Openings in technology-mediated business meetings

• This study describes the interactional accomplishment of openings in distant meetings.
• Establishing co-orientation to the shared meeting space involves multiple resources.
• These include visual monitoring and bodily orientation to computer screens.
• The mediated written agenda is crucial in achieving entry into meeting talk.
• Technological problems cause fluidity in interactional space and may cause delays.

The prerequisites for opening a meeting, or beginning any kind of interaction for that matter, are participants’ presence and shared orientation towards the situation at hand. This paper analyses how the initial moments of technology-mediated business meetings involving distributed work groups are organized sequentially and multimodally. Drawing on video-recorded meetings in an international company, it documents the multimodal practices used in the process of establishing co-orientation to the shared meeting space and achieving entry into the meeting. The analysis shows that the stepwise unfolding of the opening phase requires the coordination of verbal and bodily conducts as well as the affordances of the technological artefacts utilized. The study contributes to a growing body of research investigating the emergent, collective and multimodal accomplishment of activities in workplace meetings.