Quarantine Life: The WebEx
Picture by Choikwangmo9 via Wikimedia Commons
Scene: various home office spaces in multiple residences throughout the country.
Several employees of a Fortune 500 company on a 9 a.m. web conference to discuss Random Business Thing. Scheduled duration: 30 minutes.
9:00: 5 of 7 participants are on the line. Quarantine and weather-related small talk.
9:02: 6 of 7 participants are on the line, including one VP.
VP: “So it looks like we are just waiting on Senior VP to join.” Chat between Participant A and VP on project unrelated to subject of call.
9:03: Senior VP is on the line. “Can you hear me?” Assurances “yes, we can hear you fine” simultaneously with “Can everyone hear me ok?” followed by round robin of “what was that?” “Oh, no, go ahead.” “No, what were you going to say?” “I was just saying I can hear you.”
9:05: Discussion of Random Business Thing begins. Participant A is taking notes.
9:06: Senior VP: “Hold on…Participant A, can you share your screen so we can see your notes? Can you share your screen?”
Participant A: “OK…can everyone see?”
Everyone: “No.”
Participant A: “Oops, sorry, clicked the wrong thing… there we go… oh no wait, sorry, wrong screen, that’s my email, ha ha. OK, there. Can everyone see?”
5 out of 6 people: “Yep.”
Participant B: “No, it’s just a black screen for me.” (Various suggestions made of what Participant B is doing wrong.) “Oh, there we go.” Discussion resumes.
9:08: Dog barking. Someone yells “SHUT UP!” Participant C: “Ope, sorry about that… my dog… thought I was on mute.” Discussion resumes.
9:09: Senior VP, interrupting VP: “Hold on, hold on, sorry. Just one second. Participant A, I love that you are taking notes for us, I like that you are trying to get everyone’s thoughts down, but how about instead of a narrative form, you create a table there, so we can keep the ideas and next steps organized?” Participant A creates table, per instruction. Senior VP: “Sorry VP, go ahead.”
9:10: Participant E disappears from call.
9:11: Discussion resumes. VP: “Wait, what is this table for? I’m not understanding why we are making this a table. Does each idea go on a line and then the columns are for…or are the ideas each to be a header for its own column?”
9:12 through 9:20: VP and Senior VP have a lively back and forth about the merits of the table vs. the narrative form of notes for this informal brainstorming meeting, the results of which are not to be presented anywhere.
Senior VP: “I’m just trying, as SENIOR VP, to steer this meeting toward actionable steps as opposed to just a list of thoughts that- ”
VP interrupts: “No, yeah, no I get that, ok…”
Senior VP talks louder “…but if you don’t like it and want to do it another way, that’s fine.”
VP: “No, no, go ahead. I just didn’t-”
9:20: Discussion resumes. Two of the participants have yet to speak.
9:21: VP disappears from call. Unclear if mini-tantrum or connectivity issue. Senior VP does not or pretends not to notice.
9:23: VP returns to call.
9:24: Senior VP calls on Participant D: “Participant D, not to put you on the spot but…” (proceeds to put Participant D on the spot.)
Silence.
Silence.
“You’re on mute Participant D. Unmute yourself.”
Participant D: “Sorry, sorry, I was on mute (begins to give thoughts, gets through 20 seconds before interruption by VP.)
VP: “I think- I think- I think…” (repeated until Participant D yields the floor): “I think that’s a really interesting idea, but I don’t really see how… (proceeds to dismiss idea entirely.)
Senior VP: “Well, I think what she is saying is…” (repeats Participant D’s idea nearly verbatim).
9:27: VP: “Did we lose Participant E?”
Senior VP: “I think so. I’m going to have to jump as well, I have a bigger call to get to at 9:30. So, let’s recap. (Reads Participant A’s table aloud.)
9:28: Participant C: “Participant E just pinged me. She lost VPN.”
VP: “OK, I’ll be sure she gets the notes. Maybe they’ll be helpful to her. Are we done, then?”
Senior VP: “Yes, we’re done. One more thing I want to add though….” (discusses time keeping and other administrative matters.)
9:36: Call ends.
Total time spent discussing Random Business Thing: 9 minutes.
This was funny, in an OMG kind of way. Maybe it’s because we’re more used to this sort of thing, but my Zoom meetings haven’t been this bad. I have one very morning that has a very formal structure. But even the faculty meetings have been OK. And, TBH, it seems like at least half the purpose of online meetings it to make sure everyone is OK.
Of course, we don’t have any deans or higher ups in our meetings so far. That might change things.Report
Another purpose of those meetings is to demonstrate that “hey, I’m actually really working and not just eating bon bons.”
(It’s true, by the way, that I’m actually really working. I don’t even blog during the work day unless I’m taking vacation days, as I did a couple weeks ago. Of course, I’m very grateful to be in a position to do this. I realize others don’t have the option, either to take vacation days or to work from home.)Report
My wife leads a lot of meetings, and with the current cruelty, leads a lot of meeting online. Whether Zoom or some other system (and each college uses its own and will. not. be. told. what. to. use!) they all seem to take the same form, which is mostly a check in and a collective bitch session.
