Stefan Eriksson, 2015-11-10
Six most distracting sounds in the remote meeting
Don’t you hate it when you are in a phone meeting and someone is nervously tapping their pen on the table? According to our customers in a recent survey, sound is the single most important factor in a remote meeting. Read about it here. There are some really distracting sounds out there. The question is, which is the most distracting when you are in an important remote meeting? We dove into the subject and found six really annoying sounds. Do you agree?
1. The pen
Tapping on the table or clicking nervously is a very common bad habit. It’s not just distracting in general, it tends to pressure the participants to rush through the meeting and miss important details. A polite trick if you are in the same room as the pen clicker is to ask if you could borrow their pen.
2. The phone
Someone else’s ring signal or an abandoned ringing telephone is a classic distraction. The telephone has been high on the list of office disturbances since research started in this field back in the seventies. And it’s still a major distraction, especially if you are in a phone meeting and can’t walk away and find the owner or ditch the phone in a convenient place. We also include the vibrating phone in this category. “Sound off” is far from silent these days.
3. The trembling leg
You know the type. Always on the run, always in a hurry even if they are sitting down in a meeting. Their legs are always moving. Those trembling legs can make the most peculiar sounds. On a good day it just sounds like someone is in a hurry; on a bad day it sounds like… well something very, very private. It can sound very odd if you are on one end of a phone meeting and the trembling person is alone on the other end.
4. The hard hitter
Although new technology has created quieter keyboards, you can still make a lot of distracting noise when typing. Have you ever run into a really hard hitter? Even if the noise doesn’t come from the keyboard itself, it can spread from the desk, down to the floor and become a muffled and difficult-to-define bumping.
5. AC or plumbing sounds
You probably don’t hear it because it’s there all the time, but when you sit down with a good conference phone in an important meeting, you don’t want the meeting participants at the other end to have a distracting sound throughout the entire meeting.
6. Traffic outside the office
See number 5. Hard to fix right away, but in the long run you need to have a meeting room with acoustic panels and/or better windows.
Visit Konftel Academy for some valuable meeting tips and, of course, the conference phones that let you focus on the right things in your meetings.
