[hospadam]

Anecdotally, it's typically the people in the room who are either a) late to the meeting or b) go off on tangents or c) cause the meeting to overrun. There are lots of good and bad things about remote workers... but being a hamper on meetings shouldn't be one of them.

If you have 20 people in the office - and 1 remote worker - your conference times should be at the preferred time of the 20.

[smackfu]

Yeah, I agree. In my experience, the biggest problem with remote people on the phone is that they are actually doing other work during the call and being productive, so if you don't make it clear a question is aimed at them, they might miss it.

[starik36]

They should be, but they are not. And don't get me started on the ensuing hell if you are trying to share your desktop via WebEx or Lync.

My favorite exchange at the meeting couple of weeks ago (with a remote sales rep).

Meeting organizer: Just press the Start button and then type... Sales Rep: I don't see any Start button.

This went on for 5 minutes with 20 people in the meeting waiting around. Turned out, sales rep got a new Windows 8 laptop - no Start button.

[danielweber]

Ugh. Biz people can be really bad at this, because they think everyone has Powerpoint.

Once when I was remote, I specifically arranged before the meeting with one coworker to set up a kibbutz session (kibbutz is an expect-script that works a lot like screen, and screen may well have worked, too) showing my terminal, and she was hooked up to the projector, so I could visually walk everyone through my code.