If like me, you are spending half of your zoom meetings saying “sorry sorry, please go ahead”, then I would recommend the following: Apart from the meeting moderator if anyone wants to speak, let them write “stack” on chat. The stacked guy is in the queue to speak next.

This is a system people in our company have started following recently, and we have seen the number of interruptions go down.

The lack of nonverbal cues, with the video being off, leads to frequent interruptions and with the meeting going nowhere. Zoom meetings will always find it difficult to replace the human connection of an in-person meeting. But small things like these will hopefully help you get more out of your calls.

Note: Raised hands feature is not as helpful because if multiple people want to respond, then you need a way to figure out the order in which they speak. In our case, the first who stacked first gets to speak first, followed by other stacked people.The natural evolution of the raise hands button will be a stack button. Instead of typing “stack”, you will be automatically told your position to speak next.