In the last post about remote work, we talked about technical difficulties with remote meetings. But even when the tool works perfectly, you might find remote meetings harder than colocated ones.

Maybe it’s harder for you to find your moments to talk and listen to others.

Maybe you cannot see the remote folks very well to judge their reactions.

Or maybe the audio lag means people accidentally talk over each other.

You’re right. You are absolutely noticing these issues more often in remote meetings than colocated meetings.

I have some bad news about why, and you’re really going to hate it, so I recommend getting a cup of tea before you read this next part.

Let’s start with an exercise.

Picture yourself sitting or standing in a meeting room. All of the other members of the meeting are arranged around the table with you. Check all the statements that apply to you.

Great job! We’ll use your results to calculate your caucus score.

What the heck is a caucus score?

A caucus (and specifically an unmoderated caucus) is a type of meeting with no rules about who talks in what order or for how long. Instead folks jump in whenever they have something to say. The caucus probably sounds akin to some of your business meetings: most teams consider this meeting setup ‘not too formal’ and therefore lean on it in some format.

How to calculate your caucus score:

1. Add up all of your checkmarks from part A.
2. Add to this the number of statements you did not check from part B.

The maximum score is 16. The minimum score is 0.

You caucus score describes how likely you are to have a positive, productive experience contributing to a caucus-style meeting.

You’re questioning remote work because you’ve had more problems with remote meetings than colocated meetings. In colocated meetings, you have few qualms about taking the speaking floor and you usually have a positive experience when you do so. In remote meetings, you’ve had more trouble, and you’d like it to not be that way.

I have to bear some bad news: the way you feel about remote meetings is the way some of your coworkers feel about every meeting. The remote meeting isn’t the cause of the problem: rather, the unwritten caucus rule is the cause of the problem, and remoteness happens to exacerbate that problem to the point that even people with high caucus scores notice the friction.

What is the unwritten caucus rule?

See if you can spot it in this example:

Sure, meetings should have leeway for people to figure out what they think. But Latifah already had a very well-considered answer to this question. Todd did not. Can we agree that, based on that information, Latifah should have gotten precedence to speak?

But in caucuses, it’s not Latifah who gets the chance to speak. Why? Because Latifah paused to consider what the last person said before she said anything.

In caucuses you can’t do that because of the unwritten caucus rule: 

The first person to utter something gets the floor.

That delightfully informal dynamic turns out to be not so delightful.

To wit: if you have something you want to say, you have to stop listening to the person currently speaking and instead focus on when they’re gonna pause or finish so you can leap into that nanosecond of silence and be the first to utter something.

The format of a caucus encourages participants who want to contribute to say more and listen less. I have a name for that: caucal collaborative degeneracy.

This is a big structural reason why people interrupt each other all the time. When the way that you get the floor in a meeting is to just start talking, that’s what people do. Sometimes the interruption is an accident because the interrupter gets excited and forgets that it’s not their turn. Sometimes the interruption is an accident because the interruptor thought the previous speaker was finished, but they had just paused. Kieran Snyder has done some fascinating work around who interrupts whom, and of course there are patterns. But how do we change those patterns when the unwritten caucus rule sets us up to interrupt one another? 

Imagine your largest weekly caucus-style meeting. Are there people at that meeting who rarely contribute anything? Or used to contribute more and now kind of…don’t? Or they seem (to you) to get ‘too aggressive’ when people interrupt them? 

Bingo. The way you feel about remote meetings is the way those people feel about every meeting.

This might mean that you’ve already experienced some frustrations with caucus-style meetings in general. Well, when you hold a caucus remotely, that only makes everything worse! Joy!

Take a look again at Part B of the caucus score checklist. You checked these boxes before assuming that we were talking about a colocated meeting. Let’s do it again for a meeting you are attending via teleconference:

Did you check more boxes in this section for a remote meeting than a colocated meeting? Out of 9 people I tested this on, 8 did. The ninth person had checked all of the boxes in the first place and so could not check any more.

Why? Well, jumping in during a caucus requires precise timing: your utterance must be the first utterance after someone finishes speaking without interrupting that speaker. A single second of audio lag can throw off your timing, so you have more people talking over one another and then stopping to figure out who should have or would have talked first.

