Can You Hear Me

by Nick Morgan

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  The stakes range from high, if a big sale is at stake, to low if the call is more routine.

  Third, there are the weekly staff calls. These are the elevator music of the digital work world, commanding little respect and less attention—unless they are run well. The stakes are typically low. Let’s talk about how to improve all three types of calls.

  Put some life into your voice. It helps many people to have an actual person to talk to in the room with them. You’re less likely to drift into a lifeless monotone if you are speaking to someone in person. Having someone in the room with you helps keep the tone conversational and provides variety in your voice, as you naturally do when speaking with someone in person. Standing up helps, too; you’re less likely to let your voice drift into a deadly monotone.

  Put someone (else) in charge. If you’ve got people who are designated speakers, don’t expect them to also run the conference.

  Get someone additional to be the MC. The result will be well worth the extra effort involved in having someone to monitor problems, field questions, provide a road map, and so on. An MC should always think of himself or herself as the representative of the audience, asking questions that a reasonable person might wonder about. The MC should also summarize, follow up, coordinate, add in, and generally clean up the conversation as it unfolds. Done well, it’s an active role that can transform an audioconference of this ilk into one that is tight, memorable, and well run. The MC might also get into the habit of posting an agenda on a website or some other accessible place for potential participants to peruse ahead of time—and to use as a scorecard along the way during the call.

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  152 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Put a limit on the formal remarks. Attention spans have apparently shrunk to ten minutes these days.3 So never go longer than ten minutes with one person’s remarks without pausing for questions and comments. And take some questions as you go if there are several speakers. You can come back at the end for a general free-for-all, but do take questions after each speaker, unless you’re trying hard to bury something the first speaker is going to say.

  For the client call, try having someone from your side act as an advocate for the other side. This person could listen in to pick up on all the unanswered questions, unresolved issues, and unspoken complaints from the other side. If you’re the main salesperson, or if you’re delivering content, it will be difficult for you to listen with this sort of focus and attention. Leave the job for someone else.

  Circulate an agenda in advance, if the MC hasn’t, and appoint someone to take notes and send them out to all parties afterward. The agenda will allow participants to pace themselves.

  The follow-up will give everyone a chance to add and subtract things that are important; it will also provide an important reminder for anything that was agreed on.

  Take on or appoint the role of active listener. This is good meeting hygiene in any situation, but it’s particularly important on a conference call. An active listener repeats back (usually in a shorter, but not a reductive, way) what he or she has heard and gets confirmation that the impression was accurate.

  And there’s some personal stuff to get right, too. According to researcher Joshua Feast, CEO of Cogito Corporation, and Sandy Pentland, a Cogito cofounder, what becomes more important Chapter_07.indd 152

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  when you remove visual cues are two things—prosodic behaviors and the quality of your voice.4

  Prosodic behaviors are not as terrifying as they sound; they are simply the normal chatting habits that allow us to keep the chat flowing: taking turns, the tempo of the interaction, and, of course, listening. Most of those behaviors are accomplished unconsciously from long habit when we’re face-to-face, but when things get virtual, you have to do them intentionally. If you do, all the participants are more likely to feel included, equal partners, and listened to.

  The quality of your voice is very important, too. Is your tempo even, do you provide vocal variety, and do you avoid extremes of vocal behavior—shouting, screaming, or hanging up the phone?

  Pauses are important to show command, just as they are in person. But don’t pause too long, or your listeners will think you’ve had a stroke or—worse—lost interest.

  Give everyone equal time in a conference call If you’re trying to achieve a sense of collaboration, then Feast and Pentland’s research suggests that balance is important. Give everyone equal time. Make everyone take equal time; some slack-ers on the call may need to be prodded. And give them feedback to show that you acknowledge and appreciate what they’ve said.

  These are all practices you would do naturally in a face-to-face conversation (at least, I hope you would), but they become much harder to do virtually.

  Finally, what about that weekly staff call? How can you make it better? The face-to-face standing meeting may have been a bit dull or routine, but at least there were people in the room.

  Necessary group bonding could happen effortlessly, and group solidarity could be maintained even if not much else went on.

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  154 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels On a virtual staff call, bonding is essentially nonexistent, and you should assume that all too many of the supposed participants are doing something else.

  In addition to the above pointers that are relevant to your situation, begin by rethinking how long the meeting should go.

  Don’t schedule it for a half-hour or an hour just because that’s how long meetings went once upon a time. How about seven minutes? Or sixteen? Can you get everything done in that amount of time?

