Leveling the Playing Field for Remote Meeting Attendees
By: Jim Conning, Director of Engineering
As a Dev Manager, I’ve run many meetings that included a group of people sitting around a conference table and a subset who connect remotely by video call. These remote attendees may be in the same region, the same timezone or an entirely different continent. The people sitting around the table are at a distinct advantage in this arrangement; they hear first-hand audio and can perceive body language in a natural way. Getting a word in an intensive discussion without interrupting is tricky, you have to be poised for the opportunity to interject and seize the floor. The remote attendees are handicapped in trying to participate because it can be hard to catch everything and even harder to interject gracefully.
The stay at home rules due to the pandemic has suddenly thrust all of us onto a level playing field — everyone is now a remote meeting attendee. I’ve heard from a couple of team members who were permanent remote employees before the pandemic that it all of a sudden became much easier for them to participate in meetings. They were no longer at a relative disadvantage. This has me thinking about how we can preserve this newfound parity once we return to the office with a subset of attendees connecting remotely. There are some simple steps we can take to radically reduce the disparity between in-office and remote attendance. We should work to maximize the experience for the remote attendees and empower them to make their best contribution.
The following is my game plan for preserving the level playing field for remote attendees once most of us return to the office.
1. Utilize the Zoom “raise your hand” feature as a way for remote people to make sure they get airtime. Interjecting in a meeting is tricky and you have to be on your toes when you are present in the room. It is much harder to interject remotely, but if we structure it so there is a systematic way of calling on the remote people that will compensate.
2. Always have an onsite “meeting monitor” whose job is to ensure that we are hearing from all the remote people. This person should be aware of who is remote and should pay attention to cues and the Zoom raise your hand feature and interject (raising their hand if necessary) to ensure we call on them proactively. They need to be drawn into the exchange. The meeting monitor will quite often be the meeting organizer or manager but can be anybody in the room although having someone who is assertive will help. Having a meeting monitor needs to be an active and constant practice for all onsite meetings involving remote attendees.
3. Conduct training among the staff on how to conduct in-office meetings that include remote attendees. Cover all the points raised in this article to raise awareness and make this the normal practice.
4. Insist on high-quality audio in all conference rooms. This includes the microphone(s) in the room which must be of adequate quality and placement to ensure all in-person attendees’ voices are picked up with high quality. The IT team needs to hold a high bar on this. If anybody experiences inadequate quality they should immediately file an IT ticket rather than just dealing with it. The conference rooms need to be properly wired so remote attendees can be effective.
5. Everybody in the room must speak up. Speaking so low that you are on the cusp of whispering is not acceptable. Some people naturally have a loud booming voice. The people whose personality leads them to speak in very low volume need to change their behavior in order for us to collaborate effectively. We need to raise awareness of this. Remote people should not tolerate it — they should interject and politely mention to the speaker that they are having a hard time hearing them. Sounds simple but in my experience, nine times out of ten the remote attendees tolerate the sub-optimal volume rather than address it — we need to change this.
6. Everybody attending remotely must have high-quality audio in their home office space. This includes microphone hardware (whether built-in to the laptop or not) that is properly adjusted and in the optimal physical distance from them. Most remote attendees do have good quality microphone pickup but some don’t. These people need to be directed to get their microphone setup straightened out so that everyone can easily hear them. Barely hearing them is not enough.
7. My favorite innovation in this area is one I had at Dictionary.com where I had a team of 20 developers in Poland. I bought a Lazy Susan on Amazon (I, nor Veeva Systems, receive compensation if you click to order one). We put this in the middle of the meeting room (in Oakland, CA) and put a laptop on top of it, with the laptop connected to Zoom (it was Skype actually) and we would rotate that to whoever was speaking in the room. This way the remote attendees could have audio and video. I was very happy with this setup. I could often be seen carrying my Lazy Susan to meeting rooms.
That’s my game plan for how to maintain parity for remote meeting attendees once we resume in-office meetings. Look for an update in the hopefully not too far future on how we did with it. Happy remote meetings everyone!
