Help! I’ve Got to Take Video Meetings From Home
During this nation-wide effort to contain the COVID-19 virus, more of us will be working from home. You may be in various online meetings as a host or team member.
We at Convey Communications would like to offer you some best practices ideas for video web presence. All are easy, sensible, and point to you being a leader.
1. Find a quiet area with no distractions, making sure your background is interesting, but not too busy.
2. Use good earbuds or a headset. Your voice will come through more clearly, making it easier on everyone else. This helps when there’s background noise, but also when the room is quiet.
Too much backlighting doesn’t do you any favors!
3. Avoid backlighting! Have the light in front of you. Let your image shine! (Even – especially – if just your face.) The camera lens is adjusting to the light bouncing back at it, or lack thereof. So if there’s light behind it, it focuses on that - not you - and no one can see anything. Let’s get as much light bouncing off your face as possible. (Yes, there’s a long history of photography technology being developed for white people. These auto-adjustment lenses are made for white people. If you are a person of color, the lighting is even more important.) Play with lighting in your home or office to see what works best for you. Diffused light is best to hide shadows. Bounce light off a wall, you know your angles! It is not vainto look your best for your audience, it is respectful.
4. Camera lens should be at eye level or just above. I’ve used a monitor riser, stack of books, or a shoe box to elevate my laptop to the best height. And it should be stable. Small movements of the camera look huge to the people on the other side. If you’re using a laptop, the worst place you can put it is… in your lap.
This helps us look directly into the eyes of our audience. Even during video conferences, eye contact is still vital to good communication.
5. Eye contact matters! It’s just tricky in a video conference. Looking at the eyes of someone on your screen looks to the viewer like you’re looking down, not paying attention. The viewer sees what the camera lens sees (not what the screen sees), and that camera is just above the screen on your laptop. When you look into the camera lens, you’re making eye contact with your audience, which is very important for building trust and likeability. It can be tricky, especially when you’re listening, but at least make sure you look at the lens when you’re speaking. (Pro-tip: At Convey, we stick little googly-eyes stickers right next to our camera lens. ) And please, for the love of everything, don’t have other windows open where you’re reading something while others are talking, or worse, scrolling through a social media feed. We can all see what your eyes are doing.
6. BREATHE!!! Good support is vital when speaking on camera or on air. Sitting is generally not ideal for breath support, but at home you might be seated in your more comfortable, non-adjustable, non-office chairs. You may be slouching quite a bit more. Guard your posture while seated to keep from cutting off your breath.
7. Be still. Notice how movements seem much faster in this kind of close-up. A tiny movement looks BIG. A warm and welcoming default resting face is required, smile with your eyes. Gesturing and gesticulating is not preferred in close-ups, and as this is essentially a close-up, keep it at a minimum here. More often than not, it will just be your fingertips dancing across the bottom of the frame. And because this camera angle is essentially a close-up, all your facial expressions seem more serious or severe. Smile more!
8. Rest hands in lap or on desk if you’re not writing. NOT the elbows. Your shoulders will hunch up, and you will not seem relaxed, it will be harder to breathe.
9. Take notes on paper. Gasp! I know, it’s so old school! But if you’re typing EVERYONE is going to hear it.
10. Video conferencing is where it’s at! Embrace it! Insist on it over conference calls. You’ll feel more connected, you’ll hear fewer awkward pauses and interruptions, and you’re likely to recall more of the meeting afterwards.
Good luck with your video conferences and meetings, we’ll get through all of this together! And who knows, maybe you’ll find yourself having more of these after the crisis passes.