Meetings online can be frustrating if you’re a quiet and/or introverted member of the team or if you have poor bandwidth causing you to interrupt people unintentionally. However, I found a way to tackle this that was not only empowering to the quieter members of the team, but added another level of discussion where if it were IRL (In Real Life) would be deemed low level disruption. Let me explain:
At the beginning of the year I was in a meeting and there were about 20 of us. I couldn’t find a space to get a word in edge ways. I looked for body language and verbal markers to discern if the speaker was finished and also tried out the raise hand function (via emoji and IRL) but I was ignored which left me feeling uncomfortable in the space. I didn’t know what was expected of me in a situation like this except to try and wait my turn. However, by the time I found a gap in the traffic, my comment wasn’t relevant anymore and I found myself having the choice to either derail us all and take us back to something which everyone thought was over and done with or just sit on my hands and say nothing. 
This overlapping in spoken communications can be a power play where only the loudest and most boisterous are able to speak (Yule, 2014). This made me (and I am sure others, too) feel unheard, like my voice and my opinions had no value. I was initially frustrated with using Zoom so much for meetings because I couldn’t tell when to speak and when I did I always spoke over people and felt terribly rude and uncomfortable.
After a few of these experiences, I found myself writing in chat in the hope that either the chair or one of the most extroverted members of the team read it and spoke for me. Previously I felt like I could only write in chat if I was asked to, but this is a year of breaking the rules and seeing what works. So I gave it a go because I felt more comfortable doing that than playing the waiting game with a second round of dodgeball. At first I felt rude doing this because in some spaces there is nothing in chat but as the academic year wore on, more and more folks were getting used to conference calls and I found that people were using chat in really interesting ways:
Sharing their own experiences relative to the speakers’ content
Showing appreciation to the speaker
Sharing resources relative to the speakers’ content
Expanding on points the speaker said inc terms/acronyms
Unpacking ideas
Catching up those who were late/had internet issues 
Sharing key points

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