Poor Virtual Meeting Etiquette is Rampant

Poor virtual meeting etiquette hurts your meetings. Don’t be this guy: He was eating chips. Every time he crinkled, crunched, and smacked, Zoom thought he was talking, interrupted the speaker, and flipped *him* into the speaker view. It was distracting, to say the least.

To practice good virtual meeting etiquette, do your homework, send materials ahead of time, show up on time, make sure you and your space are presentable, turn your camera on and your microphone off, and stay engaged. Don’t eat, text, check emails, or get into sidebar chats. Mute yourself if you aren’t talking. Make appropriate eye contact by looking at the camera while actively listening or talking. Read the room and check in with people to make sure they’re following along and getting a chance to have their say. Your coworkers will appreciate it.

It’s really easy to give in to distractions while in a Zoom meeting. Without the context of getting ready for work every day and the ease of just walking down the hall to your computer to join a Zoom meeting, we don’t always have the reminders we need to make sure we’re presentable for work. Sitting at home in your sweatpants, it’s much easier to join a meeting unprepared and unpresentable. Add to that the distractions available and the ease with which it seems you can get away with them, and Zoom is a recipe for distracted and disengaged meetings.

The surprising solution is no surprise at all. It’s just to treat your Zoom meetings as if they’re in-person meetings at work and that your co-workers aren’t just on the other end of the internet, but are there live across the table from you. 

Treat your virtual meetings just like real face-to-face meetings with actual people who are sitting across the table from you. If you go in with this mindset, you can avoid so many of the embarrassing things that seem to be happening routinely in virtual meetings. What does this mean?

Virtual Meeting Etiquette is Just Like Face-to-Face

Do Your Homework

Know who’s going to be in the meeting and who they are. If they’re people you don’t know, look for commonalities: schools attended, common connections, or companies you’ve worked for. Find opportunities to build rapport at the beginning of the meeting. 

Know what the meeting is going to be about. If there are things that other people in the meeting know about that you don’t do your research try to inform yourself as best you can before the meeting so that you won’t be on the spot looking clueless should someone ask a question. 

If there were things about the meeting that you know more than the other attendees, send them some materials ahead of time so that they can be clued in as well.

Show Up On Time

Virtual meetings are no different from meetings in your boardroom: showing up on time is a simple matter of respecting other people’s time. You don’t even have the excuse of traffic, so don’t make people wait.

Be Presentable

When you do show up on time make sure you’re presentable. if you wouldn’t be dressed that way at work in the boardroom why would you dress that way to be on camera with a group of coworkers or potential clients? Pay attention to your body language as well. In a meeting wouldn’t you sit up at the table and lean into the conversation? Would you look down and rub your eyes or hold your head in your hands? Would you turn away from the table when your coworkers are talking to you? 

Make sure that you’re well-lit. It’s no good having a camera pointed at you if you’re hidden in the shadows or backlit like the subject of an interrogation. Read some articles or watch some videos about proper lighting techniques for video. It’s pretty simple and inexpensive to set up decent lighting to help you look your best. It may take some adjustment and some experimentation, but your lighting makes all the difference in how you show up on video. 

Stay Engaged

Few things in a meeting are more annoying than speaking to someone who is not listening. Stay engaged in the meeting. Try to make it obvious that you’re paying attention. That means no eating, no texting or checking emails, and no sidebar chats.  These things distract you from what the speaker is saying. If your camera is on, it also seems to anyone seeing you on the screen that you’re not paying attention. Like the guy with the chips, there are some circumstances where the sounds of your activity (like crinkling a bag, crunching chips, or typing on a keyboard) make it even more intrusive. In the worst case, your noises may disrupt other speakers by making the platform mistakenly highlight you as a speaker.

