Suggestions for parallel chat in meetings

​​​​​By Sharon Gillett, Danielle Bragg (opens in new tab), Nancy Baym (opens in new tab), Rachel Bergman, Advait Sarkar (opens in new tab), Priscilla Wong, Abigail Sellen (opens in new tab), and Sean Rintel (opens in new tab).

Most videoconferencing platforms enable attendees to post text, images, files, links etc. in a meeting chat pane or window simultaneously with audio/visual (A/V) modalities. remote This parallel chat is typically open to all meeting invitees and flows concurrently with the A/V focus of the meeting (for example a presentation or discussion).  ​​​​​​​Our analysis of parallel chat in work meetings (opens in new tab) found that while parallel chat is considered a net positive, it can also be distracting, especially in meetings that involve more than a small group of people. Parallel chat may also not be accessible or inclusive.

Our general position is that organizations should exploring more intentional collaboration (opens in new tab). These guidelines should help organizers/moderators and participants to be more intentional about using parallel chat in meetings. We cover what makes parallel chat useful or distracting, and guidelines for before, during, and after meetings.

​​​​​​​What makes parallel chat useful versus distracting?

Parallel chat is used for at least seven distinct types of messages

• Questions for the speaker or someone else in the meeting
• Links to resources such as documents and webpages
• Unrelated conversation held in the same chat
• Voicing agreement with the speaker, or sending messages of praise/congratulations (‘kudos’).
• Adding information to what is being said, or starting a conversation about a related topic
• Responses to previous messages
• Humour and casual conversation

Positive impacts of parallel chat

• Inclusion and managing the flow of the primary conversation: A key advantage of parallel chat is participation without interrupting the flow of the A/V conversation. Being able to ask a question or make a comment in parallel chat may reduce the competition for the floor. Moreover, parallel chat gives participants a way to engage if they are otherwise unable to get a chance to speak
• Coordination of action and collaboration: Another key function of parallel chat is to share links to relevant resources and documents. Such sharing might have otherwise been follow-up actions.If parallel chat persists beyond the end of the A/V meeting, it can act as both a record and a means of enabling post-meeting discussion. Parallel chat also enables coordination during technical issues, coping with language barriers, and written precision (e.g. for technical terms).
• Social connection: Casual conversation and humor can provide social support and connection.

Negative impacts of parallel chat

• Distraction and division of attention: Parallel chat provides room for unrelated topics to emerge, distracting meeting participants who wish to focus on the meeting topic. Participants may feel obliged to divide their attention, which is difficult to maintain.
• Differing expectations on how chat should be used: Informality and side conversations may be perceived negatively because the make it difficult to find specific points in chat due to message volume or topic irrelevancy (16 participants). Some participants may want more concrete norms and expectations around parallel chat use, while others like having designated moderators to ensure professionalism and respectful behavior, or to monitor the flow of the meeting and ensure voices are heard.
• Information asymmetries: Presenters find presenting and following parallel chat difficult.

Considerations for participants

Here are some questions that will help guide you to maximizing the value of chat and help it from becoming distracting.

Check and act accordingly:

• Are there standing guidelines (formal or informal) for using parallel chat in this meeting?
• Are there participants with accessibility needs?
• How do presenters feel about parallel chat?

Post when:

• you will be advancing the goals of the main meeting.
• you have listened before posting (to ensure that you are not being repetitive).
• you are asking a question relevant to the main meeting.
• you will be clarifying others’ confusion or providing useful background material (including links).
• your post promotes inclusion – even your own if you have not had the opportunity to speak or don’t feel comfortable speaking.
• if you are posting an aside, even if humorous, try to ensure that it will be interesting to most participants

Refrain from posting when:

• you will be not be advancing the goals of the main meeting.
• your post will be of interest only to a small subset of participants.
• you will create or add to a forked conversation that lasts more than a few turns (make a plan to take forked conversations into other/later forums).
• you have posted a lot (number or length of posts) relative to the size of the group (i.e. try not to dominate the chat, even just because you are excited).
• you are simply having trouble attending to the speaker (consider whether unconscious bias is an issue).

