Zoom Meetings: Etiquette and Best Practices
Inclusion
To create a welcoming and inclusive environment for our community, we encourage faculty, staff, and students to add their pronouns to their Zoom profile. When you add pronouns to your profile, they are visible to your Zoom contacts as part of your Zoom profile card in the Zoom desktop client and mobile app. You can also choose when or if your pronouns are shown during a meeting that you host or join, or webinar that you are the host or panelist for. Webinar attendees’ pronouns are never visible. Learn how to add and share your pronouns in Zoom.
Why is it important to respect people's pronouns?
You can’t always know what someone’s pronouns are by looking at them. Asking and correctly using someone’s pronouns is one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their gender identity.
When someone is referred to with the wrong pronoun, it can make them feel disrespected, invalidated, dismissed, alienated, or dysphoric (often all of the above).
It is a privilege to not have to worry about which pronoun someone is going to use for you based on how they perceive your gender. If you have this privilege, yet fail to respect someone else’s gender identity, it is not only disrespectful and hurtful but also oppressive.
Chat
Please minimize the use of the chat during presentations to show respect for speakers and to limit distractions. Once the speaker concludes the talk or opens up the meeting to Q&A, feel free to post comments, questions, and answers in the chat so all participants, including the speaker, have the opportunity to engage.
Best Practices
- Mute your microphone when you are not speaking, and be aware of background noise when you are speaking.
- Keep your background clear of distractions. Consider using virtual backgrounds.
- Position your camera as close to eye level as possible with sufficient lighting in front of you.
- If you need to conduct business outside of the meeting, turn off your webcam temporarily.
- Refrain from replying to emails, text messages, etc. during meetings.