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by amerkhalid
1838 days ago
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Zoom meetings have made me appreciate in-person meetings so much. It seems phrases like these, "Can you hear me?", "Sorry I was on mute", "You are breaking up", "Sorry can you repeat that", "Sorry my internet connection is bad today", take up way too much time. Then people speaking over each other and you cannot understand anyone at all. I think once a week in-person meetings and rest of week heads down WFH would be a great idea. Or we can do everything in async communication like emails. And no, not Slack. It is even more distracting and should ideally be used only during scheduled meeting in place of Zoom or for emergency situations. |
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Internet quality and speed is a function of a few things, including where people live. I wouldn't want to extrapolate but I've not been finding connectivity to be an issue for internal meetings. Yes, occasionally there are hardware issues (e.g. I had a flaky WiFi chip in my laptop). These may be unfortunate for a particular meeting but tend to get fixed and so "can you hear me?" is definitely not a recurring pattern in my experience.
Sometimes people choose to join video calls from their phone while, for example, walking their dog (a completely acceptable thing culturally). In those instances video and audio quality can be variable; it's up to the individuals to make sensible choices around which meetings are suitable for this sort of thing.
Finally, there's a phone backup, where you can dial into a meeting (audio only) over a phone line. Some people use this if they need to take a meeting from somewhere with particularly bad connectivity. I personally have not needed to use it once in the 15+ months of WFH but I've seen others use it.
People unintentionally speaking over each other was definitely a thing in the beginning, especially in larger meetings. I've been founding it happen less and less over time, as people learned when to pause and we developed better ways to moderate large online meetings. Video makes this much easier compared to audio-only.
Overall, I think I've come to prefer video calls to in-person meetings, at least when _everyone_ joins over video. It'll be interesting to see how well the original, hybrid model (some participants joining in person and some over video) will work.