Working remotely and working in a distributed team has become the norm today – it’s very rare to find a team that can afford the luxury of holding meetings in the same room. Moreover, with the widespread introduction of quarantine, face-to-face meetings have become the exception rather than the rule.
For a start, a few sketches, practically from real life.
A rally when everyone is working from home
You have planned a rally with your team, say, to plan a sprint. You send everyone a link to Zoom in advance, and prepare a list of topics for discussion. Five minutes before the rally, you try to start a conference call and find that there is no connection. You check your laptop, then your router – everything seems to be fine, but the connection is not established. Then you realize that your entire building is also in quarantine and actively using the network, so there is very little bandwidth left. You give out wifi from your phone – and finally connect. But… It’s been five, maybe ten minutes into the rally.
Your colleagues are already connected and waiting for you. You start the rally, tell the team about the purpose of the sprint, and start evaluating backlog elements. The first to speak is your backend developer. He explains in detail why the task will take 16 hours of his time, but half of this explanation is not heard by the team. In the background, you can constantly hear a dog barking with a slight wail – because your other colleague, who went to a house out of town for the quarantine period, forgot to turn off the microphone.
After this problem is solved, you continue the discussion, and it’s the frontend developer’s turn. He talks at length and in detail about how he is going to implement the task – but you can hardly hear him either. The reason is that he uses an external microphone on his laptop, which transmits sound, but very indistinctly – instead of speech you hear inaudible muttering.
Add to this the people connected from the phone and in the street, the ubiquitous neighbor with a hole punch and children who want to play with mom / dad, and you get the full picture of the rally.
Large team meeting (townhall)
You have a large team spread out over several towns and need to have a big meeting and talk about the past year’s results and plans for the future. There’s no quarantine yet, so you’re meeting in the office as usual. Your biggest location has a room for 70 people, so the bulk of the team can fit in there. Participants in other cities have gathered at the meeting rooms, and someone has joined in from the floor.
You start the meeting. In your opening remarks, you thank the team for the work they’ve done, saying nice and inspiring words. And at that moment, from the speakers comes the voice of your colleague, who asks his wife to buy bread: as often happens, he did not turn off the microphone and at the most inopportune moment took a phone call.
Having laughed enough, you continue the meeting and reach the questions from the audience. Your remote colleagues feel left out: they can’t hear the questions that the guys from the main location ask, because they are in the same room, where “everything can be heard just fine,” so they don’t use the microphone. As a result, remote colleagues have to guess questions from your answers.
Moreover, you even forgot to ask if they have questions (or did not ask them to write them into the chat) – as a result, the effect of your meeting was much less than expected.
Problems of distributed meetings
- The main problems with distributed rallies are most often summarized as follows:
- Participants don’t hear each other well;
- participants hear background noise too well;
- If one location is a large enough room, questions and remarks “from the room” can usually be heard only by those in the room, but not by the distant participants;
- if one group of participants is in one room and others are in a remote location, the latter are usually given less attention;
- the start of the rally is delayed because the microphone/speaker/camera/screen is not working;
- there is not enough bandwidth for video and sound, as a result everything slows down and people think that they interrupt each other because of delays in voice transmission.
To avoid running into these problems and to have an effective rally, you need to follow a number of simple rules. Most of them are applicable in quarantine conditions, and others will be useful when working in mixed teams, when some people are in the office and some are at home or in other offices.
Distribution of participants by location
First, you need to figure out what type of meeting you have:
- A working meeting, in which participants are relatively evenly distributed across locations (and there aren’t many in each location – up to about 3 people). The same scenario applies to quarantine – in this case, each of the participants is at home.
- A meeting in which the participants are also evenly distributed, but there are many of them in the locations (4 or more).
- A general meeting of a large group (townhall), in which the main group is in one location, and they are joined by several distant participants.
In the first case, it makes sense to conduct the rally entirely through conferencing tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, etc. – In this way you create one working space and a common discussion flow for everyone, each participant sees the others (via video broadcasting or as avatars), without being distracted by extraneous discussions with fellow meeting participants.
If there are a lot of participants in each location (the second case), it makes sense to gather each location in a separate meeting room and organize communication between the rooms. This format allows you to split up for a while if necessary (for example, you can have each group discuss a certain issue and then present it to everyone else). This option of communication is often practiced by online casinos, a lot of wishing for a particular game and at a particular time, the dealer or leader takes the lead and actively interact with each participant in the video game. A side effect of this option is that participants may be distracted by conversations with their neighbors in the location.
In the third case (general meeting), it makes sense to connect remote participants directly from their workplaces without gathering them in rooms.