Consider accessibility:

• If there are blind/low-vision attendees, be prepared to describe images in text or check for alt-text.
• Is the amount of chat potentially overwhelming for other attendees with multi-tasking challenges?
• Am I clearly communicating sentiment, for example when using emoji (e.g., 🙂 ), acronyms, or  non-literal talk?
• Does someone else’s chat contain ambiguous sentiment? If so – ask about ambiguities rather than assuming intent.

Considerations for organizers/moderators

Parallel chat can be very effective when it is planned for and expectations are communicated among team members and meeting attendees. In larger meetings it also benefits from light moderation.

Before the meeting

Set the stage

• For recurring meetings, develop and circulate a standing set of guidelines for use of parallel chat (feel free to adapt from this document). Ideally, recurring meetings involving more than a few people already have a set of written guidelines, laying out goals and standing agenda items, to which any parallel chat guidance can be appended.
• For any meeting, consider putting parallel chat guidance into the chat at the start of each meeting, as a reminder. This can reduce the need for a moderator to “police” chat during the meeting.
• For a one-off meeting, or meetings with a mix of agenda item types (e.g., both informational and discussion items), tailor parallel chat guidance to the agenda goals.  For example, in a discussion or brainstorm section of the meeting, parallel chat will be useful for ideas, disagreement, questions, etc. For getting through an update efficiently, parallel chat could be reserved for clarifying questions.
• If new people are joining the meeting, moderators should make a practice of checking in with them beforehand, for example to understand how they prefer to be addressed (including name pronunciation), to identify any accessibility requests, etc. This function may already be performed by a general meeting moderator, in which case chat-specific questions could simply be added to the check-in (for example, are @mentions by first name only okay with the person?).
• Depending on the meeting, chat moderation can be hard work.  To ensure that those who take on this role also get their say, consider rotating the moderator role across different meetings, and/or distributing some aspects of the role across multiple people for more complex meeting.

Consider accessibility needs of meeting members

• Compile and share best practices with your group by:
  • Prior to the meeting, asking participants for any accessibility accommodation requests.
  • Based on any requests, compiling, and sharing a list of best practices for your group.
  • Make this list part of onboarding for new group members.
• Familiarize yourself with how to include participants who may face the following challenges:
  • Processing parallel sources in multiple modalities: Participating in a meeting with text-based chat requires monitoring two parallel sources, which may be difficult (e.g., due to difficulties navigating between sources while using a screen reader or magnification). Simultaneous presentation of information through auditory and visual channels may also present barriers (e.g., blind participants must listen to both sources via screen reader, or deaf participants must watch two sources via transcription/interpreter).
  • Consuming and generating text: Reading may present challenges (e.g., for people with low vision who must zoom and pan, and people with dyslexia). Writing may also present challenges (e.g., for people with hand mobility problems or who do not touch type).
  • Understanding non-text chat: Non-text content may not be accessible, particularly for participants using screen readers (e.g., GIFs and emoticons without or with inadequate alternative text).
  • Understanding sentiment: It can be difficult to understand the sentiment behind written and non-written content (e.g., GIFs), particularly for participants with autism.

During the meeting

Parallel chat to encourage

• Chat that amplifies the meeting’s main A/V includes:
  • Links to items mentioned in or related to the main A/V.
  • Questions/requests for clarification.
• When solicited: discussion contributions, including disagreement.
• Requests for follow-up.
• Enabling more voices to be heard includes chats from:
  • People who rarely speak or chat in meetings.
  • People who haven’t already spoken or chatted a lot in this meeting.
  • People who may generally have a hard time getting a word in for many possible reasons, including low power or seniority status, minority status, or disability.

