7 Tips on How To Improve Your Virtual Meetings with Strategyzer Executive Advisor Paris Thomas

Hey, Matthias, how's it going, man? Hey, Paris. Pretty good so far. Your office slightly changed since the last time we spoke. Yeah, I'm at an airport lounge. They said that you're supposed to keep to your routine. So this is what I've done. I'm at an airport lounge. Hey, everyone. My name is Paris, and a few weeks ago I posted this picture on LinkedIn explaining my setup of how I do remote coachings and trainings. And I was explaining my Zoom rooms configuration and also my configuration back at home on how I work remotely. I've been working remotely for quite a few years now, and so I'm really used to this video calling, working from home sometimes, or not having to be at an office to do work. And so I got a lot of people asking me, you know, can I share a few more tips and tricks? So here's my video on 7 tips to improve the quality of your video meetings from home. All right, so tip number one is if you can use a virtual background, just like you saw in the beginning of this clip, it's actually quite fun. It keeps the energy high, and it's. Well, let's just say that eventually you actually think you're there. So pick a nice background. And I don't know how this works, but somehow, psychologically, there's a bit of an uplift in one knowing that you're not looking at your laundry or everything else you have in your room case. This is a sort of a guest room, and we're using it as a staging room for life working from home. And so it's nice to actually just escape, even visually, that space. Now, using a virtual background is not available for everybody. It depends on the software you use. I know Zoom has it, and it works really well, and you don't have to have a green screen, but if you do, the result is even more realistic. In my case, I have this green screen shift sheet that goes onto my chair, and as I move with my chair, then the background moves with me. But it's perfect because it's the right distance from my monitor. And I've been on calls where people had no idea that what I have behind me was not an airport lounge. So, yeah, have fun with that. Okay, Tip number two is to use your iPad or other tablet as a whiteboarding tool. So I use an iPad, and you can connect your iPad either through Airplay or. Or through a cable. And then you can use that as well if you have the sort of a pen or stylus. So I use the Apple pen on the iPad to make a whiteboarding session. And why that's useful? Well, you know, we use whiteboards in meetings all day long, so why not be able to actually engage and spice up the virtual meeting by actually drawing something out and being visual? My tool of choice for in terms of software is Procreate. And this app is fantastic because it recognizes dual monitors, which means that the actual pens and styluses and erasers and all these tools that I see on my screen are not visible to my. To the participants. The participants, all they see is the finished product of the whiteboard. So that's a great little combination of an iPad and Procreate, and in this case, zoom, in order to be able to use this wirelessly through airplane. Tip number three. It's a feature that's almost there in every software that I've seen for video conferencing, but really underutilized. And that's the polling feature. So asking questions, doing a poll online while the call is happening, if you're. Especially if you're doing coaching or training, it's a really great way to reinforce that people understood the content. And you can choose if this is anonymous or not. And it's actually quite fun and engaging for people to sort of vote and then go through multiple choices. And you have to remember that we're not all used to doing video calls and we're not used to using these technologies. So if you're leading such a call, it's kind of your responsibility to also educate participants. So instead of using the poll feature, if that's too complicated, there is also the raise hand or ask for a break or slow down or speed up all these signals. The participants can actually click, and you, as a host or moderator can. Can get feedback from them. But you do need to have a small session in the beginning of the call to educate people and give them an orientation of how to use those features. Tip number four is probably the most obvious one, which is to make sure if you're hosting this meeting, to have everybody on mute. It doesn't matter if it's three people or 300. Everybody has to be on mute because there's always this unexpected noise, especially with people now working from home. So have everybody on mute. As a host, you can mute everybody all at once, or you can selectively mute and unmute people and then just tell them, if you need to say something, go ahead and unmute. And you always have that part where people say, you're mute. We can't hear you. But eventually people get the hang of it. So don't be embarrassed to do so. Just set the rules from the beginning. Moving on to tip number five, and that is to have really good quality of audio. I think the best way to go around this is to have a headset. Wireless headsets, nowadays, almost