How to Make your Next Zoom Call Suck Less
By: Wang Yip
Tags: Zoom, Online Meetings, Audience Engagement, Meetings, Presentations

How to Make your Next Zoom Call Suck Less

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Is anybody else getting tired of the constant Zoom calls or online meetings that we have? At one company I worked, the company decided to get rid of all landline phones in the office. We all had Skype on our laptops and our laptops were always with us, so we would call each other through Skype if we wanted to talk. In many of those online meetings, if I was in the room, I would take a look around to see who was paying attention to the speaker. If the speaker was not in the same room, everybody around the room would be doing something else on their laptop while ‘listening’.

Sound familiar with what is happening today? Do you:

Mute yourself in an online meeting and then check e-mail or your phone?

Disable your video and then run off to do other errands around the house?

Find yourself constantly switching back and forth between the online meeting window and other windows on your computer?

Unfortunately, this is the reality of the situation. Having attended hundreds, maybe even thousands of online meetings, these are five ways that I have seen and experienced that can help:

Make an agreement with attendees

Seth Godin wrote Toward a Zoom agreement, which made me wonder — why don’t companies have agreements for meetings? I would also add that of the many companies that I have worked for (government, private, non-profit), none of them had any documents or policies regarding meetings and how to conduct more effective meetings. An agreement would be a great start:

If you promise not to check your email while we’re talking, we promise to not waste your time. If you agree to look me in the eye and try to absorb the gist of what I’m saying, I agree to be crisp, cogent and on point. If you are clear about which meetings are a waste of time for you to attend, we can be sure to have them without you. If you can egg me on and bring enthusiasm to the interaction, I can lean into the work and reflect back even more energy than you’re contributing. — Seth Godin

Ask yourself if you really need a meeting

A simple question to ask yourself that makes all the difference. Do you really need to hold an online meeting? Will an e-mail suffice? Can you hold the discussion on an internal team board?

Check out this handy decision tree from an HBR article on understanding whether or not you need to hold a meeting or not.

Decision tree for holding a meeting from HBR.ORG

In short, you need to ask yourself and answer yes to all of the following questions (adapted for online meetings):

Do I need input from others to move forward?

Will this discussion require a lot of back and forth (i.e., complex issue, lots of questions or explanations)?

Is an online meeting the fastest way to do the above?

Be considerate

There are many ways to be considerate to meeting participants, as a host:

Keep meetings as concise as possible.

Have an agenda with a specific purpose and stick to the agenda by controlling questions and off-topic discussions.

Start the meeting on time. End the meeting on time.

If you have to have a longer meeting, have frequent breaks to allow participants to stretch, use the rest room, get snacks, attend to children, etc.

It’s likely that if your company is global, you have to schedule meetings with participants in different time zones. Schedule the online meeting within typical work hours (9AM — 5 PM) if possible.

Pay attention and do not multi-task.

Make sure the technology works — i.e., everybody can see and hear you. Participants that are not speaking are muted. Videos and links have been tested and work through screen sharing.

Pay attention to the chat for questions or issues with the technology.

Tell stories

Out of all the ways to lose your audience, the best way is to read directly off the slides. Having conducted and listened to hundreds of presentations for work and Toastmasters, I know that some or all of the following must be true:

The speaker did not prepare beforehand.

The speaker does not care about engaging with the audience.

The speaker has nothing else to add to the slides.

In Dan Roam’s Show & Tell, Dan suggests that an ideal slide contains a single idea and:

A headline

A picture

A brief caption

Nothing else

Too much text? Find a picture to explain the key idea.

Is there too much to explain in one slide? Break it up into multiple slides.

Does the slide look more like a screenshot of a business case? Pare it down until you have the information you really want to show.

Request feedback as the host

Some of the best online meetings I have attended allowed participants to provide feedback on the meeting itself. Was it the very fact that the meeting host requested feedback and therefore, was constantly getting better? Or the fact that the host was humble enough to know that their meetings could improve?

How could the meeting have been conducted more effectively? How could the host or speaker engage the audience more? Was the content interesting? Useful? Relevant?

I would not suggest providing feedback to the meeting host — this almost never ends up well. Instead, I suggest that the next time you are running a meeting, ask for feedback from attendees. Lead and be the example for others to follow. And the most important part about asking for feedback?

Listen without any ego.

Note down all the things that attendees tell you and then incorporate it into your meetings next time. Show others that you are willing to improve and watch as others follow your example.

Recap

Unfortunately, not all online meetings can be skipped or avoided. You do have to have meetings. But that doesn’t mean that online meetings have to suck. If you are conducting the meeting, you have a responsibility, an obligation, to help meeting participants get what they need out of the meeting.

To do this: