Online Meetings Extravaganza: Tips & Advices
When Being Late For 2 Minutes Feels Like An Eternity
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur, and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach out to me and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
One of the big wonders of remote and hybrid working is online meetings. I was so happy to come to the office a few years back, and the wrestling of having a meeting room available had become a crisis of the past. For the ones who remember, it was just an annoyance of having meetings, after meetings, moving between rooms to end up waiting outside while the people inside the room concluded their meeting. Other frustrations would include being late while switching meeting rooms on different floors, and people occupying meeting rooms that they didn’t book, or occupying the wrong room. So little drama, but overall, so much inefficiency.
Without surprise, when online meetings became a thing, people were connecting to online meetings even if they were sitting next to each other in the office. It’s simply because physical meetings were too much work. As a consequence, we needed to learn how to adapt to a new reality. How do you manage online meetings, and what would be the best practices?
30-minute Calls
People might not realize that the “30-minute” call phenomenon started to happen during online meetings. The reason is simple: it is more efficient to have an online call than to move physically towards a meeting room. This allowed the propagation (in our sensitive calendars) of an infinite number of 30-minute calls. This can be a blessing and a curse. For managers, we can cover more ground with this tactic, meaning we can have multiple touchpoints with the different stakeholders in a more concentrated timeframe. The curse: Well, our calendar seems like a music festival lineup from start to finish, and you are the main attraction. It had become critical to have discipline and be more demanding on which meetings we should or should not attend. Once I had more than 40 different calls in the week: It was crazy!
Be mindful that for developers, having too many calls is dangerous since it breaks their focus time, and they aren’t as proficient as managers at context-switching (for a good reason). The online meeting extravaganza made it possible to schedule this bite-sized approach to meetings. There are even people advocating for 25-minute calls and allowing a 5-minute break between calls. Personally, I've never managed to put this in motion, but if you can, give it a try.
Team Meeting as a Team-Building
One of the main challenges of Agile is to train teams to have short daily stand-ups. When Scrum became a thing and we started to schedule daily team meetings, the challenge was to make those 1-hour-long meetings become 15-minute standups. For years, I was attuned and ready to take on the challenge and train teams to be short on their dailies. Then, the pandemic happened, people were working from home for the first time, and working from home became a commodity overnight. The problem with remote working is trying to set up team dynamics in a remote context. One thing that remote work does worse than office or hybrid work is the lack of physical presence (Yup, surprise!), which hurts the link between team members and how information flows between everyone. Here is some shocking news: Team members working alone and with no contribution to their colleagues’ efforts, is not teamwork.
After the first months of the pandemic, the team meetings had become the team’s cafe lounge. The rule of having a daily done under 15 minutes was thrown out the window, since that was the only moment in the day the team was sharing work-related news or even personal stories.
Here is a controversial statement: Not everyone has the maturity to work remotely. There will always be people who mimic their presence online without being productive, and there will always be people who aren’t proactive in sharing information. There are people who want to work remotely but aren’t to be trusted in this context.
Which means there are people who don’t work well under remote settings. The team meeting is a way to mitigate such issues and make colleagues more engaged in team matters and the team’s routines. So, it might be OK to have a daily meeting run up to 30 minutes just to have a chit-chat if the colleagues don’t exchange in an office setting. It’s the new dynamic of trying to set an ambience of trust and engagement among the whole team.
Cameras On or Off?
Most of us don’t have a podcast, I get it. I am writing this article in a closed balcony with a failed attempt at growing plants behind me. I never had space for an office at home, and the camera is an intrusion on my personal space. The space I have available at home to work is not pretty. So, it’s understandable when I feel a sense of relief having a call with the camera off.
The question of whether we should have the camera ON or OFF during meetings arose almost immediately during the pandemic, and the answer wasn’t clear. Based on my experience, if people are still seeing each other at the office, having the camera ON really doesn’t matter. The only aspect of having the camera ON is to increase the personal connection between the different parties. If people are going to the office 2 or 3 days a week, it really doesn’t matter if the online meetings are with the camera ON or OFF. However, if the parties are in different countries and people have never met each other, it makes sense to have a call with the camera ON.
