How Long to Wait for a Video-Conference Call

I had a very important video-conference call this afternoon but got stuck in traffic and couldn't get on the call until 7 minutes after it started. As the call was a one-on-one with someone, that is much too long to wait. Fortunately the person I needed to talk with stuck around that long and waited for me. We had a great call but I felt miserable for being so tardy and apologized profusely.

This brings up the question in the title of this post. How long should you wait for a video-conference call? If it is just two people, 5 minutes is sufficient. If the person doesn't show up by then, you can easily reschedule. The question becomes much trickier when it is a group call. The easy case is if there are a lot of people and you are not required to present anything. In that case, you can show up at any time. Just be sure to keep your camera off and come into the call muted. This is similar to sneaking in the side door and is perfectly acceptable provided the other people in the call can assume you were in another meeting that ran late.

So what about the cases in between? Realistically you should always do your best to be on-time to meetings. It shows that you value everyone's time. Sometimes that isn't possible and you must be late. In those cases, being 5 minutes late is about as far as you can go. Sometimes the meeting will start without you but if you have to be caught up on items you missed, it wastes other people's time.

I felt really bad about being late to my meeting today and am glad the person I met with could forgive me. At a time when most people can work from home, I felt bad giving the excuse that I got caught in traffic even though that is what happened. Now I just need to make sure I am early to the next meeting we have together.

Mobile Phone Etiquette

I'm in the San Francisco airport waiting for a delayed flight to Salt Lake City. I always try to use this time to do something productive and so I thought I would put together a quick blog entry. I have been wondering what to write about when a flight attendant pulled out her phone and had a quick video call with her husband. It got me thinking about mobile phone etiquette and what behavior is acceptable and what is not. In looking through old blog entries, this is not the first time I have been intrigued by this topic.

Last week I had an experience where I was the one having the video call in public. I was at a restaurant when I got a video call from my 2-year old grandson. Had it been anyone else, I would have politely asked to reschedule the call so I could take it from the privacy of my boat or office. My grandson wouldn't have understood and I knew the call would only last a minute or two. So is it OK to take a video call if you know it is only going to be a few minutes?

I was at dinner with a friend from work and he asked me if I needed to step outside to take the call. Obviously he didn't want to hear my phone call, but he also didn't know it was my grandson. Should that make a difference?

Ultimately every situation is different and we need to be respectful of others when we take phone calls in public. Especially video calls where everyone can hear both sides of the conversation. It is not appropriate to start a video call from a public place like the flight attendant next to me. If someone initiates a call when you are in public, you have the option to decline the call or answer and quickly schedule a return call. And finally if you are in public and it is your 2-year old grandson, just ask forgiveness like I did at the restaurant instead of permission. My friend understood and he knows it is not something I do frequently.

Limit Smartphone, Laptop, and Tablet Usage

Yesterday I got some disturbing news. My oldest daughter recently was hired for a new job but only lasted 4 days. My wife and I assumed there were budget issues and our daughter was let go because of them. Then my wife visited someone associated with the company, which is where my daughter originally found out about the job in the first place. According to our friend, our daughter was let go because of not paying attention in the new hire training because she was spending time on her smartphone. Naturally there are two sides to every story and so my wife called our daughter to see if there was any truth to it. Of course my daughter didn't see it that way as she explained that "she wasn't using her phone any more than anyone else in the training." When I heard that, a buzzer in my head went off, followed by the phrase, "Wrong answer!"

While there may be other reasons why my daughter was let go from her job, her response shows that we could all use a little education on smartphone etiquette. Meetings and training classes can get boring. Trust me, I spend way too much time in them and I am often looking for something else to do. However I find that when I do pull out my phone is exactly the time that I miss some important information that often needs to be repeated and makes an already long meeting last even longer. That means I am being rude to the presenter as well as everyone else in the meeting.

I was ruminating over this thought today when I opened up one of my wife's health magazines and came across an article about how being glued to your gadgets can be bad for you. Northwestern University found that people who were exposed to blue light right before or during dinner felt an increase in hunger. For those that don't know, blue light is the type of light emitted by smartphones, tablets, and laptops. What this means is that our little gadgets are making us more hungry than we really are. No wonder I want to snack every time I sit in front of my laptop.

One anecdotal story does not make a trend but I imagine there are a number of missed opportunities because of being glued to our electronic gadgets. This coupled with the fact that our devices are making us hungrier ought to cause us to pause and think about it before we use them.