Exploratory interview study with 12 full-time employees of a large technology company, all experienced in co-located, remote and hybrid work meetings. The results are preliminary.
12 employeesFull-time employees aged 21 to 50, five women and seven men, with degrees in engineering, science, arts and other areas.
Semi-structured interviewsInterviewees described how remote participants engage and pay attention in work meetings.
Thematic analysisTranscripts were analysed with open and axial coding, seeking saturation.
BWhat the study found
Why remote means quieterwhat interviewees described about remote participants
•Interviewees described remote participants as less motivated and less able to take part.Interviewees said people joining remotely find it hard to be heard, while colleagues in the room give them little space.
•Interviewees framed having video on as an obligation to be seen and to pay attention.One interviewee described keeping the camera off as a deliberate signal of low engagement.
Low engagement as a choiceremote attendance as a signal of interest
•Some interviewees joined remotely to signal that a meeting mattered less to them.The signal was both to themselves and to others. Joining remotely let these interviewees listen in or multitask without giving full attention.
•Interviewees read colleagues' remote attendance as a sign that a meeting was not important.One interviewee said seeing direct colleagues join remotely would be a motivation to dial in remotely too.
•The paper suggests low engagement in remote meetings can be a deliberate communication practice.Remote and local participants shared the same reasoning about it. A communication practice is an activity that is recognised and meaningful within a workplace culture.
CKey takeaway
Remote participants can use low engagement as a social practice, signalling that a meeting matters less to them. Video meeting systems could support the whole engagement spectrum rather than always pushing for more.
Made for this site with AI assistance from the verified research brief. It is not the paper's own figure.
Abstract
Video meeting research has long reported that technological constraints can lead to low engagement levels of remote participants. Under-reported, however, are the ways in which remote participants can choose their level of engagement, with the technology framing but not determining their social action. This paper presents preliminary research into the engagement practices of experienced video meeting users, which propose that the constraints of remote participation can be used to set personal and group expectations for engagement. Future video meeting systems should include a spectrum of engagement levels for remote meeting participants.
Research brief
By Anastasia Kuzminykh and Sean Rintel.
Takeaway: Low engagement in video meetings can be a deliberate social practice, not just a technical failing. Some experienced users join remotely to signal a meeting is low priority, treating the known limits of remote participation as an accepted buffer for listening in and multitasking.
Why this matters
What was known
Video meeting research has built many systems to raise remote participants' engagement, on an unexamined assumption: Video meeting researchers tend to assume that low engagement by remote participants is a problem to be solved(§Introduction, p. 1)
What this paper adds
Rather than building another system to raise engagement, we ask how experienced users themselves account for low engagement, and treat their accounts as methodical and reasonable. These social practices, however, are rarely reported in the literature on their own terms as methodical, active, and reasonable treatments of technology.(§Related Work, p. 2)
Who it matters to
Designers of video meeting systems, who we argue should support a spectrum of engagement levels for remote participants.
Research question
How do experienced video meeting users describe and account for the engagement and attention of remote participants in work meetings, and what does this imply for the design of video meeting systems?
Method and data
Design
Small qualitative exploratory study using semi-structured interviews (preliminary results).
Setting
A large Western technology company. Interviewees had extensive experience of co-located, remote and hybrid work meetings.
Participants / data
Twelve full-time employees (age 21-50, 5F, 7M) with tertiary degrees in engineering, science, arts and other areas.
Analysis
Interviews were transcribed and thematically analysed using open and axial coding, seeking saturation.
Findings
Remote means quieter. As expected, experienced video meeting users at one technology company said that people joining remotely are less motivated, and less able, to take part than colleagues in the room. #
“If you are one of the few people calling in, it's very hard to be heard. Because people don't give you space.”
The camera as a moral signal. Interviewees used the technology to explain low engagement. Having video on was framed as an obligation to be seen and to pay attention, and one interviewee described keeping the camera off as a deliberate signal of low engagement. #
“When I don't have 100% of my attention available, I'd prefer to not have my video on.”
Joining remotely to pay less attention. Some interviewees chose to join a meeting remotely rather than in person precisely to signal, to themselves and others, that it was of low interest or importance to them. #
“If I'm interested, I go for in-person, if not, I go for remote so that I don't have to pay attention.”
