Virtual meeting best practices

Overview

Mount Holyoke offers Zoom as the primary platform for hosting virtual meetings. Find more about logging into and using Zoom. College community members also have access to Google Meet through their MHC Google accounts. 

This article offers some suggestions to make your virtual meetings productive and minimize meeting fatigue.

Best practices

• Find a quiet location: Whether you’re at home or on campus, you and your colleagues will have a better virtual meeting experience if you join from a quiet location with minimal distractions. If you don’t have a private office on campus, we recommend that you join from a separate meeting room so you can minimize disruptions to other colleagues with whom you share space.

• Use a headset with a built-in microphone: We recommend using a headset with an attached mic to improve your listening experience and minimize background noise for all meeting participants. USB Headset recommendations for departmental purchase

• Mute your mic: To minimize distractions, mute your microphone when you’re not talking, or make sure noise cancellation is turned on.

• Improve performance with wired internet: To ensure a high quality meeting connection, we recommend choosing a wired internet connection instead of WiFi when possible. 

• Enable captions: Participants who are unable to hear the meeting can turn on live transcription in Zoom and auto generated captions in Google Meet. Captions show what’s being said in the meeting as text at bottom of the screen, making meetings more accessible and inclusive. 

• Try speedy meetings: In your Google Calendar event settings, set the default meeting duration for 25 minutes instead of 30 minutes. Or schedule meetings to end 5–10 minutes before the top or bottom of the hour. Ending meetings a few minutes early gives people time to reset when they have back-to-back meetings. Learn how to customize your event settings.

• Hide your self view: In video meetings, change or hide your self-view so you can focus on presenters and presentations. Learn how to manage your self-view in Google Meet and in Zoom.

Don't have a webcam?

There are still many ways to participate in virtual meetings!

Join from your computer:

You can always join a virtual meeting from a computer without a webcam. You’ll be able to see your colleagues, but won’t be on camera yourself. 

Dial in from your office phone: 

• Zoom: Use the dial-in instructions for Eastern time zone: New York.
• Google Meet: Use the join by phone option in the calendar event.

If a webcam is important for your work, please review this list of recommended webcams for departmental purchase.