If you were to survey anyone about their least favorite aspects of work, one of the top items would likely be meetings.

One Harvard Business Review study showed that one organization’s weekly executive meeting had a ripple effect that consumed over 300,000 hours of its employee’s time. As a work-society we spend a lot of time in meetings.

Good meetings can be productive, energizing, and even bonding, where bad meetings can be spectacular time-toilets. Meetings these days take on many forms: In-person, conference call, video teleconference, and text-based instant messaging or chat.

The purpose of this post is not to highlight how to make a great meeting happen (we’ll do that in another post), but rather to convince you to show up in person (or on video) wherever possible.

If your meeting offers multiple modes of participation (i.e. in-person, a conference line, video conferencing, or chat), for the sake of convenience it is tempting to just “call in” and listen. The advantage of this is that it allows the listener to multitask while the meeting is going on.

However, I would make a case that showing up in person (to include video conferencing) is actually the best way to attend a meeting. Why? Here are 10 reasons:

1. You can fully interpret the message when you can see facial expression and body language.
2. You can get questions answered in real time (you can do this in any mode of communication, but it’s less awkward in-person).
3. When you show your face, it’s less likely that people will talk negatively about you.
4. You can’t multi-task and get away with it.
5. It allows you to be fully present for others to engage you.
6. It increases your credibility. Being on the phone, you may as well not be in the meeting at all, unless you are highly engaged in the conversation.
7. You pick up context, other conversations, and side chatter, that you can’t always hear on the phone.
8. It’s easier to connect personally, it also allows others to see you in action, especially if you make key contributions to the discussion.
9. Things said in person have the perception of being more valuable and trustworthy than those things said on the phone or by some other virtual means.
10. You can be attend the pre-meeting and the post-meeting, which are the informal bookends of meetings where “real” decisions, discussions, and connections happen.

I worked in an organization where we had team members all over the country. While no one would admit it openly, those “in the room” had greater power and influence than those “on the phone”. Those who attended virtually had to work very hard to overcome the distance. In fact, some of those players would fly in every few weeks or so, just to show their faces – to let everyone know that they were a real human being and not just another disembodied voice.

Don’t get me wrong. I love virtual meetings. The virtue of virtual meetings is that they save money, reduce travel time and cost, and they can also be very targeted and even more productive if you have all the right doers at same time. In an age where organizations are looking to optimize costs, travel is one of the first things to go, so virtual meetings become the only way to meet. With collaboration technology being as freely available as it is, no organization is excused from connecting adequately.

That said, if you are dealing with folks from previous generations, they tend to value face time. Current generations don’t need face time quite as much. So let me offer this simple advice: If you need to communicate, collaborate, or meet, do it in this order: In-person, video-conferencing, phone (conference call), chat/instant message/texting, email.

Question: Can you think of any other reasons why you would want to show up in person? Or do you have a differing opinion about in-person meetings? How would you make a virtual meeting more engaging for everyone involved? You can leave a comment by clicking here.