Categories
online meetings

Please interrupt me!

At Frameable, one of our founding principles is “be inclusive.”

In life, and in video meetings, there are folks who are more and less inclined to speak. Sometimes folks get excited, and have a lot to say about a topic. It can be hard in video meetings for others to find a place to interject, whether to voice agreement, ask a clarifying question or offer an alternative view. One might wait for a natural pause, reach for the un-mute button, take a moment to consider their words and find that the conversation has moved along.

The more people on the call, the harder the decision gets — whether it’s worth the interjection to voice agreement or skepticism, or whether to abstain and let things take their course.

The easy thing to do, even for the extroverts, is to stay quiet. But in order to make the best decisions we can, it is vitally important to hear dissenting opinions. By staying quiet and not interrupting, while we let the meeting sail along, we might miss the best outcome.

Categories
team.video

Introducing Team.Video

Team.Video is built for remote teams, by a remote team. We’d like to introduce you to the product – which is now in open beta.

We built Team.Video with two foundational principles in mind:

  1. Team meetings should be as inclusive as possible; and
  2. Team meetings should be as efficient as possible.

On inclusiveness

Everyone can be seen. Our default video layout is a grid. Everyone can see everyone else, without fiddling with their layout settings or paging through a carousel or scrolling a strip.

Everyone can be heard. Teammates can always be heard with great quality audio. There is a bandwidth saver mode for folks on poor connections, which preserves audio at all costs.

But what about folks who are less inclined to speak up during a meeting? Chat and non-verbal feedback is built seamlessly into Team.Video – folks can raise their hand, give thumbs-up and thumbs-down, defer to the group or indicate that they are conflicted. This requires less weight than waiting for a good time to un-mute and interject, encourages participation from everyone, and keeps the conversation interactive and flowing smoothly.

On efficiency

Efficient meetings have a defined objective, start and end on time, and the takeaways are clear to everyone. Team.Video provides scheduling (integrated with Google Calendar), timed agenda items, and collaborative note taking.

Of course sometimes agendas can change – we’re all thoughtful humans. Team.Video agendas are collaborative, and can be built ahead of time or modified in the -call (items can be added, removed, rearranged, their timing can be adjusted, and external resources may be added). Of course, the our collaborative note-taking feature is in the call interface as well – no more switching away from the call to take notes and record your do outs. When the meeting is over, you can download the notes to continue the work.

At the end of the call, everyone is emailed the agenda, notes and resources of record, and they can be re-visited anytime in from your Team.Video workspace. Notes may also be exported to Google Docs.

Welcome to Team.Video

We’re excited to invite you to our open beta. When you sign up for a workspace now, you get unlimited team meeting minutes, a custom domain for your team, room permissions (private, knock to enter, public) and an experience that we believe will have you coming away saying, “this was a better meeting”.

Please give it a try, it’s free for everyone during the pandemic.

We welcome any and all feedback on the product. Thanks for reading.

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