Jeff Berg, a Webby Award winning designer, has a thoughtful and valuable Medium post on the etiquette of virtual meetings, especially the kind many of us in the quarantine age now have every day on video conferencing systems like Zoom. Berg brings his long experience as a UX designer to bear on what is, for most (all?) of us, an incredibly awkward and frustrating way of having meetings. With the web camera on, we feel like we're onstage, artificially emoting for an audience, but Berg says what we're really doing is grasping at a new kind of etiquette:
For virtual meeting spaces, acknowledging, understanding, and practicing new etiquette is not a wasteful formality, but is a formalization for defining space, rules of engagement, and a process for progressing discourse. There is nothing fake about utilizing the tool-sets we have available to us for optimizing communication. Being aware of your physical self in a virtual space as seen by others in that virtual space will maximize your experience and your own benefits from the interactions you have.
Key to Berg's experience with UX design, as longtime readers will know, is once creating masterpiece works of immersive art in Second Life under his avatar name, AM Radio. These art installations -- quiet, nostalgic, meditative -- tended to attract positive, impromptu conversations around them. Jeff tells me his experience as AM Radio was integral to the advice he's offering for virtual meetings now:
He believes being AM Radio in Second Life changed his perception of himself in real life, and how he interacted with people in real world settings. This, in turn, made him more aware of the dynamics of real life meetings -- and then, in turn, of the social dynamics in web-based virtual meetings, a collision between the real and virtual.
More from Jeff's post -- I like this point in particular, because I find the "Any other business?" question in video conferencing meetings tends to squash any interesting conversation that was finally getting started. His advice:
I often hear meetings wrapped up quickly with a call for Any Other Business, or a solicitation for final thoughts, as if the final moments of the meeting were up for auction, waiting for the gavel to strike down to declare the meeting and deal closed. In some cases this can be useful, especially in meetings which require decision. However, in many meetings where ideas, choices, and suggestions are the goal, it is best to use the closing of a meeting as a review of the meeting, with a summary of presented information, findings, consensus, and most importantly, actions and expectations people have at the close of the meeting.
Be sure participants close their meeting interface having felt seen and listened to. Even if you have key speaking participants and a large passive audience on the call who won’t have a chance to speak, reviewing the meeting with participants and the meeting minutes will provide participants with the reason for why they participated at all, validating their own emotional commitment and delivering on your social contract of being an active listener.
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