Four ways to keep people focused in screen meetings

Did you see Jaden Smith wearing a house on his head at the Grammys? The five-inch circle he had to peer through got me thinking about Microsoft Teams, or any similar platform. It’s no surprise people struggle to come across well through those tiny apertures.

Screen meetings are a relatively new phenomenon. A gift from Covid that kicked us into believing that ‘working from home’ actually could be just that.

And now we have to sell, pitch, influence, buy in, deliver, share, speak, communicate and everything else via this little screen. Any body language below the nipples has been rendered completely useless. Though it does mean we can feign interest and still do our emails when accounts are sharing the monthly numbers…

And this is the reason why we need to get good at screen influencing – because the default for most people is to ‘do their emails’ in a meeting.

How do you engage people better over Teams? Here are four ways:

1. Don’t use slides. Draw on a pad with a marker pen and show them, or use a Teams whiteboard. The polling tool is useful, too. Slides reduce us to the size of postage stamps, so avoid at all costs.
2. Bring your hands up. Our hands have become stuck to the keyboard and the mouse. In meetings, use your hands to emphasise numbers by showing three fingers, showing distance with both hands, offering a thumbs-up, or an OK sign. Use your hands.
3. Non-verbal communication is really important. Our body language and our tone can help drive our words home. Move away and towards the screen to reflect your level of engagement. Or show you are thinking by stroking your chin or putting your hand up to ask for a pause. We need to help other people to know what we are thinking, saying, and wanting by using our whole self to communicate through the screen. Especially above the nipples.
4. Long dialogues won’t work any more because the distractions (those emails) are too much. We must be more succinct and clear in our communication because the margin for being misunderstood has been multiplied by a factor of 10. How do you know when people have stopped listening? Observe. Look for who’s reading their emails, or fiddling with their phone. When that happens, stop and ask a question.