The Ultimate Guide to Listening in a Video Conference Part III of III

G'day - I'm Oscar Trimboli, and this is the Apple award-winning podcast, Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words.

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The Ultimate Guide for Listening on a Video Conference, Host Edition

This episode is the last of three in a series about how to listen as host during a video conference. If you haven't had a chance to listen to the overview, Episode 101, it outlines three things:

1. sequence before, during and after the meeting.

2. the role. Are you the host or the participant? And

3. the meeting size, intimate, interactive or broadcast.

In episode 101, we dived deeply into sequence, how to think about before, during and after the video conference.

In part two, episode 102, we explore your role as the host as well as a participant.

Like all the episodes, you can revisit them based on their episode number.

This one would be www.oscartrimboli.com/podcast/103

And the first episode in this series would be 101, and the second, 102.

If you haven't done so already, I strongly recommend you listen to these episodes in sequence starting at 101, 102 and then this one, 103.

You can listen to 101 at www.oscartrimboli.com/podcast/101

In this episode, the final in the series, we explore listening and hosting tips based on meeting size.

There are three meeting sizes.

1. The first one, the intimate meeting, you, maybe one or two others. It might be a catch up meeting with a peer. It might be a meeting with your manager. It might even be a job interview. A quick reminder, intimate meetings refer to the number of participants in the meeting, not the content being discussed.

2. Meeting size number two, interactive.

You as the host are part of the Zoom meeting, which has between three and 15 people. Typically, it's a regular meeting. It's a team meeting. It's a work in progress meeting. It could be a group meeting. It could be an executive or an ex-co meeting. It could be a board meeting. It could be a kickoff meeting. These meetings have a deliberate purpose, agenda and one or many hosts and one or many agenda items.

3. Meeting three, this is the broadcast meeting. These meetings typically involve over 20 people, and some people say the opportunity for engagement is limited.

In the 105 pages of The Ultimate Guide to Listening in a Video Conference, www.oscartrimboli.com/videoconference the primary navigational orientation is by meeting size.

The first question you need to ask yourself is what type of meeting, and then you can use the navigation inside the document to move you around really quickly.

If you visit oscartrimboli.com/videoconference, there's a 17-page preview guide.

In the preview guide, this outlines the welcome, the introduction, who is this guide for and who is it not for?

There's an explanation about how to use the guide, including the three key pages of navigational guidance. These are organized by the meeting size.

Each meeting, intimate, interactive or broadcast, is organized into a three by three grid.

Across the top from left to right, the context of the meeting, these three boxes, independent of the meeting, represent the host perspective, the participants' perspective and the meeting's outcome.

From left to right, it goes host, participant, outcome.

From top to bottom, it represents before, during and after the meeting.

In each of these nine boxes, there's a hyperlink which will take you directly to the explanation of each term with actions, questions, techniques and tips to make you a great listening host.

For the broadcast meeting, these boxes focus the host as follows:

Before, ask three questions of the group to understand their current mindset. During, acknowledge the themes in response to your initial three questions. After, announce what was heard during the broadcast and when you communicate the actions accordingly.

Before we jump into the guide, let's listen to Hugh Forrest, who serves as the chief programming officer for South by Southwest, held annually in Austin, Texas.

This event brings together more than 70,000 industry creatives from across the United States and around the world. And I have to say I'm very excited that in 2023, South by Southwest comes to my hometown of Sydney and looking forward to catching up with Hugh.

Next, Hugh will explain how South by Southwest prepare for thousands of broadcast presentations.

Hugh Forrest: We spend what I'd like to say is an inordinate amount of time reading through user feedback from the previous year. There are many good reasons for doing that. You learn about the event from a completely different perspective than you had as an organizer. There are often things that you learned that were great that you had no knowledge of. There are often things that you learned that didn't go so well that you had no knowledge of, and that just reading this feedback gives you a much better perspective and much fuller perspective and much more nuanced perspective of what was good and what needs improvement.

That process of reading feedback, of digesting feedback, of trying to understand feedback, of listening to what your users and what your community is saying can be mentally, emotionally, spiritually exhausting. It's often not easy reading sharp criticisms of what you've done, particularly if you think you've done something incredibly great, but I think you try to have a generally positive attitude here and understand it's all part of the learning process and helps you get better and throughout the most harsh criticisms and throughout the highest praise and the whatever objective truth is somewhere in the middle, but again, helps you do that by reading this feedback.

