In this pandemic year it seems everybody and his brother now is a Zoom ‘expert.’ Much advice just is tactics (specific tips), like an article by Mike Koenigs at Entrepreneur on April 24, 2020 titled 25 Ways to make your Zoom meetings awesome. Every now and then we glimpse the bigger picture and get strategies, like in another article by Mike Koenigs at Forbes Coaches Council on May 6, 2020 titled Avoid the Top Five mistakes people make in Zoom meetings, which advised they were:
Ignoring or failing to leverage technology
Failing to connect with your audience
Failing to represent your brand
Failing to optimize for modern attention spans
Failing to observe online etiquette
But there are some real, capital E – Experts who have analyzed online meetings. One is Nick Morgan, who in 2018 wrote a 288-page book titled Can You Hear Me? How to connect with people in a virtual world. A third article by Nick Morgan at his Public Words blog on October 28, 2020 discusses Three ways to make video conferencing more bearable, which I describe as follows:
The Rule of Predictability
Provide an agenda (link to it as the very first item in the chat) and have a Master of Ceremonies.
The Rule of Transparency
Begin by checking for local issues. People may be too polite to bring them up. Take a break in the middle of the meeting for some casual chat.
The Rule of Visibility
Create a formal mechanism, like a hand raise, for passing the conversation to the next participant. At an in-person meeting you can see who is standing behind the lectern.
The person who finishes speaking on Zoom could acknowledge being done with the TADA reaction.
A fourth article by Nick Morgan at his Public Words blog on November 24, 2020 titled Making video conferences work for you describes five more specific things to do:
Don’t hang back
Do give back
Don’t hold back
Do feed back
Don’t sit back
Ignore that advice and you may find that Zoom meetings are just modern seances.
Cartoons of speakers were adapted from those at Wikimedia Commons.
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