Episode #339: Hybrid Presentations Can Be Fraught

Presenting online is difficult. Presenting in person is difficult. The new hybrid version is a combination of the worst of both online and in-person worlds for the presenter. We teach presentation skills and one of the big breakthroughs for our class participants is the ability to get engagement with their audience. In the online world of presenting this is almost impossible. You become this tiny talking head, trapped in a tiny box on screen, every time you are using slides. If there are no slides it gets better. It also gets better if you stop the sharing function as you get a little more screen real estate. The trouble is this feature is clunky every time you want to go back to using the slides again and the interchanges are not very elegant. If you can have the speaker view only function working, then you get a lot of screen ratio focused on the speaker and that is good. Usually though, we are using slides and so it is back to the tiny box for all of us on-screen.

The real dilemma with hybrid is where some members of the audience are sitting there right in front of you and the rest are scattered to the four winds, coming in via the hosting platform, be that Zoom or Teams or Webex or whatever. There are issues with the camera angles, the camera zoom-in function and especially with the audio quality. If the camera is mounted at the back of the room, then the audience on-line gets a wide shot of those in the room, as well as the speaker up at the front of the room. In this case, we are very remote from the people watching from home. This insignificance factor is intensified by the fact we are highly diminished on screen, stuck in that tiny little box and being presented at a distance to our audience. Our facial expression power is greatly reduced and even our gestures are not having much impact, because they seem so small when on screen.

I was giving a talk recently using the hybrid system and I realised this particular set up was for people who don't know how to present and actually favoured those who like to lecture. By that I mean the speaker is there to convey information and isn’t thinking how to engage the audience. The camera was mounted on a screen to my right, up high. There was a distance between that camera and my face and if I moved toward my audience in the room, I found I was tracking away from the camera set up for those at home. Don’t forget, for those viewing from home, I was doing all this while trapped in that tiny box on screen, because I was using slides.

The set up meant I couldn’t move much from the spot and that spot was set behind a podium. Now I don’t recommend moving around too much when speaking because it can be distracting from the message. However, being able to use your full body language is a powerful tool we don’t want to negate if we can avoid it and getting out from behind the podium is preferred. In this case that wasn’t possible, so the audience in the room wasn’t getting full access to me as the speaker.

The easy out is to ignore the needs of the audience coming in online and just present to those in the room. For those at home the video presentation is like that for a third party. They are there watching remotely and there is zero connection and engagement with the person on screen. If we go the other way, then we just engage those at home and don’t worry about those in the room. That isn’t a very natural or an easy thing for a speaker to do, when all of these faces are sitting there and staring up at you in the room.

We have to accept that so far, we cannot easily get this to work perfectly when using two competing mediums. Having said that, we can try and improve on it being a disaster by a couple of tweaks. If the camera is close to us, then regularly switching our attention from those in the room, to those at home is possible. We just look straight into the camera and we can speak directly to this segment of the audience. We can make our point to this audience and then switch back to those in the room and make our next point. The key is to look at the camera and not the screen. We just treat the on-line camera as another member of the in-room audience.

Eye height is ideal for the camera mounting, so adjust it if you can, to get that perspective. Make sure the audio quality is well served by having a good microphone set up, so that people online can hear you. If the in-room audience is under 30 people, then you can get away with not needing a separate microphone for them.

The better solution requires some preparation. Have a monitor at the back so the speaker can see the remote audience and also themselves, with everyone equally trapped in their little boxes on-line. The slide deck is also being shown through Zoom etc., so that the remote audience can see what is going on, while the live audience has a screen in the room they can see. Have the speaker fitted with a pin mic, so that they can move and not be trapped behind a podium or a desk.

Have three video cameras set up. One zoomed in on the speaker for a tight shot and one for a wider, more full body shot. Have another set up at the front of the room to capture the shot of the audience. This requires a connection to a control box, where the camera angles can be switched easily by a controller. The speaker now only has to engage the live audience. The camera angles are set up from the in-room audience perspective so that those at home get the same sense of the presentation as those present. They are getting the video of the speech live and all the speaker has to do is engage by looking straight at the cameras while giving the speech, to help the remote audience feel included. We spend six seconds each time looking at our live audience members and we just do the same with the two cameras facing us, as if they were also audience members.

The setup I had for my recent talk was not satisfactory and I felt both the remote and in-person audiences had been cheated. I also felt my personal brand had been tarnished by this less than satisfactory experience. When we are invited to speak we have little control over how the hosts arrange the venue and the equipment. One of my take aways for next time was to engage the hosts more in depth on how they are going to handle this hybrid medium presentation. If they are not going to do it in a way which builds, or at least maintains, my professional brand, then I would decline the offer to speak. I might offer to give two talks - one for those in the room and do a separate one for those at home. That isn’t always possible, but as the speaker, tasting the bitter ash residue of a failed, half-baked presentation isn’t great either.