The Video Conferencing Etiquette No One Tells You About
Your alarm didn’t go off (or you hit snooze too many times) and now you’re late for work. But you’re working from home so you can manage breakfast and get ready throughout the first half of the workday. Maybe you will just rock your pajamas all day long.
Suddenly, you remember that you have a meeting in an hour and the room starts spinning around you. You consider calling it a day and lying in a fetal position till it’s all over. But, you realize that you’re a grown, responsible adult who has to be in the dreaded meeting that is just a few minutes away.
You get dressed and ready in a panic, turn on your camera, and greet everyone. As you stare into the confused faces of your teammates, you realize your blinds are still closed from last night, and your mic has been on mute since you started talking. Luckily for you, it is so dark that your teammates can’t see your face that has gone red with embarrassment, especially since you’ve been ‘Zooming’ for over five months now!
The Permanent “New Normal”
Did the aforementioned hypothetical situation hit too close to home? It may not be as bad, but I’m sure we’ve all been in situations where a virtual meeting didn’t go as smoothly as you had expected because of things that the participants could have avoided pretty easily. But hey now, we’ve never done this right? Taking up something new is always hard. And you can’t expect yourself to be a pro at it so soon.
The good news is, we’re are sailing in the same boat . Ask Business Insider’s healthcare editor, Zach Tracer. Zach has managed a team of five for over a year. Here’s what he has to say about remote work and working from home, “It won’t be easy, so don’t be too hard on yourself. When I started working from home, people told me it could take three to six months to adjust. I think that’s pretty accurate.”
But the catch is, WFH is the “new normal” for us now. Many industry leaders and trendsetters such as Facebook, Twitter, Square, Shopify, and Slack amongst others have already announced that a majority of their workforce will go remote forever. This means, getting the hang of video conferencing is the only way to exist as an employed professional without being a bundle of nerves every waking moment.
Let us take a look at video conferencing etiquette for the modern remote worker.
1. Come on time, and come prepared!
Getting out of bed just before the daily stand-up is not a good idea. Set as many alarms as you need, but keep enough buffer time to prepare for the meeting. With the almost-guaranteed lag time in video calls, your ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ are excruciating.
2. Test early, test often
Before you rush to hit that call button, check your mic, speakers, and internet connection. Also, check your camera angle. You don’t want people looking up your nostrils or feel like you’re staring into their souls. See if you have just enough light so that you don’t look like a ghost. The trick for perfect illumination is sitting with your back to the light source.
3. Wear pants, but not checkered shirts.
Checks and busy patterns do not transmit well on camera, unless you want to distract your teammates with optical illusions. Go for pastel colors instead. Avoid wearing noisy jewelry or reflective glasses that can make you look like Cyclops from X-men. This goes without saying, but wear pants, and those that match your shirt.
4. Choose your conference room wisely
Choose a relatively quiet, non-echoey place for the meeting. If your background is crowded and messy or distracting, blur it, or change it with one available on your video calling app. Its better to look like your’re on a beach or in outer-space than being Waldo from Where’s Waldo. Keep it goofy. Some teams, knowingly or unknowingly use face filters in video conferences and it reportedly makes for unforgettable and highly engaged meetings.
Case in point, Lizet Ocampo and team from the progressive advocacy group People For the American Way. For Ocampo, People For the American Way’s national political director, it was a run-of-the-mill, weekly Monday morning meeting. She wanted to do a quick check-in with her teammates over Microsoft Teams. Hilarity ensued when she accidentally turned herself into a potato using a filter. It was spud-tacular!
Reportedly, the team spent ten minutes laughing at the result — their boss transformed into a spud, with only her eyes and mouth visible on the potato. She tried to turn the filter off, but gave up in an effort to “keep the fun and smiles going”
Read more: Best Practices to Work From Home Effectively
5. Really let them finish
The “Imma let you finish” style of interruption may work at the VMAs (The MTV Video Music Award) and for Kanye West, but not in team meetings, for you. As much as you make yourself heard before you forget your point, avoid interrupting the speaker. If you have any comments or questions, wait for your turn or communicate comments and questions via the ‘rasie your hand’ or similar chat features of the video calling app.
6. Look into the eyes of the speaker.
As long as you don’t overdo the staring, this is an important tip. Pay attention and maintain eye contact with the speaker throughout. Smile and nod, or respond to acknowledge the speaker. Save yourself from the awkward exchange where you’re so still that you seem frozen and have to be asked whether you’re “still there’.
7. Let those emails and messages wait
Avoid multitasking or responding to messages and emails. If you have to interject every sentence with the sound of your keys clacking, at least provide the speaker with a beat along with it. But turn off notifications for your devices so that the chimes don’t interrupt your impromptu beat-boxing sessions.
8. Watch your hands!
If you’re anything like me, you probably cannot keep hands to your sides and are capable of poking someone’s eye out while just talking. This is perhaps amplified in meetings. The more you talk, the more fervent your gestures become. But, in video conferences, keep your hands to your sides, or on the table and limit jerky movements to avoid distracting others.
9. Keep your screen share-ready
What you do on company time when no one is looking is none of your teammates’ business, am I right? You could have to share your screen anytime. Better be prepared unless you want your teammates to know what you’re binge watching. Or, even worse, what you’re Googling.
10. Let your roommates or family know that you’re on a video call.
Unless you want your roommate intentionally breaking into your workspace with a made up emergency so that you can dip out of the virtual meeting, make sure that you let them know in advance that you’re going to be busy and would like some privacy. However, remember, pets, and sometimes kids are a welcome interruption. Remember how his two adorable children gatecrashed Prof. Robert Kelly’s BBC News interview ? Looking at how viral it went, I’m sure that meeting was a success.
Virtual meetings may not always be all smooth-sailing and most times, it may be out of your hands to remedy it. But, you can always keep these rules in mind the next time you have a video conference, and rid yourself of the anxiety. Remote work is the order of the day and the future. So as we keep doing this more and more, we will get better at this, and truly increase productivity and efficiency forever. Till then, keep the virtual metamorphosis in check!
