Remote Connection: Forging Meaningful Virtual Communication - Public Speaking Tips
Most advice for virtual professionals looking to improve their communication skills omits a crucial detail: how forging genuine and meaningful connections with your far-flung colleagues is the secret to achieving consistent and effective remote communication long-term.
My recent google search of the phrase, ‘advice for virtual teams,’ returned 49,600,000 hits! I couldn’t help but notice what was crucially missing from most of the articles on the first several pages of results. Any acknowledgement that the key to effective and productive communication long-term in a virtual workplace depends first on forging meaningful connections with colleagues.
Understanding how to create meaningful connections across virtual space is not unlike understanding what happens to when one of our 5 senses is diminished or taken away.
When it comes to the 5 human senses of touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing, the brain tends to organize itself based on function: the sensory cortex processes smell, the visual cortex sight, the auditory cortex responds to sound, etc.
However, for those born with (or who develop early in childhood) the inability to do things such as hear or see, their respective areas of the brain are actually not rendered completely obsolete.
Studies show that visual information is typically processed by a specific part of our neurological cortex that assesses spatial arrangement of objects around us, yet for someone blind since their childhood this same part of their visual cortex receives sound and touch information instead!
This allows a visually-impared or blind person to use their other senses, such as smell and touch, to establish a picture of their physical environment, just as those with the ability to see can. We too have the ability to adapt to the impact communicating in a virtual space has on the quality of our communication.
Let’s think about how our senses as they relate to communication--sight and sound specifically--are affected when communicating virtually.
It can certainly be argued that eye contact’s ability to help us feel connected and present to another person is greatly diminished in a virtual space. And that a whole host of awkward and distracting sounds may occur. Everything from distortion of someone’s voice due to a faulty microphone or a poor internet connection, to chimes and alerts from other computer programs such as Slack or Gchat.
In order to achieve thoughtful person-to-person connection in a virtual space it’s important to understand how to offset the ways our senses of sight and sound are compromised. To do this, let’s begin with a concept I often use with clients: working outside in and inside out.
Working outside-in entails understanding how the external choices you make in front of an audience influence the impression you make. These include your vocal tone, facial expression, and physical presence.
Working inside-out involves reflecting ahead of time on what you want your audience to do, feel, or understand from your message which translates to your audience objective.
Tackling outside-in first, the following steps will guide you towards achieving a rewarding virtual exchange with colleagues:
Establish a relationship with the light of the web camera. Channel your energy and focus into it just as you would a person in the same room as you.
Pay extra attention to your posture. It’s easy when something feels more casual, such as sitting in your living room, to let your posture respond in kind. Take care to sit up straight to encourage projecting an open and inviting energy.
Minimize visual distractions in your environment; the person you’re communicating with will easily pick up on it if you’re looking at a different program or screen and multi-tasking rather than engaging with them directly.
Inside-out necessitates more nuance. For example let’s start by establishing your audience objective that I mentioned earlier. This could be something such as, “My goal is to make my team feel confident I will successfully execute on our project’s next work sprint.”
Here, the sensory elements related to communication most vulnerable to diminishment by a virtual environment are your active listening skills and emotional intelligence or EQ (which roughly translates to your ability to pick up on and respond to social cues.) In order to offer both of these areas extra support, try the following:
Do a quick assessment of your listening habits with this checklist. Note your problem areas and be especially mindful to avoid them during your next online exchange. During longer conversations challenge yourself to note whether you’re able to avoid your pitfalls for the duration of the exchange or only at the beginning. When we get tired or stressed is when our communication bad habits creep back in.
Review the Seven Levels of Listening and commit to achieving, at minimum, Level 4, Focused Listening. Not all workplace scenarios demand or are enriched by exhibiting Level 7, Engaged Listening. This involves gaining an understanding of the other person’s views, feelings, and values. It would be a little odd to ask your supervisor her emotional relationship to the proposal’s due date of next Tuesday.
Allow more space at the beginning of the exchange and throughout your conversation to sense the ‘vibe’ and mood of those you are speaking to. Instead of starting the meeting by diving directly into the task at hand, instead ask everyone about their plans from the previous weekend or inquire who’s seen the latest internet meme sensation. Building in just a few seconds of small talk to a conversation can make us feel happier and more connected to one another.
One final point of advice: it always helps to make it a story. Email and other forms of online communication are inherently designed to streamline and truncate communication. For example, “4got 2 tell u, I will c u there.” As a result you may inadvertently overly streamline your communication in virtual space in order to seem efficient. But in actuality what you’re doing is hindering the ability to cultivate and grow relationships with your colleagues.
For more on how stories help with collegial connection, check out the article featured a few months ago on the BEHeard Blog about cultivating trust at work. It highlights the findings of researcher, Paul Zak whose focus is understanding how and why stories change our brain chemistry by eliciting feelings of connection, familiarity and relatability.
Finally, it’s 2020 and virtual workplace communication is here and here to stay. Hopefully, by employing the above tips, you can achieve your dream of moving to Denmark while keeping the Chicago-based job while maintaining rewarding and authentic connections with everyone on your team.
About the Author
Jackie Miller launched Bespoken in 2015 to channel years of professional performance experience into techniques that improve public speaking, presenting, and professional communication skills. She holds a B.F.A. and M.A. both from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
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