Episode #181: Zoom Meetings Starts From Hell - Part One

Like a lot of people, I have been searching for the roadmap to determine how to enable my business to survive this lockdown, work from home, brave new world. I belong to various Chambers of Commerce, mastermind and networking groups. I also have 24,000 LinkedIn connections, many of whom are pouring copious video meeting stuff into the daily feed. This means I can participate in numerous on-line events or watch the videos of people recording their on-line events. I do all this in the hope I can be become a more effective leader. Man, it is mainly painful though.

The technology employed usually revolves around having a Zoom video meeting or some similar equivalent screen based live broadcast. Usually, the organisers won’t allow you to join until the appointed time, so you are connected but in standby mode. Vaguely, you imagine that once the curtain goes up and you can join the proceedings, things will be of a professional standard, as they are now ready to rumble. Rarely the case though.

Most often the MC is not ready or there is no MC at all and we get an intimate introduction to how disorganised supposedly expert people are. What comes up on screen is often a shambles, as people struggle with the tech. Here is a hint. Don’t do it that way.

When you are going to start at the appointed time, you want all the presenters to have been successfully logged on fifteen minutes earlier and in place ready to go. Audio seems to be the dim cousin of video technology. Usually it is the biggest problem to get logged in properly, so we have to allow for people to log off and log back in, before we kick things off and that requires time.

We all usually Just In Time our swanning, grand entrance to a scheduled meeting in the office. In the on-line world, as a presenter, that is a high risk plan. Get there early and fifteen minutes is a good margin for correcting tech issues. These are much more frequent than we would expect or hope.

When the curtain goes up, what is the first thing the audience will see? It would appear that absolutely no thought has been given to this idea by the organisers. In a live, in person presentation, we know that the first few seconds determines the first impression of the speaker with the audience. Accordingly, we make efforts to make that a brilliant opening. When we are all on-line, that idea doesn’t seem to have carried across. There is no excuse for not designing the first impression you want to create with your audience, whether it be live or on-line.

For many, this video conferencing technology from home is a new thing. At the office, the tech team sets everything up in the meeting room and you just turn up. At home though, you are the tech team. It is also obvious that few people have spent any time learning how to use the tech, before the presentations. There are different systems and they all have their functionalities and idiosyncrasies.

Tooling around through the menus and doing rehearsals beforehand, makes a lot of sense in this environment, yet there hasn’t been an event I have attended to date, where I see any evidence of this occurring.

In the live presentation preparation world, we always stress the importance of rehearsal. Why would this idea become less significant, in a much higher stakes presentation environment? You can record your practice sessions and review how you will look on screen as well, which is a great tool for improving how you present on screen.

I recommend you have a slide up on screen, at the start, announcing again what the event is and who are the hosts. Use only voice at this stage, to announce what is going to happen in this broadcast. This forces everyone to focus on the screen and not have their vision split between the screen and a small box with a talking head in it.

As the speaker, after you have been introduced, turn your camera on and come on screen. Make sure you have arranged the environment at home to have a light source illuminating you clearly in front of the camera. Also, if you are using a laptop, raise the level of the laptop, so that the camera is at the same height as your eye line. Looking up the speaker’s nostrils, or over their impressive beer belly, because they have their laptop on the desk, is not a great first impression. Dress for business, so your full suit of armour needed.

In some cases, the technology allows you to have a green screen background, so that your personal living arrangements are not visible to the viewing audience. If you don’t have that option, then try to pick a spot at home with a background that is not too distracting from you, when you speak.

Just as you would live, commence with an opening statement that grabs everyone’s attention. Remember the audience are now totally wild and free from all social contracts to behave themselves, when you are speaking. They can be multi tasking like demons on speed at home. You can become just one of a number of things going on in their world at the same time. You need to crash through that clutter and grab their attention. Make them stop doing all that other crap and pay attention to you and you alone. This won’t happen by itself, so you have to design it from the start.

Video meetings are a different beast and we need to wrestle that beast into submission, so that we dominate it, rather than the other way around.