You also don’t have as much benefit of body language for conveying ideas, and you sometimes have to project further over a poor audio connection or a poor video setup. So you might be more careful to avoid accidentally conveying anger or frustration, which means reviewing your wording before you say things…which means pausing or slowing down. Which can mean losing your place to speak.

And if you’re not a likely candidate to jump in in the first place, or if you have poor experiences with jumping in, then when you find yourself in the off-timing-interruption scenario, you’re very likely to yield the floor to the other person—so you don’t talk at all. In a caucus, the person speaking often does not remember to hold space at the end of their statement for the other person who wanted to speak, so the floor is up for grabs again, and you can easily go the whole meeting without getting your thoughts heard. Then you leave feeling disappointed.

If those are the kinds of frustrations that you notice more during remote meetings, it’s worth thinking about the fact that those frustrations happen in every meeting for some of your staff.*

*including introverts, women, people of color, and experts on the topic you’re talking about.

The Upshot

When audio/visual delays exacerbate the caucus problem for people who always get the floor in meetings, it looks to them like a new problem. It’s not new; it’s just normally experienced by people in meetings with lower caucus scores. Leadership doesn’t notice because people in leadership positions tend to have higher caucus scores, and being in a position of leadership also tends to boost your caucus score (basically because people interrupt you less). But that’s a weakness of the way we identify decision-makers: good ideas come from everywhere, and especially from people who do a lot of thinking and observing before they say anything.

Making meetings more accessible to remote employees doesn’t just make meetings more accessible to remote employees; it makes meetings more accessible to everyone. 

This is especially true for contributors who aren’t usually recognized as the ‘alpha’ in a meeting setting or who don’t self-select onto the speaking floor.

And fixing that problem can hugely benefit your business!

The sucky thing about remote work is that it loudly points out the failures in your collaborative process. You can choose whether to pin those failures on remote work and halt your remote program, or to leverage your newfound insight into the failures of your collaborative process to your advantage—because now you know where to improve.

Can we agree that excluding potential contributors in meetings is an obstacle to success? Why wouldn’t you want to gather additional perspectives and make your decisions based on as much information as possible? The solution, it turns out, has nothing to do with remote work itself. The solution is to address the underlying issue: the way we hold meetings. When we address those issues directly, remote meetings feel less stressful—but also, even if you never hold another remote meeting again, in person meetings will achieve better results.

An Opportunity to Reflect

At the end of our second blog post in this series on remote work, we did an exercise that gave you a chance to write down your feelings about remote work. If you still have that, now is an excellent time to grab it.

Take a look at how you answered that first question about your physical reaction to the idea of remote work. Do a body scan. Are you doing any of that stuff right now? Try taking a deep breath, holding it for a second, and then slowly letting it out. (Sometimes when I’m having a really rough day, I do this nine more times. And each time I exhale I picture all my struggles and commitments being pushed backwards by the force of my breath into a semicircle in front of me, leaving me space to think). Or you can go from the top of your body to the bottom: for each body part, tense it as hard as you can for a second or two, then relax it. Jaw. Hands. Arms. Shoulders. Chest. Stomach. Rear. Legs. Feet. See if this helps you feel better. (Or if it doesn’t and something else does, let me know what works for you in the comments).

Now, let’s look at how you answered the second question about what you’re afraid will happen with a remote team. Do you see any of that coming up in our discussion of remote meetings? Does the caucus problem, exacerbated by remoteness, play a role in any of your fears?

Finally, let’s look at how you answered the third question about your negative experiences with remote work. What were those experiences? Did any of them have to do with remote meetings? Can you connect this caucus problem, exacerbated by remoteness, to any of your sour experiences from past remote engagements?

In the next post on this topic, we discuss some alternatives to address the caucus problem. And those alternatives can improve your colocated meetings—not just your remote ones.

If you found this post challenging but you still appreciated it, check out:

Making Room for Anger and Sadness in the Workplace

“Smart” is Not a Hiring Criterion

Michael Lopp Serves All the Cantankery, to My Extreme Glee

To read about other ways remote work sucks, check out:

Why do large companies keep abandoning remote work?

If remote work is so awesome, why does it make my job harder?

Why are there always technical problems in remote meetings?