how do we push back as a group when we’re all remote?

A reader writes:

My fully remote company just announced that our mandatory, weekly, hour-long, all-staff Zoom meeting will now be required to be camera on and mic on for all 60+ attendees. It seems like they’re trying to recreate the feeling of us all being in person. However, to me, and to I imagine a lot of people, the new requirements sound like literal torture.

This seems like a perfect “push back as a group” situation … but I don’t know how to do that in a remote setting. While I suspect my manager would also find this new requirement bonkers, I’m not so sure about his boss. I’m mostly an independent contributor, so I don’t have much incidental interaction with other people in the company.

What can I do here? Reach out to a handful of individuals on Slack to see if others think this is as insane as it seems to me? Then what? Write a group Slack message to the meeting leader (the CEO) saying, “I understand you want the company to feel closer, but we are not doing this”? In an in-person setting, I could have a bunch of low-key “this is nuts, right?” conversations with coworkers in the break room or hallways, but without that kind of casual interaction, I’m not sure how to get a group together to push back.

I don’t think cameras on for one hour-long meeting a week is outrageous, and if you frame it to people as anything in the neighborhood of “literal torture” you’re likely to lose a lot of credibility.

Requiring 60+ people have mics on is bizarre. But that part is likely to be rescinded pretty quickly because that much background noise (as well as sipping drinks, clearing throats, etc.) is going to be chaos with so many people.

We can talk about how to generate support for pushing back as a group when you’re remote, but I don’t think this is the issue to organize around.

As for how you’d do it on something else, though:

* Ideally, before you ever need to push back as a group, you’ve put some energy into forming relationships with your coworkers. You don’t have to do that — if you haven’t, you can still raise the topic when you’re talking to someone about something work-related — but it’s a lot easier if you’ve laid that groundwork first.

* Then, when you’re talking to people, you bring up the issue that’s bothering you: “What do you think about X? I’m worried because of Y.” You feel them out and if they sound like they share your concern, you can say, “I might talk to a few others and see if other people have these concerns. If they do, maybe we can talk about it with Manager.” From there, you’d follow the rest of the advice in this post about speaking up as a group — meaning that you could decide to raise it at a team meeting and have multiple people chime in, or you could ask your boss for a group meeting specifically to talk through questions people have, or you could decide that you’ll each bring it up individually with your manager. (But as discussed in that post, it usually does not make sense for one spokesperson to raise it on everyone else’s behalf. That’s likely to be less effective, and you might find others don’t then back you up as staunchly as they let you believe they would.)

* Sometimes, too, you can just speak up in a meeting where the topic is already getting discussed. For example: “I’m thinking about X — does anyone worry about how that will affect Y?” That’s a really low-key way to do it. You’re not showing up guns blazing, just raising a potential work problem and waiting to see if others join in on your concerns.

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