciate.

Small gestures tend to be more personal and targeted.

The person (or your team) will know that you were thinking specifically of them when you came up with whatever it is you end up doing.

That means a lot more than a widespread celebration that doesn’t recognise people personally for their individual contributions. It’s nice to celebrate as a group but it’s more meaningful when it is targeted.

Establish a regular rhythm

I’ve received feedback multiple times from some of my teams that they’d love it if I celebrated achievements more. I tend to be very focused on “getting things done.”

That usually means that the moment we’d finish a larger project or hit some kind of milestone, I’d already be planning on how to hit the next one.

This isn’t the worst way to work. It usually leads to a ton of productivity.

But if you find yourself in a similar position, it might help to just set up a short reminder for yourself to force yourself to think about it on a regular basis. If you do this around the rhythm of your work, it’s much easier to remember.

• Set reminders to celebrate achievements.
• Tie celebrations to your work rhythm.
• Take time to reflect on achievements.

For example, if your company sets goals on a quarterly basis, you can set this reminder up towards the end of a quarter, when it’s a good time for you to evaluate how you’re doing anyway.

If you do retrospectives on a regular basis, you could always set it up right before or right after. The main purpose of this would be to consciously take some time to think only about achievements.

What you’re ultimately aiming for is the kind of environment where people are proud of their achievements, and strive to beat them on a regular basis.

You want your team to feel like their work is noticed, appreciated, and valued by the people they work with, whether that’s you, who you report to, or the company as a whole.

This is one easy way to level up the motivation levels in your team and their overall performance with little effort.

The default reaction is to bite your tongue and not say anything.

Why?

The thing about environments that don’t encourage feedback is that it’s hard to pin down the specific cause.

It takes a long time to even notice that it’s happened. If you do happen to notice, then it’s hard to recognise the specific behaviours that led to it. And if you’re lucky enough to see those, it’s almost impossible to figure out exactly how to change them.

Avoiding a culture of feedback

Giving honest and direct feedback goes against our nature in many ways.

Culturally, we learn sayings like “if you’ve nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” We learn that it’s okay to tell white lies in order to avoid hurting people’s feelings. We almost never exchange any kind of feedback in private life.

When you get to the workplace and you try to do it, you’re fighting an uphill battle, often against your own, deeply ingrained instincts.

Giving feedback is hard:

• It opens you up for scrutiny. You bring attention to yourself. You stand out from the crowd. That takes a certain amount of confidence and self-belief, which is hard to accumulate.
• It could damage your relationships. We don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings either. Telling someone that they’ve done something annoying or that their performance isn’t up to scratch and creating more work for everyone around them can feel cruel and harsh.
• Formulating constructive feedback is hard. We’ve all been on the receiving end of some feedback that we thought was unfair or unconstructive.

Giving your boss feedback is even more difficult. understands that your boss has to be the first person to recognise your positive performance because they’ll be the ones making the decisions that could potentially impact your career.

Creating a culture of open feedback exchange has to be something you put active effort into.

The benefits of healthy feedback

Feedback is the cornerstone of any development for you, for your company, and for your employees.

If no one is giving you real, honest feedback, you can only rely on your own perceptions. You’re always going to have glaring blind spots that are obvious to everyone around you but not to you.

Imagine an environment where everyone felt able to speak their mind. You want the people in your company to feel like they can:

• Suggest anything, anytime, anywhere
• Openly criticise and explain when they disagree with something
• Ask questions that are uncomfortable and awkward.

Not having to walk on eggshells in the workplace is essential if you want motivated employees.

Synergy and innovation are just not something you can achieve in a tense, anxiety-inducing environment where people sit on negative emotions instead of addressing them.

One of the best wins of an open feedback culture is that the role of the manager becomes a little less important.

They need to intervene less because people get just that bit more comfortable exchanging feedback with each other directly. Everyone will naturally help the others around them grow without the feeling that they need to “snitch” on someone. This kind of team is the most difficult one to build but it’s by far the most fun one to work with.

How to be open to feedback

As the manager, there’s a lot you can do to transform the feedback culture within your own sphere.

Start with your team. Focus on the people you work with every day, and then see how it goes from there.

When it comes to feedback, the manager’s role is extremely important. People will take their cues from you and follow your lead, so you have to be the role model.

There are two aspects that you’ll need to think about in order to change the culture you have around feedback: how you receive feedback and how you give feedback.

