Faith + Work + Life

I’ve worked in a remote or hybrid role for about seven years now, so I was already well-adjusted to the pros and cons of video technologies like Zoom when Covid forced us to all get more comfortable with video meetings! Certainly you can find an endless supply of articles telling you tips and tricks to improve meetings, but here’s my own take based off my experience.

Most critically, I think we need to have an awareness that other people exist in the meeting room. When I am out and about amongst the general public, a thing I notice is how much we don’t notice each other. I imagine the vast majority of situations where someone cuts me off in traffic or with a grocery cart have little to nothing to do with me, or even with the person trying to be obtuse. Rather, we are a bit oblivious and self-focused in our fast-paced, individualistic culture. Manners matter – on Zoom too!

Practical Tips

Use the technology for its purpose. By that I mean, when you need to chat through something or host a meeting a video call is a great choice to be able to share screens, connect with a human visually, and avoid delays until everyone is one physical space. For a remote employee, it’s not just an occasional tool, it becomes a main tool for connection – and they may never share physical space with coworkers.

Sometimes you need to get on a call…and sometimes you do not!

Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, and alternatives are great resources for meetings, but also for quick calls. I don’t enjoy phone calls, never have. In fact, if I am calling my best friend, I text her first to warn her there’s not an emergency. That’s how much we don’t do phone calls (note: we should all be so lucky as to find a person who gets us!). However, that’s life – I can do what I want. For work, sometimes a call or “quick Zoom” with a colleague is a much faster solution than endless Teams chats or emails back and forth where confusion may already exist.

However, the rampant availability of video calls does not mean everything needs to be a video call.

Being on camera and focused can be exhausting – especially for certain roles that are meeting heavy and for remote workers more reliant on the technology. Just like some meetings can be an email, some video calls can be a regular phone call (or email, chat, etc.). Take a second to think about the right medium for your communication.

Know your culture and your colleagues. Office cultures will vary, of course, but I personally find a video call without notice rather obtrusive. Depending on meeting schedules, dress codes, and other expectations an employee might not be “camera ready” at a given moment. For many remote employees, considerations about household noise and imagery are taken into account. For my team, I urge a quick “can we hop on a Zoom?” message before calling via video tech. And for those working remotely, I highly recommend the use of backgrounds. Covid forced those to get much better than they were and it hides what’s happening behind you. My house is clean but for me personally it feels weird to have my staff know exactly what my living room looks like or a vendor to comment on my choice of decor, etc. If you have a mess, have to work from a room with an unmade bed, or deeply need to do the dishes in view on your camera, backgrounds are your friend.

Remember…we can see you! Organizations have different cultures around cameras on/cameras off. And Zoom fatigue is a thing. But if your camera is on, remember, we can see you! And if we are working from a large monitor we can sometimes see you on a big screen. In detail. So…obviously don’t be gross with personal grooming needs (i.e., turn your camera and mic off before blowing your nose). Personally I think eating on Zoom is pretty gross, but I’ve had to do it on occasion. Try to have your best table manners if its unavoidable or let your colleagues know you’re turning your camera and mic off briefly to eat but are still engaged, etc.

And apparently less obviously…we can totally tell when you are multitasking. Your attention shifts on camera just like it does in person when you are triaging your many emails instead of listening. Try to avoid behaviors that indicate the person speaking does not have your attention! And truly, I promise you, you are not better at sneakily multitasking than anyone else. If a slight distraction cannot be avoided, again, briefly turn your camera off to attend to anything urgent.

And also we can hear you! I personally set the default settings for meetings I host to auto-mute attendees. I was once part of a (large) meeting where no matter how often we muted an attendee, they just really wanted to be unmuted. So we could hear them ordering their dinner…I’ve also watched someone take their nightly run, their face bouncing on the screen. And I watched someone seemingly host a cooking show, moving about their kitchen as they prepped their food, but taking their camera to each “station” along the way…sigh.

My own rule is to stay muted unless I need to talk in large meetings. For smaller meetings or ones where I am speaking often, I might need to stay unmuted. But please, just like we can see you, we can hear you – if you need to sneeze or your dogs start barking maniacally at FedEx (just an example, not my real life obviously) try to mute as quickly as you can!

