Episode #186: Be Clear With Your OnLine Instructions

When we are immersed in our subject, be it a topic we are speaking on or a work theme we have lived and breathed, we need to be careful about letting familiarity breed confusion. In the on-line world we are often asking people to go into breakout rooms to discuss various weighty topics and then come back and report. The host can usually pop into these sealed off rooms and join the discussion. What you find when you do this can be alarming.

Either when you are in the room or when everyone comes back you discover the punters were not really clear what they were supposed to be discussing. Now we will get this same phenomenon in the real world as well and the puzzled punter can just ask for a clarification. In the on-line world, people are hesitant to mention they didn’t quite understand the task, before they are rocketed off to the breakout room, because they don’t want to admit they missed what everyone else seemed to get. All those little faces with beady eyes in tiny boxes on screen, can be a bit terrifying.

Once in the breakout room it becomes apparent they were not alone and no-one is exactly sure how this is supposed to work. I was on an international on-line session recently with nearly 170 people spread around the planet. We were given our task and swiftly bundled off to our rooms. Now being the note taking type, I had dutifully written down the steps we were we supposed to work through. What I discovered though, was that I was the odd ball bunny, because no one else had taken any notes. Consequently, they didn’t have a clear picture of what they needed to get to work on.

When we are running these things ourselves, we are captured by the tech and the breakout room requires a bit of finessing of the tech to get every one in place, so we are usually pre-occupied with the process. We forget to ask if anyone has a question or to double check on what people think is about to happen. It is a good practice to get the instructions on to a white board or a slide before we propel people into the ether and isolate them from humanity for the next number of minutes. Getting people to take a photo of the screen before they embark on their cyber journey is also handy.

My international on-line excursion was instructive, because the speaker was authentic, entertaining, the real deal and had bucketloads of knowledge of his subject. Yet at the crucial furlong he faltered and was spilled, unseated and we were left lost as we descended into cosmic isolation, trying to plumb what he said we needed to do. We may be doing the same thing with our people, when we have them on-line. We may be forgetting that if you ask 20 people to turn right, at least three will turn left. The simplest of instructions doesn't compute for some people, because they weren’t listening or they were preoccupied with other more attractive thoughts, than listening to us drone on.

Zoom meetings with a lot of people with their cameras turned on can be quite distracting. I suggest to turn them off and have none or only your face in that pathetic little box you get given on-screen. Do we really need to see all of those faces, all of the time. In a real life meeting, we are seated such that we can see the speaker and we hardly even look at the people seated to the left or right of us. Now in the on-line world, the speaker has to compete with all of these other faces vying for the attention of the audience. Cut the competition for your message down and have people focus on you alone. Turn the cameras off, hit “B” to make the slide deck go to black and then everyone is forced to concentrate on you. Hit “W” to bring up the slide deck again and keep going.

Breakouts give us the chance for discussions that are done with a manageable number of people. However, if people don’t know what they are supposed to be doing, because we flubbed it, then the whole exercise becomes one of frustration, dissatisfaction and pointlessness. Make sure everyone knows what is expected of them before you dispatch them to the on-line equivalent of the isolation ward.