# University holds the “you’re on mute” call for six seconds

> A School of Continuous Improvement poster links how quickly a muted speaker is told so with whether the remark reaches the minutes, and the University adopts a Six-Second Hold for every committee.

A call that has always come at once will, from now on, wait six seconds at every University committee. The Six-Second Hold follows "“You’re on Mute” as a Point of Order", a research poster released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, and it comes with a companion provision: every remark begun while muted is entered in the minutes.

> The record a committee keeps of itself is settled in the few seconds after someone begins to speak. We were glad to spend a season in those seconds.
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> --- Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas

The study followed the call through 57 video meetings of strata, sports-club, parents' association and hall committees, setting the time taken to make it against what later reached the circulated minutes. Remarks alerted within six seconds were minuted at under half the rate of those alerted later, and the team found little in the subject matter to account for the difference. The Hold and its schedule of muted remarks translate that pattern into a practice that committees can carry out themselves.

Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, said the Hold "gives each meeting a pause it can call its own". The University takes particular satisfaction in a rule short enough to be counted aloud, and the hold period will be reset each year against fresh recordings.

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.j1gtrv.