Random musings: How to Elevate Your Presence in a Virtual Meeting

Monday, April 13, 2020

How to Elevate Your Presence in a Virtual Meeting

Today's blog post is based on an article from the Harvard Business Review:

Even before the COVID-19 crisis started, 5.3% of Americans — more than 8.2 million people — worked from home, according to a 2018 U.S. Census report. And with the outbreak turning more office workers into work-from-home employees, video conferences are becoming more routine for a wide range of business purposes, from staff meetings to brainstorming sessions to major announcements.

P.S. Did you submit your Census questionnaire? I did mine online. And if you're looking for part time or full time temporary work the Census is hiring. I worked during the 1980 Census and my son, Danny, worked during the 2010 Census.

But communication tactics that work well among colleagues in a conference room may not translate seamlessly to Brady-Bunch-style quadrants on a computer screen. Organizational behavior professor Andy Molinsky recommends seeing virtual meetings as “an entirely different context, not simply an in-person meeting or a class on a screen.”

I know I've been on a lot more Zoom meetings lately. Here's a post I did on Zoom a few weeks ago.

Elevating both your point and your presence in a Zoom, Skype, or similar virtual meeting, requires not only engaging in video conference-friendly tactics but also disabusing yourself of potentially detrimental misconceptions about the medium.

To help keep your impact actual when your presence is virtual, consider these six recommendations:

1. Focus on your camera, not your colleagues
2. Maintain a strong voice
3. Frame yourself wisely
4. Be present and mindful
5. Don’t become your own distraction
6. Use the chat window as your partner

I've tended to ignore the chat widow for the most part, unless specifically directed to it. And I recently found out that you can save a chat in Zoom. Here's how. You can save chats manually or automatically. I would suggest setting it up automatically, to your computer, so you can access any meeting's chat. The automatic setting needs to be done on the Zoom website, not the app. You can access the website from the app by clicking on View more settings at the bottom of the settings window.

Whether you’ve been participating in virtual meetings for years or just started this month, it’s important to realize that a video conference isn’t just a conference over video — it’s an entirely new interactive experience, which requires adapting your perspective, habits, and tactics to make it work effectively for you.