  Next, set aside time when no one is allowed to do anything except socialize. The real point—one of them, at least—of regular staff meetings is to define and solidify the group for all participants. That happens not as much in the formal stuff as in the chitchat at the beginning and end. Make sure that there is real time for this essential work. And get everyone to participate.

  If you’ve got a sense of fun, you might help establish rapport, at least initially, by having the group do entertaining social tasks like trivia, impromptu polls on current events, or contests that involve the whole group. Give out prizes. Make sure everyone participates. Pose a question for the next meeting such as “Come prepared to talk about your current pet or one you’ve owned in the past.”

  If the group is located in different regions and doesn’t see each other face-to-face naturally, then assign each person to do a thirty-second video on some social topic—favorite food, favorite local spot, interesting local custom, and so on. The idea is to allow each participant to share with the group something about who and where the person is.

  Finally, as you discuss items, and especially as you make decisions, poll the entire group. Never assume that silence implies consent. Silence can mean something in face-to-face meetings, Chapter_07.indd 154

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  because the leader can ascertain how people are feeling through their body language. But don’t trust silence on a virtual call.

  Silence implies nothing but mute. Never forget that.

  Make visible the rules and customs that are typically invisible in face-to-face settings You might, for instance, say that the participants can offer comments for so long, and then follow this period with a feedback session where you deliberately go around the virtual room and ask everyone for a response. You need to keep the discussions shorter and routinely monitor the way people respond. Think of it as your job to be the referee of the conversation.

  More than that, you need to ensure that emotions (normally revealed in body language) are verbalized when you sense that people feel strongly about something. You d
o this by checking with everyone around the room. Offering the participants a checklist of emotions can make it easier for people to share uncomfortable feelings when necessary. You can make it informal, by simply asking each person where he or she rates on an agreed-upon scale. For example, “On a one-to-five scale, where one is ‘hate it’ and five is

  ‘I’m ecstatic,’ how do you rate the new idea?” Or, “Rate the call (or idea, or decision, or proposed action) red, yellow, or green, where red is ‘stop, I hate it,’ yellow is ‘OK, I have some concerns, but am ready to proceed cautiously’, and green is ‘I’m in.’”

  For the longer term and for projects that last more than a month or two, establish a group activity with both virtual and physical aspects. For example, you might have everyone meet for virtual lunch and bring a national dish that people video and share. Or you might have participants take a tour of their office, floor, or building, either in real time or prepackaged. They can then share the resulting video with the rest of the team.

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  156 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Combine the virtual and the real

  for greatest effectiveness

  The research in this area is in its infancy, but it shows that the combination of real and virtual becomes a powerful way to keep people engaged.5 Thus, it’s time to take it up a notch. Where teams used to go on whitewater rafting trips to build trust and to test their values, now you’re going to engage your team in a shared activity, with part of the team owning the instructions for a puzzle and part of the team possessing the actual physical pieces of the puzzle to be put together. For example, you might give one part of the team a desirable electronic gadget that requires some assembly.

  Give the other part the instructions. Only in the combined effort will a successful solution be found. (And then, a month or two later, reverse the roles, so that no one becomes jealous.) Remember that the virtual bottom line is that people on the other end of the phone are getting less information than they would if you were all together in person. That means that the format will always be inherently less interesting than an in-person meeting. It’s an uphill battle to keep people’s attention, check on whether they’re still listening, and generally keep in touch. The following are some ways to keep the conversation engaging.

  Smile when you talk. Smiling warms up your vocal tone. When you sit down, like most office workers do, for long periods, you tend not to breathe properly and you get lethargic. Fight that by going for a brisk walk before the call and then smiling during it.

  Make the audioconference as interactive as possible. Conversations are interesting; listening to one person drone on for hours is not. Debates are interesting; monologues are not, unless you’re Chapter_07.indd 156

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  Richard III and your speechwriter is William Shakespeare. So, get two people in on the act.

  Instead of a talk, make it an interview. If you’ve got a speaker scheduled or even if you don’t, then consider employing the interview format rather than just having one person talk. The give-and-take of an interview is inherently interesting, especially if there are differing points of view.

  Be clear and present about the logistics, timing, and duration. I’m not a big fan of agenda slides for in-person talks, but the aural equivalent is very helpful on a conference call. Announce how long you’re going to run, announce frequently where you are, how long until questions, who’s talking, who’s on the phone, and so on. All of that helps create a more intimate feel, which would happen more or less automatically when everyone is together in the room. But it doesn’t happen on the phone without help. Think of yourself as the play-by-play announcer for the show that is going on in the virtual space, and make it as exciting as the playoffs.