Best practices for encouraging useful parallel chat

• Bring useful chat to the speaker’s attention, to encourage transfer of relevant ideas into the main conversation; highlight key points and clarifying questions.
• Ask participants to speak key written chat content out loud, both so the content enters any meeting recording and/or transcript, and for participants who may miss the chat; examples include participants such as presenters, or others for whom monitoring multiple sources simultaneously is difficult or impossible (as with certain disabilities).  If participants are unable to speak their own content, speak it for them.
• Remind people of the option to raise their hands.
• Apply inclusive behavior guidelines to parallel chat. For example:
  • When contributions are requested, encourage people who haven’t yet spoken or chatted.
  • Acknowledge when an idea advanced by one person gets ignored, then later credited to someone else.
  • Follow up privately with specific participants if you have concerns that certain chat entries may have affected them negatively.  Follow up can happen during or after the meeting, as appropriate.
• Align the chat with the accessibility requests of the group, for example by:
  • Providing text descriptions of non-text chat.
  • Providing text descriptions of visual content shared in the meeting (e.g., through screen share, or in a participant’s video feed) that has not been described.
  • Leaving appropriate time for participants with disabilities to respond (e.g., if using an interpreter or screen reader).

Parallel chat to discourage

• Chat that is likely of interest to only a small subset of attendees.
• Chat that diverges from the main presentation or discussion.
  • This can happen when a post generates a chat-only discussion that was either off-topic to begin with or becomes off-topic as the main AV meeting agenda moves on.
  • Such discussions may raise useful topics, but if they persist “too long” they risk distracting not only the chatters involved, but also everyone else in the meeting. How long is too long is exactly the kind of judgment call moderators are asked to make.
• Chat that overwhelms the main conversation
  • On-point chats can still become more intensive than the main discussion, especially in large meetings.  When chats start flashing fast and furious on the screen, participants may perceive them as “higher volume” than the main meeting.
  • On the one hand, the norms of in-person meetings would label side conversations as rude. On the other hand, a major benefit of parallel chat is its potential for greater inclusivity.
  • One possible way to distinguish these two scenarios is to notice whether the high volume is a result of the chat engaging a large fraction of meeting participants (more likely to be a marker of inclusion) or engaging a few participants intensely (more likely to be a marker of distraction).
• Chat that results from multi-segment meeting structure
• In meetings with multiple segments of interest to different attendees, the chat window may frequently get out of sync with the main AV agenda. For example, a speaker in one segment may respond to questions during another segment; or a chat discussion may become divergent (as discussed above) when it starts during one segment then persists into another segment. This latter scenario is especially likely if the different segments are aimed at separate sub-groups of attendees.
• Chat that is inaccessible to meeting participants. For example, depending on the participant group, inaccessible chat could entail:
  • Visual content that lacks text description (which may be inaccessible to blind or low-vision participants)
  • Subtle sentiment implications that are difficult to perceive
  • Any other accessibility requirements participants have shared.

Best practices for discouraging distracting parallel chat

• If you need to ask an individual to refrain from further chats on a topic, use a private backchannel to avoid public shaming.
• For divergent topics or intense small group discussions that have gone on “too long,” ask the participants to shift to backchannel so as not to distract others.  If the topic is important but not appropriate for further discussion in the main AV meeting, suggest a follow-up meeting.
• For distracting chats within multi-segment meeting structure: A Project Tahiti journal entry suggests that pausing between segments to handle that segment’s chat and establishing a norm of out-of-band communication to address questions or discussion beyond the pause, can be an effective practice for parallel chat for this type of meeting. (See first verbatim in the Appendix for the full entry.)

After the meeting

• Follow up on the parallel chat. If items in the meeting chat text deserve more attention than the main meeting AV was able to give them, consider sharing such items in a short follow-up email to the meeting participants. If a meeting recap is already part of the meeting’s regular practice, the chat recap can be bundled into it. Examples of useful items include:
  • Relevant ideas that did not get attention during the meeting
  • Links to relevant information
• This practice can also reduce help reduce distraction by reducing the pressure on participants to split their focus between the main meeting and the chat, knowing that chat highlights will be shared later.  Reducing this pressure may be particularly helpful to participants who find it challenging to multitask in this way, possibly (but not only) because of a disability.

More information on accessibility

For more information on making remote interactions more accessible, especially for large events such as conferences, see the ACM Guide to Accessible Remote Attendance (opens in new tab). For more information on inclusive practices in general, see Microsoft’s 10 inclusive behaviors (opens in new tab).

The authors thank Jaime Teevan and Priscilla Wong for their ideas and pointers to other sources that contributed to the original “Guide for Moderators” framing. We also thank Irene Money and Phil Rosenfield who reviewed an earlier version of this document, and others who provided feedback.