So we'll spend six weeks reading feedback, trying to analyze that feedback, try to put that into some general themes and even more specific themes. And then by about late May, early June, we're beginning to plan for the next year. And one of the big pieces in terms of planning for the next year is this South by Southwest Panel Picker interface that we've been using for approximately a decade. This is an interface where anyone in the community, which basically means that anyone with a web connection can enter a speaking proposal. It allows us to listen to what the community wants to get new ideas and new speakers into the event. We'll get somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 total ideas, speaking proposals for South by Southwest, of which hopefully about a thousand of those will be accepted to the event. The other 4,000 are also, again, very, very useful in terms of trying to discern what our community wants to hear, what our community wants to learn about that our community is much more focused on learning the latest technologies.

This Panel Picker system is ultimately a way for us to communicate with our audience, for us to learn from our audience, for us to listen to our audience, and I think it's one of the many things that has helped us continue to improve present event.

Oscar Trimboli: Whether you're preparing for 70, 700, 7,000 or 70,000 as Hugh has just explained, when it comes to the broadcast format, the majority of effort is actually in the preparation.

Let's jump to the guide now and understand how to prepare to listen before you commence the process of putting the content together for the broadcast meeting.

If you were to click on the link for the host in the guide right now before the broadcast meeting, this is what you'd read.

Before the meeting, many techniques available during intimate and interactive meetings are available in the broadcast meeting as well in the broadcast meeting.

Especially the ability to ask participants questions before the broadcast, during the registration process.

These questions signal that you want to listen. You want to make the session interactive. You want to signal to the audience that you want them to be part of the presentation.

Whatever you collect before the meeting, please make sure you summarize and integrate the themes from registration into the content of your broadcast.

This is where your effort will be.

It will be in collection, categorization, summarization and ultimately, presentation back to the group.

Be conscious that your questions in advance will influence and impact you, the participants, the group and the outcome.

For the broadcast meeting, balance your questions and responses between open questions and questions that force the participants to rate or rank a value that you can deconstruct later on for the audience.

In the guide, we provide a link on how to customize your meeting or webinar registration. If you are doing this via a Zoom meeting, the setting can be found via meeting, new meeting, and you want to check registration required. Make sure that check box is checked to on. When you do, make sure you hit save because it's a two-step process.

Then scroll down to the very end of that webpage and you will see a section called registration. You will have a new selection field called registration options.

Here, select edit. Then you'll be offered questions in a range of mandatory fields like first name, last name, country, city, etc., and you'll be asked questions and comments. That's right at the bottom. Make sure you check that on and set it as a required field. Now, make sure you hit safe again. It's really critical to hit save.

These custom questions, you can tailor them for the audience as part of the registration process, and now when they register for the event, they will be offered a mandatory question to complete.

Remember, you don't need to use Zoom tools to collect this information, yet it creates a strong incentive for the audience if they answer the questions as part of the registration process.

It's just simply a better experience for them as well.

In the guide, we also provide a link to the full information about how to set up these questions as part of the registration process if you're using a Zoom webinar.

Next, consider what and how you'll ask for information.

If you're requesting a response as a comment to this question,

how clear is our strategy?

This will allow people to type in a few words, a few sentences to describe this.

This creates nuance.

This creates texture.

This creates really useful verbatims that emerge from the patterns of user responses.

Now, that's a very different level of engagement and care if you ask participants the identical question, yet they can only choose from one of these five, so the question might be,

our strategy is clear, and then the options you may offer them, strongly agree, disagree, neither disagree or agree, agree or strongly agree. Those five options will fit nicely into a chart, a pie graph.

They will provide very clear numeric insights for the room. What it lacks then is the richness of the insights from the verbatim.

Now, if we use the first question alone just with comments, this will require more effort on your part in preparation.

The second, it'll take you about 30 seconds to graph that information.

Now, neither is right or wrong and what I recommend that where possible, use both approaches to collect some numeric information and some information that's open comments as well.

No matter how you choose to listen and ask questions in advance of the broadcast, please make sure you summarize them into themes and ideally into your response in your action plan in the first third of your broadcast.

Now, an assumption many people make is that you need to present the broadcast live.

Yet, if you use these techniques, you can prerecord the broadcast as well.

There is no reason that you can't think about given the outcome of this meeting, should my content be prerecorded or should it be presented live?

