To think that people could attend meetings in person?

[Zorilla]

Just that really. Where I work most of us are in most days due to the nature of our job. However, whenever we have project or team meetings, only about 1/3 of the people will go into the meeting room, everyone else joins from their desk over Teams, with camera off.

AIBU to find this irritating? Today we had a team meeting, which is a conversational meeting rather than PowerPoint presentations. I was in the meeting room but only one other person joined me so I ended up just talking to a black screen of faceless people with their microphone off. What is the point?

Ask them to turn their camera on?

Meh 🤷🏻‍♀️ surely the point is the meeting is accessible for everyone, even if they're joining via teams they're still joining and able to join the conversation? It's practical a lot of the time! In my job we're spread all over, without online meetings we'd never get everyone in one place at the same time.

Sometimes meetings for meetings sake can block up your diary too, at least online you can listen and join in when needed and do other work too!

YANBU. I’m sure occasionally people have a reason why they don’t leave their desk but no, if you’re in the office, you attend in person.

That wouldn’t fly in our place, unless you absolutely needed to have your separate screen open to look at something. I take it you don’t have power to insist that people turn up in person.

Could you build in a start time of five minutes past the hour, so that people have no excuse of not having time to go from one meeting to another.

That’s really weird if everyone is in. If that is the case and it’s not a hybrid meeting then just don’t provide a teams link and a meeting room location instead?

If it’s a hybrid meeting then sorry but I agree with your colleagues. I can’t stand hybrid meetings and find it difficult to follow those on line if I’m in the room. That said, I’m deaf so use the captions feature and that might have something to do with it!

Agree, this should be standard. I feel most meetings don't need to be F2F

Na zoom meeting with camera off is the future. Don't need to sit in a meeting room with people even when said room is 2 feet away.

Most meetings are such that you can just listen and contribute when it is your turn. If on a Teams, Zoom or other remote call, you can be doing other work (assuming you can multi-task) instead of sitting there only listening.

I intentionally schedule meetings on days when I am not in the office.

Actually that’s what a lot of our firm does. Teams links aren’t included as standard if it need to be in person or it seems like everyone will be in the office, but a separate link it sent out if someone says they can’t make it in person.

I only attemp purely in-person meetings with a group size of around 4.
Anything bigger, and I go for hybrid as its too hard to make all of those competing diaries work.

I'd think it odd if you're all in the same building anyway but a minor annoyance like this doesn't detract from the wider benefits of hybrid + remote working.

That said, a friend of mine has quite severe social anxiety, she tends to freeze up and goes blank in meetings despite being good at her job. The ability to join the meeting from her desk would allow her to contribute to the meeting without the mental anguish. So all in all this isn't an issue at all!

Attending meetings in person is problematic for people with vulnerable household members or for people who are themselves vulnerable. Some of us haven’t stopped dealing with this crap.

they are also problematic for people with certain allergies.

The last few years were supposed to have helped with this kind of ableist bias, but this is just example 16383621 of how the message did not sink in.

Are you having too many meetings that could have been an email?

I couldn't be arsed turning up in person just because someone doesn't like people being remote. It's a you issue.

Not unreasonable to expect attendance or camera on. But I would question if they were all needed in the meeting at all. Clearly they weren’t all adding value

Unless I've misunderstood the OP it's not about scheduling , the meeting is happening and the people are there in the office but sit and join virtually

I agree that seems very odd

So just to clarify, as PP said, almost everyone is in the office everyday. There is the odd person WFH on any given day. But today for example, everyone was in the office but only 2/6 of us attended in person.

So has it been explained to them that they needed to attend in person? It could just be that they think it’s all optional. But…the very fact that they’re actually in the office and chose to join the meeting on Teams is a bit telling in that they probably either find the meetings incredibly boring or a monumental waste of time (most likely both). So I’d be looking at the reason why and if the meetings need to happen at all. A meeting just for the sake of it or because ‘we always have one on a Thursday morning’ is unproductive and time wasting so as someone else said above, could it have been an email instead? If the meetings need to take place then look at making them shorter or at least more vital/succinct and at the very least a bit more interesting.

No problem at all with people not turning up in person, though I do find it rude when they don't switch their cameras on in that circumstance.

But it sounds like a lot of the staff were actually in the building but couldn't be arsed to leave their desks.

I do this sometimes as my part of the meeting is small ao u can get on with other things at the same time. We have so many pointless meetings 🤦🏼‍♀️

Doe it actually matter as long as they were present? Like is the same as that whole people can’t possibly be working unless I can see them right in front of me working.

So many meetings could just be emails too.

I hate presenteeism as much as anyone but I feel that lately a lot of people shoehorn in justifications that support their own agenda rather than what's honestly better work practice.

I mean, the majority of people would rather roll out of bed at 08:45 and not have to commute but now it's increasingly common to not even have the camera on, which for many just means lounging in the dressing gown and faffing around on the ipad during meetings.

I did this for my MPQC card training. Just wrote down the bits the trainer said would be in the test and spent the rest of the day browsing my phone. Got 100% in the test and even googled a few answers as they couldn't see me lol. Did the same for my 35 hours online CPC training too. Not good really.

Unless I’ve read this wrong the issue here is not people joining online from home, but actually being in the office and not bothering to go into the same meeting room?!

That is both batshit and rude in my opinion OP.

Incredibly odd and rude if people are in the office. I cannot believe people think this is acceptable! I would refuse to run those meetings and go and round up people from their desks.