While certain academic terms frustrate me to no end with their inscrutability—say, social anthropology’s “synchronic analysis” (meaning no more than the analysis of the present, rather than the historical)—others delight with their clear identifications. One of those is social loafing. The first time I encountered this term, I knew exactly what it was referring to.
Having extracted the term from any context, though, I’ll provide a definition, so everyone out there can equally delight in the rightness of this term. As Wikipedia has it, “social loafing is the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when working alone.” Sound like every group project you ever worked on in school?
As observed by Steven Rogelberg in his excellent book examining meetings (an overly detailed post to be found here), one of the biggest issues with large meeting is the extent to which they enable social loafing. If anything, social loafing typifies the behavior of most people in large meetings 10+ person meetings, with the meeting organizer and a handful of participants taking up most of the speaking time.
While there was truth to this claim prior to our WFH-era, the past year of Zoom and Teams calls has only magnified the potential for social loafing, where it’s easy enough to hop on a call, say hello, mute yourself, turn off your video, and recede into the unseen sidebar of someone’s shared screen.
Another related pain point over the past year has, ironically, been how easy it is to jump onto a virtual call. No need to be in the office, seated around the same conference room table—one person can be in Idaho, another in their car driving back from a site, and everyone else in their respective homes. It’s convenient, sure, but it’s also too easy to join these meetings.
Some may question whether social loafing is such a big deal, though. The Wikipedia article referenced above explores one theorized cause for social loafing: the diffusion of responsibility:
As the number of people in the group or team increase, people tend to feel deindividuation. This term defines both the dissociation from individual achievement and the decrease of personal accountability, resulting in lower exerted effort for individuals in collaborative environments. This phenomenon can thus decrease overall group effectiveness because it is contagious and hard to correct. Once identified by the group or team leader, it is their responsibility to reassess and put into motion new rules and expectations for everyone. (emphasis mine)
So, is there a way to do this? To set new expectations for meeting participants?
One method is a meeting organizer unafraid to call on people for their opinion, willing to draw out social loafers and eliminate them by the force. Another, far easier method? Just don’t invite them in the first place. While there’s an occasional reason to have people “sit in on” meetings—someone is a subject matter expert whose opinion may be valuable; someone is new to a role or a team—the main function of the observer in a large meeting is to just dilute its effectiveness. (The more people, the worse the meeting.)
The first and easiest step then, is to dis-invite social loafers or observers.
In fact, I’m gearing up to conduct a “meeting audit” at some point in the coming months, when it looks as though a required in-office presence will reassert itself into my life. Through that audit, I’m hoping to answer a few questions—but two of them are pertinent to this problem of social loafing:
- For meetings that I lead, who are the social loafers?
- For meetings I participate in, in which ones am I a social loafer?
For meetings that I’ve identified as having some social loafing component, the follow-up questions are obvious:
- Can I dis-invite these people from the meeting?
- Can I stop attending this meeting?
Note that an obvious positive side effect of any dis-invitation actions is “giving time back” to our days, but that’s secondary to positive effect of eliminating social loafing, which should improve the effectiveness and productivity of meetings.
Taylor Coe 