  Use emotion-laden words when you’re trying to communicate something important. Normally, we decode the intent, emotion, and attitudes of the speaker through body language and, to a lesser extent, through tone of voice. On the phone, you only get tone of voice, and the aural input is not very good at that, because the fidelity of telephones is notoriously bad. You have to work hard, therefore, to tell people how you feel; they won’t necessarily pick it up from your body language unless you forgot to turn the video camera off.

  Use words that label your emotions so that no one doubts how you feel. Say things like, “I’m excited,” or “It’s really sad that,” or Chapter_07.indd 157

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  “Wow, Jim, that’s fantastic!” You’ll feel like it’s hard work until you practice it enough, but soon it will become second nature.

  And if you have teenage kids, the added benefit is that they’ll think you’re really, really weird when you start talking the same way at home.

  Address the issue of dominance

  in conference calls

  If you’re the leader of the team, you need to ask yourself a key question: How much do you dominate the conversation on the conference call? How much do you want to dominate it? If you’re like most people, and you like the sound of your own voice, the answer may be, “as much as possible.”

  But that attitude is not healthy for the team as a whole and especially not a virtual team. In the virtual world, a little goes a long way. Lacking the emotional connections that face-to-face body language provides, people are quicker to resent someone’s dominating the conversation; they are quicker to decide that the person is a bad human being and are quicker to tune out. Thus, you have to think about how much influence you want to have—

  very carefully.

  Let’s begin with positional power. If you have lots of it, influence becomes a relatively simple proposition. People with power over others tend to talk more, to interrupt more, and to guide the conversation more, by picking the topics, for example. This power still works online, as long as everyone on the call knows who you are—and you don’t abuse your power.

  In the virtual space, your role as the convener of the meeting, the one who initiates the technology, gives you a certain added authority that entitles you to a little more positional power than you would normally have. People commonly begin a conference Chapter_07.indd 158

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  call by asking who called the meeting. Such issues are easily worked out through body language in person but need to be made vocal on a call. Don’t overdo it, but if it’s your meeting, you get to call the shots.

  Now, what do you do if you want to challenge someone else’s positional authority? A different kind of power is conveyed by passion for the subject at hand. The problem with passion in the virtual world is that it’s mostly conveyed with body language, which is missing from the online configura-tion. As a result, passion can get filtered out and is less strik-ing when it appears. Further, because people are tuned out online, they are less likely to notice your passion and respond to it in a virtual meeting.

  On a conference call, then, you have to pour into your voice all the energy and passion that would normally get telegraphed when you jump up, start pacing around the room, and wave your hands in the air. Or when you pound on the table and raise your voice. Shouting doesn’t convey the same punch on a phone call.

  It just annoys the listeners, who have to adjust their headsets.

  Thus, passion can still carry the meeting in the virtual world, but just not quite as well. You have to be more articulate, muster more facts, tell better stories. The ante is raised on a call because the normal ways that passion sells itself—body language—are largely gone.

  You can dominate the conversation, beating out positional power, if you have expertise. Asserting your expertise doesn’t work quite as well virtually, but it still works much of the time.

  The diffident expert’s voice will be lost online in the usual inefficiency of, say, a conferen
ce call, in the clamor of people wanting to be heard. Expertise without passion is not always effective, but if it’s patient, it can be the last person standing in a debate and thereby get its turn.

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  160 Specific Techniques for Specific Digital Channels Both passion without confidence and

  confidence without passion fail in the long run Both online and in the real world, confidence all too often covers up a lack of expertise, and expertise without confidence can get ignored. It’s the fate of the engineer with average or below-

  average communication skills.

  And there’s a final way to dominate a conference call: be the last to speak. The last person tends to carry the day, since everyone’s input is less convincing, less forceful, and less authoritative than it is in person. If you can hold your verbal fire, do so—but don’t wait too long. The other habit that gets magnified online, of course, is that people lose interest and move on. You don’t want to wait until the verbal train has left the station to make your pitch.

  We learn at a very early age that conversation is a pas de deux, a game that two (or more) people play. It involves breathing, winking, nodding, eye contact, head tilts, hand gestures, and a whole series of subtle nonverbal signals that help all the parties communicate with one another. All these signals drop out of the virtual world. Indeed, that’s the whole problem in a nutshell: conversation is much less functional without these nonverbal signals. Conference calls inevitably involve far more interruptions, miscues, and cross-talking. We’re not getting the signals we’re used to getting to help us know when the other person is ready to hand the conversational baton on to us, and vice versa.