Do’s and Don’ts To Make Video Conferences Work For You
We’ve been in this pandemic long enough to know viscerally that video conferences don’t work as well as face-to-face communication. There’s something missing — and we know what it is: connection.
The human connection we had often taken for granted before the pandemic started thrives from — requires — face to face communications. The normal signals that connect us are muted on video conferencing. Even though we can see the other person, their affect is muted by the two dimensions, the small size of the other person, the bad lighting, the slight delay between video and sound, and proprioception, all which I’ve talked about before.
How do you make video conferences a boon for commitment, rather than a trial the participants endure?
The hard answer is that you have to bring more to the party than you might have done before.
Don’t hang back. You need to be the one that provides the energy to make the meeting a success. Don’t leave it to the others. Because you’re just another node on the network, and just a URL away from somewhere else, it’s easy to be a freeloader on a video conference. It’s easy to wait and see if it has anything to offer you, like a teenager at a mixer, waiting to see if someone else will dance first. There is no place for wallflowers on a video conference, not…
