Office considerations for Staff and Faculty joining online meetings

You will likely be joining meetings concurrently with others in your same office suite or building. Headphones are highly recommended in joining online meetings (e.g. Zoom or Teams), to not only prevent possible feedback with audio contamination of others in your offices, but also to keep meetings private.

Closing your office door (when possible) may not mitigate noise contamination and/or wandering ears.

Use of microphones on headsets or external microphones will lead to more optimal audio experiences for meeting attendees online, and will have the added benefit of not requiring you to exhaust yourself while adhering to Covid requirements like mask-wearing.

Raising your voice is not optimal, as you will likely become exhausted and the topics of discussion can travel to unintended listeners.

Setup your computer, particularly the computer’s webcam, in a position where lighting on your face is optimal. Lighting your background (unless intended) or sitting in front of a window where you are dark and washed out due to being backlit are not ideal positions for lighting.

Setup your computer, particularly the computer’s webcam, in a position where your background is not distracting, offensive or revealing unintended information. Facing the webcam at a blank wall behind you is usually ideal, but being selective about the background can contribute to the overall online experience, especially, if there is art, books or other background decorations that give you talking points to your conversation.

On CGU’s campus, you will want to be physically connected to the network by an ethernet cable. This will give you the most optimal connection, especially in terms of bandwidth, for your online collaboration experience. If a network cable is not accessible, please utilize the ‘eduroam’ wireless connection.

When you are joining meetings online, especially when you are moving about campus or between campus and home, have your data, websites or other physical resources ready prior to the time of the meeting. You do not want to struggle through logging into other sites, share screen or virtual background problems, and/or need to get up in the middle of the meeting for your audience to see.

Be familiar with your collaboration tool’s capabilities. If you need to stop and deal with something in the middle of the meeting, do not distract from the meeting. Please use audio mute if you need to speak with someone in your office, video mute if you need to stand up, and/or pause share, for any activity requiring you to log in or navigate your computer to get to the relevant shared content.