If I had a nickel for every person who has told me how much harder it is to present well over Zoom (or Teams or Meet or whatever platform), I could actually retire at some point.
There are many reasons for a remote presentation to be more difficult in terms of connecting with the group, reading the room, and assessing whether listeners are “with” you. Today we focus on the role the listener plays in your success, and why it can be easier to present well in person.
What’s the difference?
I’ll lead with the punchline: we rely on listener reactions to gauge how to present our narrative. We do not have access to these reactions over Zoom (or the like).
Why does a listener affect the speaker?
A study by Bavelas et al showed “the importance of moment-by-moment collaboration in face-to-face dialogue” by conducting an experiment.
Subjects were paired up and one partner told the other a “close-call story”. In some groups, the listers responded normally, which meant they provided natural responses (nodding, saying mm-hmm, wincing, or exclaiming). The other group of listeners was instructed to count all the words used in the story that started with the letter T. This distracted them such that they did not use normal responses or interjections.
The storytellers whose listeners were distracted and not engaging normally told far worse stories! They rambled, had abrupt endings, were choppy in narrative style, and justified their points waaaay more without the normal listener responses.
The listener’s response is essential to our confidence that we are getting our point across. A lack of confidence leads to not trusting ourselves, and therefore doing a worse job.
How does this translate to remote presenting?
It is probably obvious at this point why a remote presentation might suffer — we do not hear the “mm-hmm”s and other little noises of agreement, and we don’t see little facial expressions.
It doesn’t help that listeners on remote platforms also don’t honor this end of the communicative bargain – they behave as though watching TV instead of as though they are part of the conversation. They are often invisible, so why react?
And as the experiment referenced above shows, we tend to ramble, lose flow, and generally speak less well without listener feedback, which is typically absent (or reduced) in a remote context.
So what do we do about it?
Awareness of the issue is the first step. Simply knowing that it exists helps direct what to do about it. Being aware of the need to override the natural communicative assumptions of listener response is a huge part of addressing it.
Preparation, then, takes this need into account. Knowing that you might feel less secure that you are landing your points without responses allows to you practice with that in mind. This leads to…
Imagination is your friend here. You can literally imagine the audience responding with nods, smiles, little noises of agreement. If you see/feel this response, you can “trick” your brain into presenting with the same finesse you have with a live audience.
If you’d like some personalized guidance on performing well in remote presentations, reach out to schedule a session!