But, she is pretty good at roping them in. All while cats wrap themselves around peoples heads, dogs bark, children scream, people reposition cameras to best show off their living rooms, and I am wandering aimlessly in the background.Report
My employer has a long-standing culture of online meetings (often to the point of minor comedy – I’ve been in online meetings with attendees who would all be within line of sight of one another if they all stood up and looked over their cubicle dividers).
Fortunately we don’t, as a rule, use video in our meetings. Nobody need know how many of their colleagues have shirts on.Report
Yeah, teleconferencing/web conferencing isn’t new to us either – we have a lot of remote employees around the country, and I’m one of them. We have two 2 corporate headquarters, one in the east and one in the northern midwest, and both of them are closed right now and so there are now dozens or hundreds more of us working from home. Part of the problem is variously bad internet connections and those of us who are used to doing the web conferences from conference rooms where someone else runs the equipment.
Fortunately, our server does not seem able to handle the load if everyone has their cameras on, so we mostly keep them off. Which is good for me because I haven’t brushed my hair in weeks.Report
In my (very limited, even now) experience, Zoom seems to do a better job handling video than WebEx. I’m not sure why (or even whether) that’s true. My own computer at home doesn’t have a webcam anyway, so I’m off the hook.Report
25+ years ago when I was writing prototype software that got used for experiments with internet meetings, one of the things that jumped out in some of them was the potential benefit of having a tablet-like device to provide a shared view of the document(s) being discussed so that everyone knew we were on page 13 and talking about the second paragraph. This was suggested even for face-to-face meetings of the group in a single conference room.
In a meeting of peers, anyone could move the largish red dot that was the pointer. It was amusing to watch the single solid dot turn into two flickering dots in different places when two people insisted on moving it to different locations and refused to release their mouse buttons until they “won”.Report
In my world, the funniest thing is a “brainstorming” call with an SVP. In my corporate sphere:
SVP: says a thing… introduces VP “Chief of Staff”
VP CoS: says scripted thing planned by SVP, hands off to Other VP [who at least has a Line of Business charter]
Other VP: says more scripted things to set-up the guy who knows what he’s talking about:
Director: says stuff that explains SVP, VP, Other VP, things – with charts and graphics.
SVP: closes meeting with “Call To Action” to do 3 things that we do anyways, but now we have to document them as a “Call To Action” fulfillment items.
Percent innovation with “Call To Action”: 0%
Percent added to overhead: 10%
Net Gain for Doing the Actions we’re already doing: -10%
SVP, VP CoS, and Other VP tout bold leadership to C-suite… and have the Call-to-Action lists to prove it.Report
I wrote this to mirror almost exactly the meeting I had yesterday. The VP/SVP sniping at each other over the format of the meeting notes was a thing to behold.
In the end, we had no action items.Report
Yes, I believe you… I’m agog that an SVP/VP would do that… would never happen in our hierarchy… I mean, not with the “others” present.Report
I’ve been working semi-remotely (i.e. with a nationally distributed team) for years. We are thus pretty good at video meetings. we have added weekly standing meetings to drink coffee and show off our pets together which we didn’t have before.
That said, the federal space is Zoom-lite at the moment owing to the FBI security warnings. Got a second email today in fact about how our IT folks will be actively removing downloaded Zoom plug ins and blocking the web client for GFE. So kludgy Web-Ex it is I guess.Report
Fortunately, the video meetings at my company go somewhat better than this. We use our own software product (recall I work for {bigtech}), so tech issues are rarely a problem. We’re all using the same thing. We use it often. Our calendar and email infrastructure is integrated with it.
One feature I love is I can turn off my camera, since I don’t really fully engage in my normal grooming behavior from home. Plus, the “mute” button is easy to find.
Anyway, I don’t mind it. Working from home is pretty okay so far, at least for me.Report
Note, this seems like a helpful service to get us through these trying times: https://www.sweetfarm.org/goat-2-meetingReport
That’s brilliant!Report
The sad thing is that our in-person meetings were pretty much just as dysfunctional, in somewhat different ways.
As someone who spent half his working life in meetings, I absolutely detest them.Report
What I always hated was meeting with a half-dozen in one place, and another set remote. With the whole thing on confrence call. Two whole groups talking over each other and you could hear whispering in the background half the time.Report
“VP: “I think- I think- I think…” (repeated until Participant D yields the floor)”
I’ve been thinking about this, and it seems to me that this is actually an important thing about not-in-person communication; that overtalking is a lot harder when you can’t physically intimidate someone into shutting up. You can still do it but it’s a lot more obvious that you’re grabbing the mike, as opposed to just being a big threatening dude with a loud voice and the other person is intimidated into giving up and letting you think “I’m not being rude, obviously she realized I was right, otherwise why did she stop talking?”Report