Receiving feedback

Start by creating opportunities for the people around you to give you feedback. This can look like the following:

• Whenever you discuss a company policy for the first time, ask your team what they think about it.
• Whenever you make a decision, ask your team if they think it makes sense or if your rationale is understandable.
• Whenever you present information, ask your team for their gut responses. Was anything about the information surprising to them or did they expect it?

Try to invite feedback in every situation where it makes sense.

Give them prompts to help them out. If you’re asking for feedback on a presentation, say something like “I’m worried that it’s a little too brief and won’t be easy for the others to follow” or “I’m not sure this is actionable enough.”

Show vulnerability, be openly self-critical and articulate your own insecurities. This will eventually, over time, give people the impression that you are actually open to feedback, that it’s important to you and that you’ll act on it.

Avoid defensiveness

Pay very close attention to how you respond to feedback.

If I had to pick one thing that will make or break your feedback culture, it’s how the manager responds to critical feedback.

• Don’t ever immediately respond by questioning or dismissing the feedback. If you can hear yourself think “but that’s completely not true,” do not say it. Don’t even let it show on your face. This makes you sound defensive.
• Remember that feedback has nothing to do with whether someone is right or wrong. You’re completely within your rights to disagree and to explain why you disagree. At the beginning though, you want to build enough trust for them to feel secure in telling you what they think.
• Make them feel heard. Body language like crossing your arms and moving your torso away from them is a signal that you’re not happy. You should reiterate what they said and see if you understand it. Ask questions that are exclusively around getting clarity, until you know exactly what they mean.

Once you’ve understood it and had enough time to process the feedback, you can think about responding.

Good responses might be:

• Choosing one part of the feedback which you will act on and try to change.
• Admitting if you can’t change something because it’s out of your hands.
• Taking their feedback on board but explaining the background behind your decision the first time round.

You can only encourage feedback by showing that you’re open to admitting that you’re wrong. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have your own convictions or beliefs. You just need to communicate them well.

Giving feedback

The other way in which you can be a great role model is by giving good feedback.

Again, assume that your team will take their cues from you, so start by thinking about the setting you choose to give feedback in.

• Praise publicly. This is a way to recognise and celebrate achievements. If you want to see more of any kind of behaviour, public praise is an easy way to encourage it.
• Address critical questions publicly. Don’t avoid or talk around critical issues. If you’re sitting in a meeting and you notice someone rolling their eyes or scoffing internally, call them out on it. Ask them to speak up and say what they think.
• Give negative feedback privately. Calling people out in public if they made a mistake just makes it feel uncomfortable for everyone. The others sitting there will think “what if this was me” and it’s very easy for the person to feel embarrassed. This isn’t an environment that’s conducive for taking feedback on board or trying to change your behaviour. It just makes people angry.

Tips for fostering continuous feedback

• Do it as close to the event as possible. It’s much more awkward to follow up on something a week later than to just address it immediately.
• Focus on finding the right balance between being blunt and being straightforward. Don’t focus so much on not hurting the person’s feelings that you don’t actually end up saying what the problem was. You have to be direct and articulate it properly. Don’t say “your performance is subpar” (too blunt) or “your performance was okay” (too wishy-washy) but rather “a great performance at this task which you worked on would’ve included more comprehensive research, been on time, took more perspectives into consideration.”
• Be prepared. When you walk into a feedback session, you should know exactly what you want to say, what kind of change you expect to see from your team member, and why this is important enough to you that it’s worth addressing.
• Be specific. Don’t say “your demotivation is bringing down the others in the team.” Instead say, “By saying “nothing will ever change anyway, so there’s no point,” you gave the impression of a fatalistic and demotivated attitude, which feeds to an environment in which none of us can be bothered.” You want to focus on the specific behaviour that you observed. Don’t ever give feedback that you can’t back up with at least one example, ideally a couple.
• Be very careful not to assign meaning to an action. Give people the benefit of the doubt. The vast majority of people you work with will not do things out of malicious intent. Don’t automatically assume the worst because of something they said or did. Assume that they made a mistake and they didn’t realise how it might have come across.
• Keep a tight rein on your emotions. If you feel angry, resentful or frustrated, it’s not the right time for you to give feedback. Give yourself some time to calm down. For it to be constructive, you need an environment in which both parties feel able to say what they feel is true.
• Be generous with your praise. Take the time to notice the hard work and the achievements of the people around you and reward them for it in whatever way you can. There’s something to be said for not praising so often that no one notices or takes it seriously, but you don’t want to do it so rarely that your team members think you don’t even notice. Find the right balance for yourself.