Read The Room

Staying engaged and seeing if everyone else is engaged is harder in a virtual meeting than in person. That’s one reason people think they can get away with things they wouldn’t consider in the boardroom. It also makes it even more important for you, as the leader or current speaker of your meeting, to check in with your audience and make sure they’re still following along. Stop sometimes and ask if there are any questions. Make sure everyone’s still with you. Help others stay engaged by speaking to them specifically, asking them questions, and allowing them a chance to speak, too.

Virtual Meeting Etiquette Differences

Clean Your Background

The same principle of being presentable applies to your workspace. Everything your camera can see, your co-workers can see as well. Don’t rely on a virtual background to hide the mess behind you. If you’d be embarrassed to have a pile of messy papers on your desk at work, maybe you should think about the pile of dirty laundry on the bed behind you in your virtual meeting. 

Turn Your Camera On

Plan to be seen in your meeting. The whole point of having a virtual meeting is to create, as much as possible, the face-to-face engagement of a meeting around a table at work. Whether it’s because of the covid-19 pandemic or because you have a distributed team or because you’re talking to clients on the opposite coast, virtual meetings provide an opportunity for low-cost and easier-to-schedule face-to-face interaction. So turn your camera on. We’ve all seen studies showing how much communication occurs at a nonverbal level. Much of that comes through observation of facial expressions and body language. If you don’t turn your camera on you’re depriving your coworkers of the opportunity to understand you better. Besides, it’s simply a matter of respect. If you can see them, you should let them see you.

Make Eye Contact 

One of the telltale signs that someone is paying attention to you is that they’re looking at you when you speak. In a virtual meeting, this doesn’t happen naturally. You have to make a mental shift to look at the camera, not the screen. If you’re looking at the screen and the camera is above or off to one side, then to the other attendees, it looks like you’re looking away. By looking directly at the camera lens while actively listening or talking, you can give them the impression that you’re making eye contact. This may feel unnatural to you, but it feels more natural to the people you’re speaking or listening to. 

Remember You’re On Camera

Another story of embarrassment in a Zoom meeting involved one participant who didn’t realize his camera was on. No doubt he intended only to be on audio because he showed up without a shirt on. Every time he spoke, his co-workers were treated to a view of his well-aged chest and belly. In such an awkward situation, sadly, no one dared to tell him. The meeting went on for 90 minutes with him oblivious and everyone else embarrassed to their core. This could never have happened if he were physically at work. It could easily have been avoided if he treated his virtual meetings as if he *was* physically at work.

Mute Your Microphone

It’s impossible to have a sidebar conversation in a virtual meeting like Zoom or Microsoft teams because there’s only one channel for people to be talking. The system doesn’t lend itself to allowing more than one person to talk to each other like you could in a conference room. There, proximity can help control which message you’re hearing and who can hear you. On Zoom, it’s all or none. This also means that if you make any sounds, Zoom assumes you’re speaking. 

What’s the danger in that? Whenever you make a noise, your picture will pop up for anyone in speaker view or be highlighted in the gallery view. I heard one embarrassing story from a Zoom meeting with many attendees. One person was experiencing some gastrointestinal upset. Unfortunately, they did not place their microphone on mute. Not only did all the other attendees get to hear their loud and repeated episodes of gas, but to add insult to embarrassment, their picture lit up in the middle of thirty co-workers’ screens to accompany the sound.

It’s not just such things that disrupt Zoom meetings. Eating, drumming your fingers on the table, and typing, as well as dogs and children in the background, are all distracting sounds. They can interrupt another speaker, drawing everyone’s attention away from them and onto you. Do everyone a favor and place yourself on mute when you’re not talking. Train yourself to check whether you’re on mute before you speak. Otherwise, you’ll trigger a chorus of “you’re on mute” from your team. 

Final Thoughts

Good etiquette is good etiquette, whether in person or over the internet. Take these tips to heart when you’re in your next virtual meeting. Your co-workers will thank you, and you may avoid some embarrassment. Just remember that when you’re on Zoom or in a meeting on Microsoft Teams, you’re at work. If you wouldn’t do it in the boardroom, don’t do it in front of the camera either.