Zoom meetings are getting tedious

Preface

I’ve always been a huge advocate for remote working, and making sure that the team that I’ve grown around me can work unhindered as much as possible to get the best out of them, and them the best out of me. We’ve been using Zoom as a company for a very long time, using it before the pandemic really hit for meetings with customers, and staff when they were at home. (We did use Slack calls for internal meetings, but they were flaky at times!).

Since the pandemic, we’ve been working from home pretty much full time, and with that we’ve been making extensive use of Zoom for meetings with the team, the company and more broadly clients as well.

I’ve had a taste of the “old times”

Recently, we had one of the team’s from the company in the office for a sprint retrospective and planning session and it was great. The energy was high, the concentration remained throughout, and people were excited. Albeit a lot of this excitement might be tied to the fact that 60% of the team hadn’t been in the office before, or met each other in person, but it was the most productive meeting I’ve been in with that number of people for a long time.

This is what it used to be like. Having as much of the team onsite in person for a planning session, bouncing ideas off each other and being suitably energetic about the future project plans and the previous sprint that we smashed. But this isn’t the future either…

What is the future?

I don’t want to drag the team to the office for any and all meetings. I don’t want to sit at home and do all meetings remotely if there are some of the team in the office on a set day each week. We’re working on our return to office plan, and it’ll strike a very good balance between office and home working. Developers want to get their head down, at home, and work unhindered. Juniors like to be surrounded by knowledgeable people to ask for help. I like to make sure we’re making best use of time in meetings or working.

Zoom meetings have become tedious and tiring when ran back to back. So the future, is a balance between all of the above. Big meetings in person, really pushing creativity within the team. Small meetings, remotely, when they fit in around the developers work schedules. Hopefully overtime, the environment that comes with working in an office will entice a few team members to want to work more in the office than not.

But until then, I’ll be doing less lengthy Zoom meetings. Running shorter meetings (45 mins or so max) to enable some decompression time between meetings. Clawing back some of my own time and flexibiltiy that is automatically experienced with in-person meetings. For some reason, I feel worse being late to an internal Zoom meeting, than I do to an in-person meeting - it’s weird.