Video calls shut my brain down
Honestly there's very little good about video calls. I would prefer In-Person ideally, but if that is not possible, it is always more productive to just use slack or email. Or just a short audio call.
Honestly there's very little good about video calls. I would prefer In-Person ideally, but if that is not possible, it is always more productive to just use slack or email. Or just a short audio call.
I love working from home more these days, but those days I do go into the office I find that meetings are way more engaging and productive. Being face-to-face with folks it's just much harder to disengage and focus attention elsewhere.
Most meetings can (and in my opinion should) be emails or chat messages. My rule is that I only go to meetings where there is a demonstration of some kind that cant be sent in an email, or cake.
"People think there is more social connection.. ..but we found the exact opposite. So we found in the virtual condition, people are looking significantly more at their partner, almost double."
If anything, the video suggests video calls are problematic because individuals focus too much on being presentable and looking at their conference partners, rather than putting their focus on the actual activity. Quite the opposite of tuning out deliberately (even if this is still possible).
1 person gets to talk as long as they dont get interrupted or leave a long enough gap for other folks to speak up.
its like talking but with a 5 second latency.
so what ends up happening is people dont like to be rude, so they dont speak up unless theres a long gap of silence.
but gaps dont happen because usually 1-2 people hoard the discussion, you know the type who never pause between sentences and drone on and on.
in real life those people would be sidelined because people look away and have side conversations. but in a virtual meeting these people hijack every conversation for the entire hour
Not sure if I'm the problem or the tech.
You, as an individual, can also deploy several redirection techniques to shut those people down in either virtual meetings or in-person meetings.
Tacit approval is either given by non-verbal acknowledgement (looking at them), vocalized agreement, e.g. "uhuh", "yeah", "and then what happened?", or by silence.
I have an internal count that I do when someone starts talking and I become conscious of the interlocutor: "Hey, I need to interject, you raise a valid point about X but I have a question around it, <name of other participant>, what do you think of <completely unrelated subject>?"
And you repeat the "Hey, I need to interject,hey, I have a question, Hey, I need to interject" until the other person stops long enough.
Some days, you just have to be firm and get into the conversation.
You can also just butt in with "Hey, that's interesting but it sounds like we are lost in the technical weeds, could we please take this offline or move it to a different meeting?" If the person running the meeting doesn't pick up on that, they shouldn't be running the meeting.
I also like to drop in "Hey, I have to cut this short, I've got another meeting I need to run too, can we move this along?"
People are very unaware when talking on the phone or in a video meeting. Like literally they become deaf. After three or four attempts of interjecting in a very short period of time of just 15 seconds or so, if the person isn't listening, I've just started talking directly to the meeting running directly over them and saying "we need to move on. Can you mute him?" It might be considered rude, but it's what everyone is thinking.
What you are describing may be a better way to hold a generic video meeting but it does really highlight how bad video calls are for brainstorming in particular. What you are describing would be terrible for that.
I’d argue that it’s no different from in-person unless you ban laptops and cell phones from the meeting.
This is as true in in-person meetings where people are allowed to bring in their laptops. It was a common problem pre-pandemic, and I'd often criticize meeting organizers for having a poor meeting format (e.g. team meeting every week or two weeks with unclear agendas, or having agenda items where each item only involves 1-3 people, but since it's a different set of 1-3 people for each agenda item, everyone is forced to be present for the whole meeting, etc).
I find working together on a document keeps attendees focused (along with a few tips/tricks like polling individuals, aligning current discussion with others' previously stated ideas and writing what people say as verbatim as possible)
Analog voice service is limited to 300–3,300 Hz, and being analog, subject to line noise/static/etc. About the only constant with it was that people would hold handsets up to their heads that were purpose-built, and reliably had a decent minimal level of quality.
With IP-based conferencing, you get as good as the worst link. A lot of people use built-in microphones on their laptops in a noisy room, and so the audio sounds like garbage. The people with consistently high quality have gaming-style headsets (or really, any >$100 headset). There's a couple people I talk with that have (inexpensive) studio-style microphones on boom arms, and they sound phenomenal.
Of course it could be you. If you're listening using garbage headphones or the built-in speakers in your laptop, it doesn't really matter how great other people's microphones are.
You're clearly misremembering the quality of analog phone lines; at their worst they're better than a bad IP-based service, but at their best they are blown out of the water by people that put even a modicum of effort into their setup.
One quick "hack" is to do your conferencing on a box connected to your router via Ethernet (or through switches). It can help bad connection paths but it's not a panacea. Another is if you have a slow internet connection, try to get a router with QoS and apply that to prioritize your VoIP packets.
Unfortunately other than cellular standards, there's no good way way to easily get a low latency, low jitter connection as most packet switching is optimized around throughput. Personally we use Zoom at work and I know the Zoom edge has low jitter to me so if anyone needs to VC me at work, they should get "as good as it gets". For my personal VC needs I ended up using Matrix and hosting a TURN server in a DC that peers directly with my ISP. Folks in my area can call me on it through WebRTC and get latency on the 3-6ms range.