Pre-work and Engagement
Why pre-work matters
The single biggest lever you have over session quality isn't what happens in the meeting — it's what happens before it.
The single biggest lever you have over session quality isn't what happens in the meeting. It's what happens before it.
Most meetings fail in the same way: a group of people show up cold, spend the first 20 minutes orienting, the next 20 minutes diverging on what the meeting is even about, and the last 20 minutes scrambling to converge on an output. By the end, people are tired and the team has produced something less than it could have.
Pre-work is the practice that breaks that pattern. It moves divergent, individual thinking — the part meetings are bad at — to before the meeting starts, so the live time can do what live time is uniquely good for: dialogue, decision-making, and building shared understanding.
This page is the philosophy of pre-work in Gleo. The mechanics — how to build it, what task types are available, how participants engage with it — sit on the pages that follow.
Preparation over participation
The principle Gleo is built around — and the framing we use throughout the docs — is preparation over participation.
That doesn't mean participation is bad. It means the meeting is the wrong place to do the work that preparation does better. Three things in particular:
Divergent thinking
Brainstorming, recall, opinion-forming. The kind of thinking that benefits from time and quiet — and gets compressed into the first three minutes when it's done live.
Reading and watching
A 6-minute video, a one-page brief, a research summary. Reading something out loud to a group is the slowest possible way to deliver it.
Quiet voices
In live meetings, the loudest 20% of the room produces 80% of the words. Pre-work gives every participant the same chance to contribute, on their own time, without having to compete for airtime.
Pre-work is a leading indicator
When you can see — at a glance, before the session starts — who has and hasn't done their prep, you have something rare: a leading indicator of how the session is going to go.
If 80% of participants have done thoughtful prep, you're walking into a session where the dialogue is going to be deep and the convergence work will be productive. If 30% have, the session is at risk and you can do something about it before it begins (a nudge, a re-scheduled invite, a re-framing of the prep ask).
Most teams don't have this visibility. They find out a session went badly after it ended, when it's too late to act.
What good pre-work looks like
A few patterns that consistently land well:
- Mixed media. A short video or article, plus a couple of questions. Not five paragraphs of text and a 12-question survey.
- A clear "why." Tell the participant up front why the prep matters and what you'll do with their answers in the session. Vague prep gets shallow responses.
- A mix of opinion and fact. Ask for both their position and the reasoning behind it. The reasoning is what makes the live conversation rich.
- Lightweight reactions where it counts. Letting participants emoji-react and comment on each other's prep responses turns prep into a low-friction warm-up — see Comments and reactions.
- A realistic time budget. 15–20 minutes total. People will block time for that; they won't block 45.
The anti-patterns to avoid
The three patterns we see go wrong most often:
| Anti-pattern | What it looks like | Why it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Homework as punishment | "We're behind, so I'm sending you a 30-question form to fill in before Monday." | Sets the wrong tone. Pre-work that feels like a chore gets done resentfully (or not at all). |
| Vague tasks | "Have a think about our Q3 strategy." | No structure means no usable output. Participants don't know what "having a think" produces. |
| One giant text question | A single open-ended prompt asking for half a page of writing. | High activation energy, low completion rates, and the responses are hard to compare or aggregate. |
The fix in every case is the same: small, structured tasks with a clear purpose. Five short questions of mixed types beats one big essay every time.
The 20-minute rule
Keep total prep time per participant under 20 minutes. The Session Planner shows an estimated prep duration as you build the task list — pay attention to it. Once prep crosses 20 minutes, completion rates drop sharply, and the participants who complete it are the ones who would have prepared anyway. The marginal value of more prep, beyond a point, is negative.
If your prep is creeping over the cap, the right move usually isn't to ask people to do more — it's to drop the lowest-value tasks. The constraint is what makes the practice land.
How this category is organised
The rest of this category covers the mechanics of running good prep in Gleo:
What participants see
The participant-facing prep page, end-to-end. Read this before sending your first invite.
BComments and reactions
How to turn prep into a low-friction conversation between participants before the session starts.
CTracking responses
How to read incoming prep efficiently — by member, by task, aggregated where it makes sense.
For the how of building prep — picking task types, structuring a flow — see Pre-work task types and Building pre-work templates.
Tips & pitfalls
Test your own prep before sending it. Open the public prep URL in an incognito window and complete it as if you were a participant. You'll catch bad framing, broken task ordering, and the "this should have been a video" moments before your participants do.
Send prep with enough lead time. 48 hours minimum; 5 working days for senior participants. Sending prep on Sunday night for a Monday morning session is a near-guarantee of low completion.
Reference the prep in the session. Nothing kills future prep completion faster than participants doing prep that the facilitator then ignores. If you asked for it, use it — even if just to acknowledge it on screen at the start.