I don't think a lot of leaders think about the trade off in live versus prerecorded. When is either appropriate is an important question to ask.

Now, back to the questions. Balance your questions between open and defined responses.

Here are five examples.

1. What is one question you'd like to ask the presenter about the topic?
2. What is one barrier to achieving the outcome?
3. What is one resource you must have to achieve the outcome?
4. Which one of our competitors can we learn the most from and why?
5. And finally, what is one thing our customers are consistently asking us for that we aren't providing?

Now, the focus on one is designed to prioritize the responses from the audience.

In question four, which one of our competitors can we learn the most from and why?

This question allows not only the competitor to be named, a value, but why allows us to get more nuanced. So make sure you balance them and use your judgement about whether you're using prioritization questions or open ended questions.

Next, you want to think about the participant's perspective.

Depending on the audience size, I recommend you create subsets of perspectives from the audience's responses to your questions, rather than treating every result exactly the same.

If the audience is more than 30 people, you should be breaking down the presentation into multiple groups.

It might be by age or tenure or location or profession, maybe by department or seniority.

Collecting this information in big, big groups, hundreds and hundreds of people will allow you to prerecord broadcasts that are tailored specifically to audience subsets.

Now, not all organizations will have the ability to create registrations like that, but when we've used this, it's been really potent form of listening for the broadcast.

For live audiences, it means you'll be tailoring parts of the presentation as well.

Examples of this could include tailoring your communication based on the departments in an organization setting.

It might sound like this.

"This is what we heard from finance and this is what we'll do as a result for finance employees. We heard something slightly different from engineering. They need us to be doing this, and it'll take us a little bit longer, possibly the next three months."

Another context could be based on the tenure of the employees, how long they've been working for your organization.

Your content could sound like,

"We notice employees with a tenure beyond a decade have these three key issues, whereas employees that have been with the organization for only two years have these immediate priorities."

Providing these insights based on the group information collected creates a perspective not just for you as the presenter, it creates perspective for everybody in the audience to realize that their perspective is not unique, and other areas, groups or departments have slightly different requirements.

This also sets them up for success in helping them achieve their outcomes as well because they are listening not only for their departments but also the needs of other departments, other projects, other tenure groups.

This unifies the perspective of each person and integrates them across the organization.

The final context could be if you are presenting to a completely unknown audience, you might need to find content and context criteria to integrate it in.

Examples of how I've used this,

"although customer care team spent more time talking with the customers than executives, executives spend more time talking about the importance of customers."

Another approach I used in a presentation was

"although finance spends time discussing cost control, they are the highest paid employees in the organization. "

The contrast of both of these creates deep engagement, and in both cases, it set the chat on fire.

Finally, thinking about the outcome. Think about your themes, your groups and cohorts defined by playing back participant issues and ensure that these themes are amplified in the first third of the broadcast, and sprinkle this content throughout the middle and final third of your presentation, and this will maintain the audience's engagement.

I just want to share some of my perspective when I define this checklist with the organizations I speak to, to broadcast with.

We go through a checklist typically a week to two weeks out. This is typically administrative setup.

• Who is the host?
• What is the introduction?
• How will the handovers work?
• Is there a moderator?
• These kinds of questions.

One thing that consistently surprises me though is my request to have closed captions activated before the meeting commences.

Not everybody in the audience's first language will be the language I'm speaking in.

Activating live transcription or closed caption is a simple way to assist people where the broadcast language is not their first language.

If people get distracted during the broadcast, they can quickly return to the discussion by catching up through closed captions because it's typically delayed between three and seven seconds.

Please keep in mind that the participants can activate or deactivate the closed captioning themselves, but they can only do that if it's turned on in the administrative settings of Zoom.

This covers off the first part, the before part of a broadcast section from the guide.

There are seven pages dedicated to the broadcast meeting. We have just covered off the first three pages, the before section of the guide as it relates to the broadcast meeting.

Whether you're a beginner, intermediate or a Zoom master host, the 105-page Ultimate Guide to Listening in a Zoom Conference has many more tips and techniques for you.

The difference between hearing and listening is action.

If you would like to access the guide, visit www.oscartrimboli.com/videoconference.

There you'll be able to see the preview of the guide, 17 pages or the 105-page guide.

I'm Oscar Trimboli, and along with the Deep Listening Ambassador community, we're on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the workplace one conversation at a time.

And you've given us the greatest gift of all today. You've listened to us.

Thanks for listening.