How to Have Masturbation-Free Meetings

Many things go viral on the internet — Drake memes, cat videos, and in the era of COVID-19, videos of men masturbating on Zoom calls in front of stunned colleagues.

One such video wound up in a Whatsapp group I’m a member of, and once it became apparent what I was looking at, I turned my gaze to the reactions of said masturbator’s colleagues. Naturally, reactions ranged from shocked and bemused, to fits of uncontrollable laughter.

I also found myself laughing, not just because of the accidental public display of self-gratification, but because there were 24 other people on the call.

This man’s life was no doubt turned upside down because of a meeting that probably didn’t need to happen. In most but the rarest cases, a 25-person Zoom call or face-to-face meeting is usually an expensive waste of time.

The Folly of Large Meetings

As Paul Axtell wrote for Harvard Business Review, when you have more than eight people at a meeting:

• There isn’t enough time for everyone to participate
• Rich back and forth debate is replaced by shallow comments
• People become more guarded and less candid
• Tough topics and decisions are dealt with off-line instead

Not only that, but a 25-person one-hour-long meeting is a 25-hour meeting in terms of the cost to the company.

Such meetings are likely to fall victim to groupthink, and the highest-paid person or most dominant person’s opinion, at the expense of the optimal decision.

It’s unlikely that every person at the meeting is equally, or even partly invested in the topic at hand.

As a result, and most critically, the majority of people — already suffering from meeting and Zoom fatigue — are likely to be present only in word and not deed.

If they’re not masturbating, they’re quietly working away on something else, or catching up on their Twitter feed, or secretly swiping right on Tinder.

Two Types of Meetings

Most internal meetings tend to fall in either one of two buckets; decision-making or information-transfer.