What I Love...and What I Hate.. about Video Conferencing

As a high-tech exec for BabbleLabs, I already did a lot of group calls, but then COVID-19 and “shelter in place” came along. Now I spend much of every working day in video conferences. Here's an unfiltered view of what works well, and what sucks:

1. Equalize the group. I’m one of those people who naturally talks a fair bit in conference calls, both because I have plenty of opinions and because my position tends to push me to the front. But I’m aware that communication in a conference is a bit of a “zero sum game” – if one person talks a lot, then others don’t. And that means important points of view are downplayed or missed entirely. This is especially true for organizations where part of the team is centrally located, participating in the conversation as a physical group, and part of the team is distributed across remote locations. I’ve noticed that the people together tend to dominate the conversation, forgetting the remote participants – they just get to listen. A conference call, especially a call where there is no physical conference room for the “core group,” levels the playing field. It means that each connection has a more equal chance of getting a word in, in part because these conference groups adopt mechanisms, sometimes formal, sometimes ad hoc, to ensure participation. While imperfect, it does hold some promise to enfranchise remote workers, people with less formal authority or tenure in the organization. I believe it creates a healthier group dynamic and leverages the full strength of the organization more completely.
2. Laptop video gives a good view: When I participate in a video conference, I really rely on the video feed, especially the video feed from laptop cameras, to get me closer to the individuals. While this video is neither as convenient nor as high resolution as being in the same room, it is a bit better than just getting an audio feed. I typically switch between the “gallery view” which shows everyone on the screen at the same time, and the “speaker focus view” that shows just the speaker. Laptop video isn’t a cure-all, but it does allow some assessment of body language and allows some number of other visual cues to improve understanding of the nuances.
3. Sharing documents works:  Even in face-to-face meetings, we have long shared documents on a common screen, but video conference document sharing works pretty reliably across all conference bridge types, and offers quite rapid switching among participants. I think we can get more data, more quickly than we typically did in the days of “passing the HDMI cable around the room.”
4. Span time-zones: Recently we’ve all been coping with the massive transition to working from home, but we have long had to deal with teams spread out in time and space. It has been particularly challenging to effectively integrate people in Europe and Asia into conversations with North American teams. Decent video conferencing, both the technology and our improved awareness of how to make it work, makes conferences outside the core work hours more feasible. While these meetings do impinge on people’s personal time, the fact that we can get in and out of a meeting quickly makes calls in the early morning and through the evening possible. And internationally connected teams do have stronger common sense of mission, higher productivity and better leveraging of diverse skills around the globe.
5. Efficient meetings: Video conferences are often short, productive meetings. If we set aside some of the serious issues with call logistics and audio – as explored below – conferences can be quite quick and to the point. I think there are three reasons for this. First, it is easy to get in and out of a conference call – no gathering your materials and finding the right room and no fumbling around to print the documents you’re going to need. I can shave a few minutes off the beginning and end of each meeting window because I can transition between meetings fast. Second, the format encourages more uniform agreement on the agenda, and fewer distracting side conversations that often take meetings off-track. (The flip side is that video conferences often don’t work so well for brainstorming, I’ve found.) Third, for better or for worse we don’t do as much small talk. I think people get down to work more quickly, and find other venues for catching up with close colleagues. It does save time, but it can create a social vacuum where people start to feel out of touch on the human side

So that sounds encouraging, but there are also a set of video conference effects that I really hate. 

