During the early days of the pandemic, Built In asked me for some practical, tactical advice on running remote meetings, drawing from my PhD in virtual communication and my experience running a remote GTM team of about 175 employees.

The line they took from our interview was about acknowledging what was actually happening in everyone's house before pretending a meeting was business as usual: "Rather than pretend these distractions aren't forefront in your mind, make time at the beginning of the meeting to address them... share the biggest frustration as well as the biggest positive triumph of the day."

It's a small thing, but it's held up. The teams that named the chaos out loud for thirty seconds got more out of the other fifty-nine minutes than the ones that pretended nothing had changed.