Do Zoom meetings disrupt your team’s workflows?
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If I don’t need to be on camera for a meeting or a one-on-one with one of my team members, I make sure that I’m walking around the house or sitting down outside for it. I try to do something to make sure that I don’t sit too long in one spot and get too used to it. It requires a greater conscious effort to deal with the work-life balance.
You can meet 15 people in 30 minutes or less by just walking down a hallway. That would take you three weeks to do remotely. It did take me three weeks to connect with all the folks I needed to. And you have to do it in a more formal way—you feel like you should have an agenda because you're on a Zoom call taking up their time. It’s like you need to have a talk track prepared for introducing yourself and trying to really understand and connect the dots of how everybody works together. Because they're not sitting together, you don't have facial recognition as easily.
And in terms of being able to get up to speed quickly and get to know who your core business partners are, you lose some of that prioritization as well, because everybody already has a stack of standing Zoom meetings that they're constantly trying to fit other things around. It stalls relationship building and it stalls integration into the company culture.
Meetings are a big pet peeve of mine. A lot of people started conducting them as support forums because they wanted to over-communicate. They didn't want to let anyone go and wanted to make sure everyone heard the message. But at that point, having 50-70 people on a status call is not going to help. It is not a status call, it is a support forum. People need help and at that point, Slack or any other asynchronous messaging is going to be much more efficient.
We've gone through a different way of working where if you're not careful, you end up with back-to-back Zoom meetings. You have no chance to actually get any work done because all you do is you're jumping from one meeting to another, with barely any time to take a break or walk around. I'm sure many other people have had times where your back's aching because you haven't moved enough and haven't walked around the room.
And there are two schools of thought: those who don't really care if they have Zoom meetings all day and then turn off. And then there are those who think, "I need to get that work done." And they'll carry on into the evening just trying to get the work done. We've got to find a balance.