For remote workers, the answer is simple: Camera ON. A key challenge of remote working is achieving the same level of connection as if we were all seated in the office. It is a challenge that is never 100% achieved, and it’s OK to accept defeat in this regard. Therefore, we should try to mitigate this by always having the camera ON during meetings while working in a remote setting. Which makes it incredibly important to have trips or other forms of meeting colleagues physically, a few times a year.
Physically In The Office, But Having An Online Meeting Together?
One of the strangest things that happened when coming back to the office after the pandemic was seeing people having an online call while sitting next to each other. It’s weird. However, it’s practical.
The trick is to find something in between that works for everybody. Scheduling a meeting room is one of the biggest headaches of modern offices, and it’s understandable if people want to avoid the hurdle. However, if the meeting is a team meeting, it makes sense to book a room on a recurring basis and build a culture where that team meeting takes place physically in the meeting room. At the beginning, some colleagues may not like this approach, but it is important to have the engagement of everyone.
Having at least the team meeting take place physically in a room still produces better discussion and exchange of ideas. If the team is working in hybrid mode, we can go back to setting dailies around 15 minutes or less and take the coffee chatter elsewhere.
For other meetings, if people want to have an online call just because it’s more practical, it’s OK. Online meetings are simply more efficient, are done quicker, and people can get back to their work faster. If the participants in a given meeting don’t see each other often, it makes sense to try to have the meeting in person, just to improve the interpersonal link. However, from time to time, an online call is simply done faster.
The Danger Of Parallel Work
If you are like me and take the opportunity to advance on some work while in a call, then welcome to the dangers of inefficiency. I get it; we have so many meetings that we need to parallel our work while on calls with little importance. It is difficult to understand if our presence will be needed, and there is no point in being on a call to speak only briefly about a subject. However, on the other hand, people are expecting that you are listening, and they might ask some questions that could catch you off guard.
Doing work while in a call is a dangerous game that I play, but I try to mitigate its risks. Mitigation techniques include blocking focus time on the calendar and trying to make those moments happen. However, in a very dynamic environment and a project context, things happen and need to move fast, degrading those focus moments by scheduling calls in between because the topic needs to move forward. There is no solution here besides trying to reduce the number of meetings and blocking the calendar. In practice, when moments come where you are expected to deliver an output and need to push forward 3 or 4 different topics, parallel work during your silent moments on a call is doomed to happen. It’s a skill on its own, but I just want to warn the reader: Avoid it. If it becomes a norm, something very wrong is happening with how working days are scheduled.
The consequence is that people may assume you were paying attention and therefore caught all the information shared about a specific task, engagement, or event. While doing parallel work, the details of what is being discussed aren’t being caught, and you might get a surprise later on the road. Meetings are meetings, not podcasts.
Parallel Chats While In a Call
This topic is close to the previous point. It refers to having parallel chats with people who are in the same call, to exchange ideas or feedback on what is happening on the main call. This is one of the wonders of online meetings, where before we present an idea or an action, we can get feedback from some of our peers to understand if we have allies on that idea or not.
However, with great power comes great responsibility.
The goal is to understand different viewpoints on a call without interrupting the speaker. It’s not meant for having a parallel discussion that results in not sharing important insights with the rest of the audience. Otherwise, it will be a waste of time for everyone.
A good example of a parallel chat is to understand if our perception of what is being said is accurate. If someone is proposing idea A or B, and we fear that we lost an episode in a series of events, it would be OK to ask in a parallel chat what that action or suggestion is about. If a set of people isn’t understanding, it's normal to ask the speaker in the main call to clarify. It avoids the meeting from being stopped just because one person is not understanding what is being discussed (even if it's not that big of a deal, honestly).
A bad example of a parallel chat is to have a completely different stream of conversation about the subject matter being addressed at the meeting, without sharing important facts and impacts with everyone on the call. This “hiding cards” case is used by some people to put on an act of having a superior understanding of a topic. However, what is shown in practice is that those colleagues aren’t to be trusted.
Parallel chats are doomed to happen, but it is important to make them short and focused on the topic at hand. If the chat becomes as big as a page of 19th-century poetry, it's better to address the ideas or impressions with everyone on the call.
That’s it. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest it in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Artur
Coming into the office to have meetings online is my pet peeve.