Company finds a way to stop rewarding the loudest voice in the room and start rewarding efficiency: ‘It moved the bias from who is quickest in a room to who can describe what they did, and the second one at least correlates with having done something’

Are written updates an advantage or only a different kind of bias?We have to accept that verbal meetings give more influence to those who feel comfortable raising their voice, speaking, and making themselves noticed. Those meetings primarily benefit the socially dominant. Written updates, on the other hand, are more objective, and if everyone writes them, there is no social bias.It happens a lot; in verbal meetings, we favour people who are more confident speaking, even if they objectively did less work, so opting for a written update regime changes the focus to what really matters.Some people say not everyone feels comfortable writing, so we'd be exchanging one bias for another, but I'm not so sure about it. Lists are easy; they don't need special social skills or even writing skills. They are mandatory for everyone, and they just require having something to add to them.If you can't write what you did on a simple list, maybe you haven't done that much. If some employees have a hard time writing, management should do something about that, but I definitely think writing is way easier than speaking in public.Maybe some people don't like updates like this because they were succeeding…

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