For the past few months I’ve been the only remote person on my team. While everyone else meets up in Houston each week, I sling code from my cozy town in West Michigan.

Given the situation, we’ve gone through some trial-and-error on the best ways to collaborate for a variety of things.

Remote-friendly retros have been difficult to nail down.

Everyone in Houston would meet in a conference room and one teammate would open their laptop and connect to me on Google Hangouts. This was great! They’d swing the laptop back-and-forth so I could see who was talking, making it easier to stay engaged.

But if you’ve been in a retro, you may have experienced this funny phenomenon. Everyone starts out boisterous and cheery. We celebrate our recent victories. Then we eventually get to the harder topics, the things we need to improve. And voices start to hush a bit, as the conversation turns more serious and sometimes sensitive.

Guess what? Built-in laptop mics are worthless in a conference room with hushed voices.

So we switch the audio to the phone in the room. I can still see through Hangouts, but I need to mute my computer mic and speaker and handle audio over the phone. The sound is only marginally better.

Do I continue to strain to follow the conversation? Or interrupt the flow and discussion and ask that everyone cater to my needs? Not wanting to be a nuisance, I sometimes chose to do my best to follow along, even when it’s difficult to hear.

With that choice I become disengaged as it becomes difficult to follow conversation. I’ll be cranking the volume up and down, trying to regulate sound between the confident folks right next to the phone at the center of the table and the soft-spoken opinions in the far corners or the room.

In the most successful remote retro I’ve attended, everyone brought their laptops. Everyone connected to Google Hangouts. One person near the center kept their mic and speaker on. The rest muted both the mic and speaker, to avoid noisy feedback.

I could see everyone! No one was distracted by the one laptop being pointed around the room. I could see smiles or serious faces, I could tell if the room was laughing at a comment or offended. And they could see me!

In that retro, I was much more engaged. The audio improvement could have been a result of a smaller group (and closer sitting) that week. Or perhaps the topics did not have a heavy air, and so the volume level naturally stayed at a reasonable decibel. Or that particular laptop mic was just better.

Regardless, seeing the faces of my teammates was a breath of fresh air, and I was better able to gauge their feelings with the addition of facial expressions instead of just trying to read into attitudes on the phone.

The only “perfect” remote retro that I can imagine that ensures suitable audio for all attendees is for every person to attend remotely, in separate rooms or locations, so that no speakers or mics need to be muted. But for a team that is mostly in one location, this may be a nuisance. A fierce dedication to being remote-first would be necessary for this option to take hold.

Experiment with your team, see what tools work for your entire group. Speak up if a certain format isn’t working for you – if you have a good team, chances are they’d be happy to try a different way the next time. Regardless of the tools used, retros are important to help a team become more efficient, help individuals improve their craft, and as such the team should do their best to ensure all team members are able to stay engaged in the conversation.