Two years into the pandemic, we still have executives who can't be bothered to learn something as simple as how to mute their microphones during a Teams meeting. I think it's a subconscious reaction to the idea of them being muted. In a normal meeting, no one would ever think to mute them since they're so high on the food chain.
> at that point the solution is for them to hit mute
From a technical point of view, that is really the best thing. It works, and sometimes it's the only thing that works.
But if you try to get people actually do it, you run into problems:
(1) They don't realize it's them. AFAIK the system doesn't play their audio back to them, so while everyone else hears the noise, they don't. The one person who needs to take action is the one person who doesn't know action is necessary.
(2) They are distracted. When their spouse is talking, they are focused on whatever their spouse is saying, not on how it affects the meeting audio. Or the meeting is boring and they're not paying attention.
(3) They just don't care enough. They are there to attend a meeting, not fiddle with computer stuff. Some people will never take the time to learn where the mute button is in the software.
Perhaps #1 could be improved, though, with some kind of blindingly obvious indicator in the UI. If "YOUR MIC IS WHAT EVERYONE IS HEARING RIGHT NOW" flashes when your mic takes the floor, maybe you'd notice it lighting up when you didn't intend for it to.
Let me summarize my take on the 'don't mute' advice in this article:
* Is the call 1:1 or extremely small? If so, it's down to the preferences of the people in the call. Otherwise, for larger calls:
* Are you in a quiet environment?
* That was a trick question. You are not in a quiet environment. You think you are, because your human brain is good at filtering out background noise. Your microphone is not. You are not being forced to actually listen to what your microphone hears. The rest of us are. Mute your fucking microphone!
My old headset would disconnect at random. It had its own physical mute button. At some point, Teams decided to switch microphones for me without telling me. So when the headset came back online, Teams continued using the built in laptop mic. Fortunately I wasn't doing anything embarrassing.
Someone asked where some background noise was coming from. I said "not from me, I'm on mute". And several people said "no you're not!"
>I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake.
Because
1) most group meetings that need people to be on mute most of the time are useless, boring, snooze fests, most attendees don't care about, so those 'professionals', who are caffeinated zombies half asleep, will space out and forget the status of their mic within 10 seconds of toggling it
and
2) most chat apps suck at drawing attention to the status of the mic and, if you have multiple monitors, you can be staring at one monitor (Jira, reddit, Redmine, HN, VS Code, etc.) while the chat app and the status of the mic is being displayed on another monitor where you're not looking
It's a mistake super easy to make. Still, better be safe and make the mistake of being muted all the time, than forgetting to mute yourself and have participants hear something you didn't want them to hear.
Ideally I'd want a feature that gives the image on all my monitors a red vignette, or something like that, whenever my mic is hot, so I don't have to keep paranoidly glancing at the mute toggle every couple of minutes, to make sure my mic is still muted, so they can't hear me mumbling on how incompetent management is.
Well that's a software/user solution to a hardware problem.
If you have a quality headset/microphone you can be unmuted for a whole meeting, people collectively making noises (Ahh, or Ohh) are important ways of communicating information that are lost if everyone is muted until they have a comment to make.
Were you previously using just the laptop mic? I can’t imagine being on a group teams/skype for business call without a USB headset with a dedicated hardware mute button.
Someone will inevitably blurt my name and I have to frantically unmute myself and then mute myself again.
Unless you’re senior leadership and they never mute themselves.
I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake. Having used Discord for so many years, this has never been a problem aside from a select few people who had very clear reason to mute themselves. Meanwhile in professional settings, people seem to be falling for this over and over while lacking the common curtesy of not letting random environmental noise bleed through (read: their mics are barely ever turned off).
Not to mention push-to-talk has solved this issue for almost a few decades now.
and everyone has to be on mute if they're not talking.
In all the calls I've attended this was always the case anyway, and there seemed to be an implicitly understood rule of "keep yourself muted unless you want to say something". Seeing someone's mute indicator turn off was a cue to pause and wait, as it indicated someone wanting to say something.
It's not just speaking audio, but randomly people talking something without muting their mics, noise popping up, multiple mics at the same time resulting in echoes. I mean, It's Congress still they can't manage to mute everyone and then have an operator only unmute someone when they are required to speak? on the other hand, It's also shocking that people aren't familiar that Muting Mic is a good practice.
Audio processing is a risky move -- so hard to get right. We've been using https://team.video at work, and one thing I absolutely love about it is how they handle audio / muting.
When you're speaking, you don't have to wonder if others can hear you because your microphone pulses in green visually as you speak. If your audio isn't working it shows in yellow with no pulsing, and you and everyone else can see your audio is not flowing.
Also, if someone else forgot to mute and their kid is making a ruckus, you can just mute them. You don't have to wait for a moment to interject and ask them verbally, you can just go ahead and do it.
Or, when you see someone else in their video feed trying to speak up, but they forgot to unmute, you just unmute them. No everyone saying, "you're muted" over each other.
It takes a second to get used to the idea that everyone has all the power, but in practice it just makes everything go way smoother.
This simply doesn’t work in the long run, and/or at scale. For me someone who doesn’t mute while they’re not talking is a dead giveaway they haven’t been doing remote work for very long.
It’s simply rude to broadcast your noise to the entire group of people, let alone dozens of people doing so at the same time. If your child is crying, it’s fine, I understand how things are, and of course I’ll understand you’re distracted. However, I’m not fine with your child distracting all 20 people on the call.
reply