1. Ease of distraction: Having a laptop open is a terrible temptation – a temptation to monitor email, check chat, put the finishing touches on a document, launch another compute job or monitor Facebook. Of course, we all did some of this when we just brought our phones or computers to conventional meetings, but the video conferencing creates even less peer accountability. We can waste a lot of time throwing together the perfect document to share or digging around for the exact date of that email that came up in discussion. Of course, we each have different levels of engagement required in meetings, and this has long been true. (I remember going to business meetings in Japan early in my career, where very senior people attended the meeting because it was appropriate for their level, but they were not expected to actually stay awake for the whole time, especially if the meeting was in English).
2. Poor video resolution: Document sharing is great, but eye charts are not. We are beset by two problems. On one hand, people presenting documents sometimes fail to appreciate the minimum necessary fonts to make a document legible, so we get charts and graphs and bullets that defy understanding. Lots of time is wasted calling for more zoom, or font size changes, or focus on the right part of the spreadsheet. On top of that, laptop screen real estate is at a premium. Ideally we want a clear video of the speaker, an overview of the group, lots of real estate for the shared documents, extra space to see the conferencing controls, and whatever other documents or tools we need (or are tempted) to consult on the side. There is no perfect screen layout and certainly not enough pixels to do the job. If for those of us who have added an extended display (or even two), getting all the visual information we need, at sufficient resolution, is hard.
3. It's unsociable: The flip side of the drive for efficiency in meetings is the simple fact that video conferences are not great for small talk. Whispering to your neighbor is impossible and attempting a side conversation is rude. You can typically use chat as a private side channel but it’s hardly a satisfying way to maintain or build one-on-one relationships. At BabbleLabs, we now have twice-weekly all-hands conference calls to check in, share news and build some team spirit, but the dynamic is not nearly as easy and light as in a face-to-face meeting.
4. Conversation barge-in fails: Every human learns early in childhood how to hold a conversation. We quickly develop intuitive understanding of when and how to break into an on-going conversation, delicately sensing the tiny pauses in the speech of others that allow us to slide in politely. Similarly, we listen and watch others to know when they want to speak and to yield the floor gracefully to give others a chance to participate. Three factors make this much tougher in conference calls. First, more people in a conversation means more competition for speaking time. Second, not being in the same room means a loss of the auditory and visual cues on when someone is pausing and on who wants to speak. Third, time lags mean that a speaking pause may be filled before everyone gets a chance to barge in. Several people will barge in at the same time, then back-off with awkward pauses and apologies. Conference calls, even good video conferences, suffer from all three challenges. A delicate back and forth among multiple people requires extra delays, extra deference and sometimes formal protocols to identify next speakers. Even so, more aggressive speakers will tend to dominate the dialogue, and more reticent speakers may not get a fair share of attention. This often counteracts the benefit of equalizing the group, and is particularly rough on individuals who pride themselves on their politeness (quite often women, younger team members and people from non-US cultural backgrounds).
5. Lousy audio: We value seeing our colleagues in video conferences, but most of the real, live information transfer is through the spoken word. After all, we can get a lot done in a conference with audio and no video, but a conference with video and no audio would be a disaster! We are so sensitive to squeezing the last drop of understanding from speech that any impairment in the quality of the speech significantly degrades the productivity of the whole meeting. Not only does bad audio directly hurt comprehension, but even marginal audio forces participants to devote all their energy to comprehension, leading to fatigue, dissatisfaction and opportunity to concentrate on the larger issues of the meeting. Bad audio comes in lots of forms: source noise like crying babies, barking dogs, road noise, loud typing and the leaf blower outside, heavy room reverberation and echos, like faint “far-field” voice pickup and packet loss and other disruption of the audio signal inside the network. An especially annoying set of audio issues often happens on conference startup – connecting multiple devices from the same room (multiple participants or one participant with laptop and phone) creates complex feedback loops for the conference and torments everyone with heavy echoes and audio howling. I have routinely lost ten minutes at the start of a conference getting people to find and turn-off the extraneous speakers and microphones responsible. Audio quality is one of the biggest determinants of the overall productivity of a conference call.

Conference calls are a large and growing part of the professional life of many of us. Anything we can do to improve the effectiveness and to reduce the frustration and strain would be a boon to our personal effectiveness and the productivity of our teams. We need to reduce the impact of the bad, and further develop the positives, if we’re going to thrive in a conferenced world. BabbleLabs is focused on this, especially on curing the problems of lousy audio. We build sophisticated software that runs on existing laptops, phones and other conference infrastructure that dramatically reduces noise, reverberation, feedback and packet loss for better comprehension, lower cognitive load and easier conference set-up. We’re deeply invested in transforming the speech experience in conferencing to make everyone’s life in this stressful time, just a bit better. Come take a look at what we're doing at BabbleLabs to change conferencing forever: