A Distributed Meeting Primer

One screen, One face

That’s really the only way to do it. Any other situation where there are people looking face to face and someone else on a screen makes it not fully collaborative. People are naturally more inclined when there is someone they can look eye to eye.

My company is ~50% remote (or distributed) and our all hands are with every person on their own laptop. Some people in the office pushed back, but we went this direction with zoom where you can have up to 100 people on the screen at 1 time and it has been incredible. Plus, you don’t have to set up any a/v equipment because the meeting link is in the calendar invite.

I have a neighbor that owns a consultancy. They've started shipping the Meeting Owl videoconference camera to all of their high profile clients.

I personally haven't used it, but he spoke highly of it. I think the intelligent focusing of whomever is talking looks interesting. Certainly looks better than those "cameras in the sky looking down" views that are typical to most office setups.

https://www.owllabs.com/

P.S. No I'm not an investor, owner, or anything. Just a product that seems to take a different approach to remote meeting presentations.

Remote (or distributed) worker at a company mostly in a single building. I wish I was worried about the stuff in this article. I’m just lucky when I don’t have to beg for a call in number.

After a bunch of terrible calls with antiquated desk phones on speaker, I asked to have some of the conference phones in the main building upgraded just to the poly on conference phones (couple hundred dollars each). Was told no. So instead we waste way more money with expensive engineers trying to make out what is being said.

All video cameras on company equipment are disabled. By corporate policy, they previously only worked on skype, which is only internal to the company. When I asked why they were disabled, I was told that it was to protect proprietary information. Everyone carries around a personal cell phone capable of transmitting video to anywhere in the world and that is okay, but locked down company hardware that can only transmit in company is too much of a risk.

I asked for a few small surface hubs to do video conferencing on, and was told no. Then they spent more money to buy one big one and put it by the executives, with restrictions on who can use it, so it is never used.

I could keep going.

This is very nice, and I've shared it with some colleagues.

I've dealt with distributed meetings my whole career, and it's ranged from "wall-pounding waste of time" to just "meh". My current job has a pretty great system, but the weak spot remains WebEx, with people not muting by default or forgetting that they're on mute.

This article is a good list for any host/moderator to enforce.

Team can be distributed or not, every time someone is on outside they are missing non-verbal communications. What I read in the article are a bunch of crutches and to seriously fix this make everyone remote, even if in the same office. Or make meetings onsite. Everything else will seriously undermine good fabric of the meeting, so sit back at your machines and be remote. Granted, sometimes people are sick and can't attend of whatever reason meatspace meets - same holds, they will be excluded from some communication. my 2c.

I work with a small team of 5 that is distributed all over the world (Vietnam, NYC, Abu Dhabi, Hungry). Every weekday, for the past year, we have a meeting using Zoom. This is by far the best software and we've standardized on it for all of our meetings, even with outside contacts.

One interesting thing we've taken to is not using video. I don't know why, but it works better to just hear voices. We are cautious to not talk over each other, even if it gets passionate.

We are very careful to mute ourselves after talking to prevent any sort of feedback as well as keep outside noise down. I've found that wearing headphones with my laptop mic works best.

We also have a policy of being on time. It is very rare for us to show up even one minute late. In fact, I just show up early and wait a few minutes on hold.

Out of band started with Slack and for some reason has moved to a whatsapp group... I don't really know why and haven't really bothered to figure it out.

here's my suggestion: If anyone in a meeting is calling in, kill the conference room and everyone get on zoom. We are a mostly distributed company, so it makes obvious sense for us, but even early one when only some folks were not present, we switched to everyone being on zoom or no one being on zoom and it make everything better.