everybody has one or uses one. My Choice is the AirPods Pro. They work really well, both as an audio source for input and output, and because I think really well on my feet when I'm doing training or coaching, I can be mobile, I can walk around while talking to my audience. You can also use a wireless microphone for that purpose. But what you don't want to use is your default microphone that's embedded in your laptop, especially if you have a laptop, and that's your tool of choice. The reason for that is these microphones are directional. And if you're using a dual monitor setup like I do, what happens is that at some point somebody will share a screen and you'll have to sort of look around and move away and look to the other screen. And when you do that, your voice is moving away from the microphone, which is usually right below your monitor. And so when that happens, your volume drops immediately. So you have a microphone in your laptop. But maybe best to invest in having light, little bit more, better quality of sound. That's really important. So tip number six is all about sharing screen. And this is a feature almost everybody uses, especially if you're hosting a meeting and you're going to be training or coaching and you're going to be sharing content, you're going to be at some point sharing your screen, which is typically either a keynote or a PowerPoint or some sort of document. What happens in most cases when you share your screen, the real estate of your video conferencing tool is basically taken up by that shared screen space. So everybody else becomes either tiny little windows, thumbnails, or you can't even see your audience as opposed to what you have when you're not sharing a screen, which is the, what's called a gallery view. And in the gallery view, everybody's in equally sized thumbnail. So you can see, you know, 10, 50 people in front of you with everybody's cameras on. But when you, when you lose the gallery view and all you see is your share screen, it would be the same thing as a speaker turning their back to the audience and just looking at their PowerPoint and reading from it. What happens is your energy level drops dramatically. You might not notice it, but because you're not seeing other people look at you, you're starting to get way deep into your own slides, and so you completely lose focus of your energy and things start to get boring. So my advice for this is that you need to look into the capabilities of the software you use and how you can actually circumvent that. But if you can't figure it out with sort of a nice little checkbox that you haven't managed to check, then one way around it would be to log in from a different device as a participant, say, for example, with your iPad. And on that device you can make sure you have gallery view, while on your device you can have your shared screen with your PowerPoint or Keynote. And so if you have that device there on, you have to make sure that's muted, otherwise you're going to get echo from your sound. Then you can have that device there to be your focal point of your audience looking at you. And just those eyes looking at you will make sure your energy is kept where it's supposed to be. Okay, my final tip for now is to have lots and lots of breaks. Looking at a monitor and having a video call is exhausting when you compare it with what we were used to, which was mostly face to face interactions. You want to have lots of breaks, especially if it's a longer than an hour type of session, at least every 45 minutes to an hour. You want to have a stretch break or a bio break where people actually are told you need to stand up and come back in five minutes. But even if it's an hour call, that doesn't mean that you're going to go nonstop without a break. It's really important. Rule of thumb, maybe every 15 to 20 minutes to engage one of those features that I spoke about and many other features that exist. For example, you know, the Polink feature I spoke about. But even breakout sessions where people can go into virtual breakout rooms and do an exercise or anything else, like asking them a question. Or even, especially if everybody's video is on, which I strongly encourage that you always ask your participants to have video on is to even ask them to raise their hand and physically raise their hand, not the virtual hand, but you can see on the monitor who agrees or disagrees with something. And these are little tricks and tips basically to keep everybody always engaged and always listening to what you have to say and not to drain their energy. Okay, so for this last tip, my guess is that there's a few of you out there who'd like to know more. What are those tips and tricks that we can use in between those 15 to 20 minute checkpoints to keep the audience engaged. If you'd like to know more, drop me a line or write a comment, maybe specifically on something you want to hear more about. Just let me know what your feedback is on this video so maybe we can discuss a few more things in even more detail. There's so much in this domain that we're all learning. I hope everybody's well and keep safe and go virtual. Thanks for listening.