Episode #309: Presenting Online Isn't Going Away, Ever

Remote work is a sticky concept. Bosses may prefer to have people under direct supervision in the office, but the masses have voted with their feet and headed home. Tokyo commutes are a shocker. Crowded trains, standing squashed up against total strangers for long hours is not something anyone looks forward to and being able to ditch all of that and stay home instead sounds much better. There is a need for in-person teamwork and finding the balance between remote days and days in the office is a hot topic at the moment and will continue to be so.

Internal and external meetings will need to be conducted remotely. We are entering the hybrid world where some of the team are in the same office meeting room and everyone else is at home connecting remotely. This will spill over to meetings with clients. Japan is always a country where there is a surprising number of people required for the meeting on the client side. I can’t count the number of times when there was just me on one side of the table and host of people on the other, with me wondering why are there so many required for this meeting? That will continue in the remote world and in the hybrid meeting world too.

This presents a number of problems. Engaging our audiences online and in the room are both difficult thanks to the technology. When groups gather in a room for the meeting, there is normally one camera to cover all. There are some tools available like the Owl which uses multiple cameras covering 360 degrees, to show who is speaking on the screen for those who are remote. This is good, but there is a limit to its effectiveness, because it suits small groups gathered in a U-shape. Sound is the issue here. Usually there are one or two of those UFO looking microphones on the desk to pick up the audio and in my experience they are never quite satisfactory. It is also very frustrating when those in the room react to an unintelligible remark and start laughing, while those beaming in remotely have no clue what is going on. This really divides the group into first and second class citizens very quickly.

The other problem, which despite everyone working with the technology for the last number of years, is that few people still understand how to use the camera. In a meeting room with one shared camera it is difficult, because the distance to the people speaking is quite far and with a wide shot, we don’t feel any connection with them. The Owl and similar technology can help, but I haven’t seen too many firms bothering to use it when they already have installed one camera at the front of the room.

For those joining remotely, they invariably fail to look at the camera at all and are looking down at the faces on the screen. This is understandable, because we are trained to look at people faces and this is where all the body language information is located. Unfortunately, we are not looking at the people though, because our eyes are downcast. We are looking at the middle of the screen, rather than at the green dot, which is where the camera is located on the top of the laptop. When we ignore the people’s faces on screen and talk directly to the green dot, we are now engaging directly with the audience because they see us looking straight at them. For the speaker though, it is not very satisfying, because there is no sense of strong personal bond between us and the audience faces on screen, so we feel disconnected.

To add to the already heightened degree of difficulty, when we introduce slides, the speaker becomes this person trapped in a tiny little box on the screen. We cannot really see them very well, so the personal relationship is lost. Normally when we are presenting, our face, voice and gestures are critical to being persuasive, but when virtual we are robbed of two of the elements. We only have our voice to work with. Sadly, very few people understand the importance of how to use modulation, pauses and speed control for emphasis when speaking. Take note next time you hear people giving a talk or in a virtual meeting. The tendency is to put the same amount of speed and strength behind every word. Boring and often monotonous.

In fact, we need to use pauses more in the remote world, to allow people the people listening to follow what we are saying. Also, we purposely hit key words with more power and this is a must, if we want to lift certain key words in the understanding of our audience. This is not a word democracy. Not every word has the same value in a sentence. Most people who are not trained properly give each word gets the same emphasis treatment, so there is no differentiation.

Do we really need to have the slides up all of the time? If we can stop sharing the screen as often as possible and present ourselves in full screen mode that is best. Yes, that may mean a bit of switching between getting the slide deck up again and alternating between it and ourselves, but this is the way for us to have more impact. Being on full screen allows us to employ gestures, however limited and also to make the best use of our facial expressions. These are very powerful in driving home our point and communicating our message.

Having the camera at eye height would seem to be an obvious thing, but I still see so many people just resting the laptop on the table in front of them. Why shooting up one’s nose is thought to be professional or attractive is a mystery to me, but a lot of people have zero self-awareness and continue to make this most basic of mistakes. We want to get that camera at eye height, so we can make it easier to ignore what is going on in the main screen and just engage each person directly through the camera.

If people don’t work these things out, we will all be treated to desultory presentations for the remainder of our working careers. That thought sends a shiver up my spine, I can tell you. Or can we all get back to the understanding that this remote medium has its own idiosyncrasies and we have to master them, because this medium isn’t going away.

I hope they can come up with a technology solution that give us the type of effect you can have with a teleprompter, where you can be looking straight at the camera in the middle of the screen, rather than just the green dot, which is mounted at the top. That would help us all to be better able to engage the people on screen with great eye contact and improve our communication effectiveness. Until the technology catches up, let’s get to work on what we can control and be a professional when in person and when beaming in virtually.