GitLab offers a nice course about transitioning to remote work. One of the items in their guidelines about online meeting is not having hybrid meetings. This is, all those attending must attend from their own device rather than the meeting room one (see Jabra) precisely for the reasons this feature tries to address.
It does in ways you likely don't understand. At large enterprises with satellite offices, most of us don't want to sit at our desks and annoy our coworkers who are also in-office by taking calls at our desks. That leaves meeting rooms, which are at a premium.
Full single device for everyone would mean either everyone loudly shouting at their desks from within their noise canceling headphones or the company giving everyone an office with a door. As even Google doesn't do this for their employees, this is the next best thing we can do to save the sanity of our coworkers and respect remote colleagues dialing in by including them in a shared room meeting.
I sometimes work out of a WeWork here in Bangalore, and they have these tiny one-person soundproof cubicles for taking calls. All they have inside is a cushioned bench to sit on and a table large enough to hold a 15" laptop.
It's a great idea, IMO. You can fit 10-12 of these in the same space as a regular conference room. This solves exactly the problem you're describing.
> You can fit 10-12 of these in the same space as a regular conference room. This solves exactly the problem you're describing.
So it's kinda like sitting in a conference room, except you're talking to other people via a shitty audio quality with latency, random noise, talking over each other due to not seeing each other. You don't even have the benefit of a more ergonomic personal setup like more monitors. When people are in the office, let them do their meetings in person ...
If your entire team is in the same location, then you should certainly have your meetings in person. It'd be silly to force everyone to join a Meet/Zoom. I'm proposing a solution for situations when that's NOT the case (e.g everyone is fully remote or you have a hybrid team).
When you have a hybrid team, the office people can sit in a conference room (for which this Meet feature will be great) and the remote people will connect remotely ...
I worked for a large company with offices all over the globe where 95% of meetings were online. I worked there for several years and don't remember anyone ever complaining about the setup, even though we were in an open office.
Rules are meant to be broken. I've participated in many meetings where, for one reason or another, some participants couldn't join in person. Making it easier - for them and for us - is a technical challenge, and not something to be decided by an arbitrary rule.
Remote is extreme and is still not the norm. It is easier to baseline on things optimised for remote then relax than try to shoehorn in person into remote which is then doomed to fail.
I worked for a company that was headquartered in London and had satellite offices in Spain and Germany. After we all went remote during the pandemic the EU offices said they felt so much more engaged with the rest of the company because they were no longer disadvantaged by default for not being in HQ and in person bad habits were penalizing them
Its definitely doomed to fail if CEOs want you to think it's doomed.
Your comment is handwavy with words like "feel" and "bad habits". There are real issues with remote work, but there are also ways to mitigate the downsides of it. It's easier for some people to just dismiss the idea entirely and pretend that in-office work is the better alternative without any problems. I have definitely seen that happen in my company and here.
Yes - my response was to the rejection that rules are to be broken.
I have worked there fully remote jobs and the ones that did it best fully leaned into being remote.
There is no hard or fast rule, I've been in a team social where I was the only person remote and it still felt relatively natural. I've done a fully remote follow a recipe and cook at home session which was also pretty fun.
I've also been in places that do the bare minimum of what constitutes remote "oh we use Zoom and screenshare" and dictate to people where everyone is cam off. And the difference is night and day.
I think that a little bit of cargo culting wrt remote etiquette is probably a net good thing because I posit many people still don't know what good looks like.
Personally, it was an eye-opener for me to see what difference the personal contact makes. I now prefer companies which are in-person or hybrid (which doesn't optimize for remote).
It's optimizing for the lowest common denominator. When a majority of the team is present in office, it's silly to downgrade the experience for everyone.
You are right, but sometimes hybrid is just a reality. For us it would be an absolute game changer when you do not have to rush to find an empty meeting room or phone booith.
The meeting room (should) have a much higher quality mic than an attendee's laptop. You want that mic.
Worse, when attendees use their mic, someone in the room asks a question, which remote viewers cannot/do not hear, because it is not picked up by the mic on the laptop. Or they join and don't mute, resulting in feedback loops.
I do feel the need for Google's feature though: the pandemic has meant a reduction in offices, so now we're ending up in "co-working" spaces, which — despite this being the bread and butter of the business — have in my experience alarmingly poor quality meeting rooms. To the extent that those present have given up on them. Literally, we were in one with no cabling. We asked the company for a cable, and they gave us a DP cable, but the room was HDMI. In these situations, yeah, nobody is going to want to waste the time trying to deal with getting the coworking space provider to deliver a quality product, and features like the one here help make up the difference.
I have literally never worked in a place with coworkers who understand VC tech well enough to understand what you're suggesting and who are diligent enough to actually do that. Getting that level of cognizance, over the entire seated body of a conference room, for the entire meeting, is unicorn territory IME.
