I fixed video conferences. Now Zoom just needs to listen to me.
by Sarah Reed
Sarah Reed is General Counsel at RA Capital Management. She is the only lawyer to have received the National Venture Capital Association’s Outstanding Service Award, for her leadership role in conceiving of and spearheading the NVCA Model Legal Documents.
December 17, 2021
As the Omicron variant looms over this upcoming holiday season, an increasing number of companies are pushing back return-to-office plans (again). What does this mean for all of us? Another year of Zoom. And, Zoom, after spending almost two years “working” on your platform, I have some notes.
Here you are, in a position to disrupt and transform that most hated activity of white collar workers, the business meeting – and what have you done with the opportunity? Squander it.
The biggest workplace “innovation” associated with your trademark is “Zoom-free Fridays.” Is desuetude really the most you can aspire to? (Not a great leading indicator for your stock performance, by the way.) Honestly, Zoom – it’s as if someone whispered “Mobile computing is the future!” to Steve Jobs in 1978 and he spent the next decade optimizing a rolling cart for the Apple II computer. You’ve utterly failed to reinvent any of the worst aspects of the business meeting. And there’s a reason ditching you on Fridays is the newest workplace benefit: if meetings used to just plain suck, on Zoom they are soul-destroying.
It’s obvious from the banality of your current platform that you don’t have a clue what I’m on about. So let me mansplain to you - for free! - five vital features you should implement immediately:
1) The chess timer.
Imagine this: All participants are placed on mute as they enter the meeting, and as soon as anyone unmutes to speak, their clock starts. In case you have colleagues who aren’t ashamed after hogging 12 minutes of a 30-minute meeting (imagine!), you could also have a feature that simply cuts them off after a time pre-set by the meeting organizer (e.g., soliloquies limited to 4 minutes, and maybe a cumulative allotment per meeting).
2) The ability to track, cumulatively, how long each participant commands the floor.
It’d be nice to bring some data to annual review meetings, right? “Hey, do you know that you’ve taken up roughly half the time at weekly staff meetings, even though you are only one of ten regular participants?” “Hey, you’ve only spoken up once at our team meetings in the past year – how can we help you feel more comfortable expressing your views in a group setting?”
3) A speech recognition feature.
This innovation would automatically mute someone as soon as the words “I just want to echo/reiterate what [Jenny] said…” leave their mouth. Save us, please. We get it.
4) A voice modification feature.
With this, it’d be easy to flip the script in meetings - specifying, perhaps, that all male participants speak in a high register and all female participants in a commanding, sonorous tone. Might that change the speaking dynamics of those most enthralled by the sound of their own voice? But seriously - we already use camera filters and backgrounds; why not modify audio? Trans colleagues, if they preferred, could modulate their own voices or select one that fits them best. And podcasters and content creators could change characters with the click of a button.
5) And the most important fix…
Any lawyer who uses the words “with all due respect,” “desuetude” or “fulsome” gets immediately turned into a cat for the rest of the meeting.
Will these improvements save the world from Zoom fatigue? Maybe not. But will they make meetings marginally more interesting? Absolutely. And isn’t that all we can ask for before the Pi variant comes for us?
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