Oh, you find the facilitator attractive too? That’s so interesting.
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Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
Meetings are necessary.
Principally because the person organizing the meeting says so.
Yet the truth of what really goes on when everyone gathers together to stare into their own laptops and phones can be hard to grasp.
I am grateful, therefore, to exclusively examine research that claims to show the psychological truth behind meetings.
The research was given to me by Klaxoon, a company whose website promises #GoodVibes.
Well, its research doesn’t.
One statistic made me lie down on my deck, stretch my arms and legs as wide as possible and ululate to the skies: “You think this world is funny, don’t you?”
And then I got up and read the statistic again.
40 percent of CEOs are more engaged during meetings if they are attracted to the meeting facilitator.
I put that in bold, so that your tears and/or laughter could boldly emerge too.
You see, you put these people in charge of companies and they’re the same sorts of vacuous, superficial halfwits that you’ll find anywhere else.
If you’d like to be optimistic, it seems that at least a small proportion of them will try and clean up their psychological act when they reach the top.
I know this because in this same survey, 52 percent of managers claimed to be more engaged during meetings if the facilitator accorded with their personal esthetic.
We have made so much progress.
You might wonder why these Klaxoonists wanted to discover this fascinating information.
Well, as far as I can tell from a website that I found not quite attractive enough for me to pay complete attention to, the company exists to “inspire a collaborative culture.”
This, a company spokesman told me, involves “turning your phone into a collaborative meeting tool with features like quizzes, surveys and instant messaging.”
Ah, so co-workers can now play quizzes together on their phones?
But aren’t they playing quizzes during meetings anyway?
It’s just that instead of playing quizzes with co-workers, they’re playing them with Jason, an organizational behavior student (dropped out) from Kent State University?
And you don’t ever have to worry about whether Jason is attractive or not, as you never have to look at him.
Please, the mere thought that physical attractiveness — rather than, say, personality, ability to communicate or, perish the concept, brains — might still hold so much sway, even at the top of organizations, makes me fear for the tatters of humanity’s future.
Still, Klaxoon boasts that its methods rise above this pulchritude-obsessed culture to make everyone work more productively together.
And then I noticed that one of its clients was L’Oreal. The beauty company.
Ah, that must be an interesting assignment.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.