Is great videoconferencing possible?

As we all prepare for more remote work with the onset of COVID-19, a big question that comes up is whether we can be as effective collaborating in real time with our coworkers. A big piece of that will inevitably be video conferencing.

As someone who has spent a lot of time on video calls, most recently at PayJoy with teams on 4 different continents, I thought it be useful to share some tips for how best to go about video calls with other small groups or large groups. I should also mention that there is some great research on this topic, including this piece from Nick Morgan and of course howto guides from vendors and the folks at Stanford. But my goal here is to give advice based on real world experience at tech companies.

Small groups and 1:1s: In a small group setting and especially that one on one setting the key really is to recreate the intimacy you get from an in person interaction. I don't mean intimacy in a creepy sense but rather in the very real human sense.

In these situations it's really important to keep your camera on, be in a quiet space, and to make sure you show up on time to show a certain amount of respect for the other people on the call. It's also very important to understand that there may be a latency in the audio and to give people time to respond to your questions in case you are trying to probe or delve deep on a topic. Conversely, I've also found in these situations it is always better to leave a lot more time after they speak / before responding to make sure others feel comfortable completing a thought. By the same token it's important to make sure you leave time at the end to ask if anyone else has anything to say as in a video conference of five you could have one person who hasn't had a chance or felt comfortable to speak.

Finally there should be new norms. It should be OK for someone to leave the video conference early if they are not relevant anymore for the conversation and this should be established as a common rule so people do not take it personally -- however this does make it even more important to have some level of agenda even in these small meetings. It should also be ok for cats and kids to enter and leave meetings.

Large meetings or team all hands: These meetings are frankly the most difficult although they are often the most susceptible to video conferencing. Much of the research recommends an MC or turn-taking which can be useful. I find it ironic that most of the stock images I found for this post are either grandmothers talking to their grandchildren or large internal meetings with a number of other people calling in. In fact is probably better that 100% of people are remote rather than a mix in a large meeting situation. In these situations a lot of the tips above are relevant but need to be accentuated. Here is what I have found:

It is even more important to leave space for people remote to weigh in on a topic especially if some people are in the office. It's also critically important that there is an agenda so people understand when time is short and when time is not short considering we often use physical cues to indicate a level of urgency around moving on from a topic in people off and raise their hand to talk in physical environments. It is useful to have that document up to orient everyone on where you are and it is absolutely OK for people to turn off their video -- with the exception possibly of the speaker. Not everything is relevant to everyone and so it is actually probably OK for people to actually be working on other things while the meeting is happening -- as long as they are on mute. My expectation is that this new push around remote work might actually help people understand that you can actually be more productive when listening in on multiple meetings as long as you know when to focus and when not to focus.

Finally it is very important to have a dedicated note taker to send out meeting notes following these meetings considering you may have had situations where the audio was less clear and you don't want any kinds of misunderstandings. I would say it's probably just as important if not more important to leave 10 to 15 minutes at the end for open Q&A considering there may have been questions that came out of the presentation that people were not comfortable airing in interrupting mode. In fact it's probably better to not field questions throughout a presentation and rather ask for all questions at the end considering the strange dynamics of interrupting on a video conference with high latency.

What have you found works and doesn't work?