What to type in the chat during a video call

Use the call chat for things that would be rude or slow to say out loud: links, spellings, numbers, and a quiet correction. Keep anything that needs a reply out of it, and never let a decision live there alone. The chat log is the least reliable writing at work, and you will not find out until you go looking for it.

Almost every video call now runs two conversations at once. One has a speaker and an agenda. The other is a scrolling column that half the participants are reading instead of listening.

Nobody agrees on the rules for the second one, so people invent their own, and the results range from useful to quietly nasty.

The call chat is a second room

The chat during a call is a separate space with a separate audience, and it should be written for that audience rather than for the meeting.

The two rooms have different memberships. Someone dialling in from a car is not reading. Someone presenting is definitely not reading. A person sitting in a conference room with the shared screen may not have the chat open at all.

So anything typed in there reaches a subset of the meeting, chosen more or less at random. That is fine for a link. It is a disaster for an agreement.

What belongs in the call chat

The call chat is good at the things that would derail the talking if you said them out loud.

• Links and file names, so nobody has to transcribe a URL from a slide.
• Spellings of names, products, and unfamiliar words.
• A number the speaker got slightly wrong, typed without commentary.
• A short "I can take that" so an owner gets attached without a pause.

The correction is the underrated one. Interrupting somebody mid-sentence costs them their thread in front of everyone, while typing "small thing, the figure is from the March run" lets them pick it up in their own time, often without acknowledging it at all.

The other good use is the question you do not want to interrupt for. "Happy to hold this until the end, but I did not follow the part about billing" gives the host a choice about when to take it.

What does not belong in the call chat

Keep anything with consequences out of the call chat, starting with decisions.

A decision typed into a call chat has the shortest lifespan of any writing at work. The window closes and the log goes somewhere nobody searches, assuming it was kept at all. Two weeks later, four people remember four versions. Everything about getting a decision in writing applies here on a harder deadline, because the container disappears when the call does.

Also on the list: anything that needs a considered reply. Post a real question with three sentences of context and you have asked someone to read carefully while listening carefully. They will do neither well.

And the obvious one, which people do anyway. Side jokes about the person speaking. It feels private and it is not: chats get screenshotted, and plenty of tools keep the log somewhere the organiser can go and read it later. I have never seen that end well for the person who typed it.

The hybrid problem

When some people are in a room and some are on screens, the call chat becomes a channel that excludes the room by default.

Nobody sitting at the table has a laptop open to the chat. The remote half is having a lively conversation the in-person half cannot see, and the in-person half is having one the remote half cannot hear. Both groups leave the call thinking the other one was disengaged.

It compounds, because the exclusion is invisible to the people doing it. Nobody in the room ever sees the good idea that was typed and never spoken. They notice that the remote colleagues do not contribute much, and that impression hardens into an opinion about those people.

There is only one fix and it is boring. Somebody in the room has to own the chat window and read from it out loud. Assign that person at the start, the way you assign a note taker.

A few things keep it from becoming theatre:

• The reader should have no stake in the topic, so nothing gets quietly filtered.
• They read the line and the name as written, without summarising.
• They speak up even when the chat is empty, so the room knows nothing is waiting.

Unowned, the chat is a private club with a live feed running beside the meeting.

Type it as though it will be read aloud

Write every line in the call chat as though someone will read it out to the room, because in a well run hybrid meeting somebody will.

Call chat is the highest-pressure typing most people do. You are half-listening and the moment is passing. That produces the shortest, bluntest sentences anybody writes all week, and blunt reads as annoyed to a reader who cannot hear your voice.

I built Unvent around a single keystroke for this reason: a fix that arrives after the moment has passed is worth nothing. A call chat is the sharpest version of that, since your comment is either in before the topic moves or it may as well not exist.

Two small habits cover almost all of it. Put the subject first, since your line will be read out of order by whoever is scrolling back. And add the two words that turn a correction into an offer of help.

Clear the chat before you leave the call

Move anything that matters out of the chat while the call is still running, because that is the last moment everyone involved is present.

• Links go into the doc or the channel where people will look for them.
• Anything that sounded like a decision goes into the recap, as a full sentence.
• An owner who volunteered in chat gets named as the owner in the recap too.

Thirty seconds of copying beats a fortnight of "I thought we agreed that on the call".

One last opinion, and it is not a popular one. If the interesting conversation in your meetings keeps happening in the chat column, the meeting is the wrong shape. People type there because it is the only way to say something without taking the floor. That is worth noticing, and it is usually a bigger finding than whatever was on the agenda.