Try to avoid distractions. Office interruptions can be tough. Even with a sign on your door that says “Meeting – Do not disturb,” people will disturb. This can be tough when it’s an executive or your own boss, but work to avoid appearing distracted when you can. When you can’t, acknowledge to the person(s) on Zoom that you need to step away for one minute and then address the person at your office door.

If you disconnect from your 1:1 with a remote employee and have to reschedule, you potentially disrupt both your schedules and priorities for the day. If you routinely allow on site distractions to outweigh the virtual meeting, you send the message that what happens on site matters more to an employee who may already feel a bit disconnected by the nature of virtual work. (And boundaries matter here – teaching on site staff and colleagues that they take priority can create an unhealthy team dynamic.)

My advice is to only allow for interruptions and ending virtual meetings early if they are disruptions you would permit for in person meetings (i.e., emergencies, your boss will rage if you do not drop everything else for them the moment they appear in your cubicle, etc.). There are tyrant bosses, but most of us are not faced with that. In most cases, I think the interruption of virtual meetings would not happen at the same frequency for the equivalent in person meeting. Two people sitting at a conference table is just a better visual cue that a meeting is taking place than one person starting at another on a screen. That means it’s on you to address the disruption and prioritize finishing the meeting. Consider the example you set for your team and for staff with less experience as well. (Obviously, YMMV and you have to make the right choice, understand if something is emergent, if you do actually work for a tyrant, etc. But most things just simply are not…)

Acknowledge the virtual water cooler. Remember that remote employees do not get the same space for “water cooler” chats or casual conversation that on site employees do. While I am not a fan of forced team building/games/or “get to know you” Zoom hours, there needs to be more intentional room for social interactions when a team relies heavily on remote/hybrid arrangements. Allow people a few moments at the start or end of a meeting to chat where it feels natural. If you’re the boss or the leader of a meeting, try to avoid signing on and immediately changing the tone. If attendees are laughing or someone is sharing a brief anecdote, give them a moment to be humans together before getting started!

This can feel impossibly hard when your to do list is so scary you are tempted to burn it or claim computer gremlins destroyed it. Or when your Zoom meetings for the day are so back-to-back-to-back you aren’t sure you’ll get a bio break. But, it matters. Find a way to honor a person as a human first wherever possible.

And for a practical solution to this and the very real need for bio breaks, consider changing your calendar defaults so meetings are scheduled to end at times other than :00 and :30. Here’s a link on how to do this in Outlook. Doing this, even when you’re facing a long day of meetings helps create a little bit of a buffer. I also got comfortable long ago with phrases like, “I require a bio break before my next meeting starting at 2. Should we schedule time to pick this back up?” and “Anybody do anything fun this weekend?” to honor my biological and social needs!

Pick the right tech for the meeting. Meetings with tons of people are better off as webinars and having less videos vying for attention. Meetings with external vendors should take their access into account (the rabbit hole of links I had to use one time for some very random video tech a vendor “had” to use instead of my Zoom link…).

If you really don’t need everyone’s cameras on, maybe give them a break. Either way, be clear about expectations. For team meetings I include in the invite something like “I expect everyone to disconnect from email and Teams during this time to focus on our agenda together. We’ll have cameras on for this meeting.” The speaker staring at a sea of Zoom boxes with no smiling (or even frowning!) faces is tough. Be a good participant if you’re on a call that you’re not leading, too!

Picking the right tech can also mean knowing if Teams is a resource hog for calls of more than 1-2 people (it can be) and ensuring on site and remote staff have decent cameras, mics, headsets, etc. For those in open spaces, being able to reserve a conference room or other space with a door for meetings requiring privacy is key.

Essentially, wherever you can, reduce barriers. For me this means for big meetings I set an alternative host (or three) so if my tech or Internet connection fail, or I have a life emergency, am ill, etc. someone else can run the meeting. If my Internet is not its best one day, I proactively reach out to reschedule meetings or ask if we can shift to the phone where viable.

Whether hosting or attending a virtual meeting, speak up/chat when there are issues. You would be unlikely to sit in an in person meeting and just not say anything if a mic was screeching, a person’s mouth was moving and no sound was coming out, etc. It is okay to politely interrupt someone to let them know there’s an issue or to blurt out the now classic “you’re on mute” as needed.

What about you? What lessons have you learned from our virtual meeting world? Feel free to share your best Zoom anecdotes below!