Colleagues read the signal. Other participants read colleagues' remote attendance as a sign that a meeting was not important. One interviewee said this would motivate them to join remotely too. #
“If I know that some of my direct colleagues are joining remotely, then it is a between-the-lines indicator that it's not important enough. That would motivate me to maybe also dial in remotely”
A practice, not just a constraint. Because remote and local participants shared the same reasoning about it, we suggest low engagement in remote meetings is a communication practice (recognised and meaningful within a workplace culture) and more than a technical constraint. #
“low engagement can be a social choice - not just a reaction to limitations but an exploitable social resource on the basis of those limitations”
Questions this paper answers
Why do people disengage when they join meetings remotely?
Partly because remote participation makes it harder to contribute. Remote people find it hard to be heard or to jump into a conversation, and easier to get distracted. People in the room also forget about those on the screen, even with video on. (See §Results, pp. 2–3; §Results, pp. 3–4.)
Does turning your camera on in a video meeting make you pay more attention?
It can feel that way, because video on is often treated as an obligation to be seen and pay attention. Some employees of a large technology company said video made them feel watched. One deliberately kept the camera off when not giving full attention, using it to signal low engagement. (See §Results, pp. 3–4.)
What does it signal when colleagues join a meeting remotely?
Sometimes that the meeting matters less to them. Some employees at a large technology company chose to join remotely precisely to signal low interest in, or low importance of, a meeting. Others read it that way. One said seeing direct colleagues join remotely would make them dial in too. (See §Low Engagement as a Signal of Interest, p. 4; §Low Engagement as a Signal of Interest, p. 5.)
Is low engagement in remote meetings always a problem to fix?
Not necessarily. Video meeting research usually treats it as a problem, but some employees of a large technology company chose it. They stayed available for a meeting without giving it full attention, for example by multitasking in a large meeting that mattered less to them. (See §Low Engagement as a Signal of Interest, p. 4; §Limitations, p. 5.)
Contributions and implications
Future video meeting systems should include a spectrum of engagement levels for remote participants.
Remote participants could choose more nuanced roles, such as "Monitoring" or "Listening in", which might set technological defaults and confer social rights and obligations. Imagine, for example, that remote participants could choose to set themselves as "Monitoring" or "Listening in".(§Implications for Technology Design, p. 6)
AI could notify a user of meeting content relevant to them during or after the meeting, so a monitoring mode might not need live presence and might reduce multitasking.
Other low-engagement roles could include "Oversight", an "uncertain" status, or a "degrees of separation" model of expected engagement.
Limitations
The sample is small and drawn from one company, so proportions and generalisability are unknown. (§Limitations, p. 5)
Company culture, and other levels of culture such as team, region or country, may strongly shape meeting practices.
These are preliminary results from a short exploratory study.
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Concepts
Communication practice
Craig's definition, which we argue low engagement in remote meetings fits: a commonly engagedin communication activity, meaningful in particular ways, among people familiar with a certain culture(§Low Engagement as a Social Practice, p. 5)
Attentional User Interfaces
A sub-field of HCI. Its organising principle: enhancing computing and communications systems by treating human attention as a central construct and organizing principle(§Related Work, p. 2)
Engagement spectrum
How we frame what interviewees chose from: So our users were describing a combination of motivational hierarchy, engagement spectrum, and meeting roles from which to make an active choice to signal low interest through remote participation(§Implications for Technology Design, p. 6)
How to cite
Anastasia Kuzminykh and Sean Rintel. 2020. Low Engagement As a Deliberate Practice of Remote Participants in Video Meetings. CHI 2020. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3383080
This brief was prepared with AI assistance and published by Sean Rintel. It is not the authors' published text. Page numbers refer to this PDF.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{kuzminykh2020low,
author = {Kuzminykh, Anastasia and Rintel, Sean},
title = {Low Engagement As a Deliberate Practice of Remote Participants in Video Meetings},
organization = {ACM},
booktitle = {CHI 2020},
year = {2020},
month = {April},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3383080},
note = {CHI 2020 Extended Abstracts},
doi = {10.1145/3334480.3383080},
}