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’

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Olivia Arocena • Writer and Editor
Sep 19, 2026 4:00 PM EDT

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 using only their social skills, and now they have to get to work. It's normal; it takes time. We live in a society that consistently rewards that. I even get tired of reading internet posts about how upper management always rewards those who look stressed over those  actually working.

At any rate, this is just my opinion, and I'm open to debate if anyone thinks this is not the best route to take; I just want to hear consistent arguments as to why that is.

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  • The natural writers celebrating

    Cheezburger Image 10664547840
    via Vitaly Gariev

    Rewarding the loudest

    Image for illustrative purposes



     

  • we switched to written updates and the loudest people stopped getting promoted

    wek led the daily standup about fourteen months ago. replaced it with a written update in a channel, one short post each, whenever you start. the reason was timezones, we had picked up two people in europe and the
    via Joylithic_36
  • standup time was becoming a fight. the effect on meetings was what you would expect, about four hours a week back per person. the effect nobody
    via Joylithic_36
  • predicted showed up at review season. two of the people who had been considered strong performers were suddenly not obviously strong. not because they got worse, but because what they were good at was the
    via Joylithic_36
  • meeting. quick verbally, confident summarising other people's work, always the one who framed the problem out loud. in writing, every day, in a place anyone can scroll back through, that stopped converting.
    via Joylithic_36
  • meanwhile a woman on our team who barely spoke in standups turned out to be doing about a third of the difficult work. it had always been visible in the code and never in the room. in the written channel it was just there,
    via Joylithic_36
  • every day, in her own words. two promotions went differently than they would have a year earlier and i do not think anyone consciously connected it to the format change.
    via Joylithic_36

  • No more speaking in public

    Cheezburger Image 10664548096
    via Vitaly Gariev

    Are written updates better then?

    Licensed media provided as editorial context



     

  • i am not going to pretend writing is neutral, it favours people who write comfortably, and we have one guy who is excellent and hates it. but it moved the bias from who is quickest in a room to who can describe what they
    via Joylithic_36
  • did, and the second one at least correlates with having done something.
    via Joylithic_36
  • KyleGuyLover69 I like written updates asynchronously cause you just post into a channel at a random time not a single person looks at
    via KyleGuyLover69
  • Inspirationphoric-57 written updates favour a different group, they do not remove the bias. worth being honest about that, especially for people writing in a second language
    via Inspirationphoric-57
  • Extreme-Piano4334 Promoting both types is important. Nice noticing that.
    via Extreme-Piano4334

  • Social skills are not the most important skills

    un bitd
    via Vitaly Gariev

    Not everyone is good at writing

    Stock photography for depiction only

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