
Introduction
Nice to have you with us again for another episode of Digital 4 Productivity and the 6th chapter of the book “Using digital tools effectively”.
Yes, last week we talked about the topic of assistants and perhaps here is a little recap of the top 10 tips on the topic of assistance. There is no good reason to do without assistants. If you are a small team or a solopreneur without an office, use Virtual Private Assistance. Always give your assistant full access to all your data and systems. The productivity benefit is always greater than the security risk. Let your assistant prepare your emails too. Also hand over your social media activities to your assistant. Always consider, does it need to be done? And if so, can my assistant do it? Do you also use external services such as Fiverr or Upwork for projects? Do you use MS Teams and/or a Kanban tool to communicate with your assistant? Do you also give your assistant access to your digital notebook? Use automation tools, even if your assistant could take over the task. Your assistant can do more. Yes, and assistants can of course communicate in the personal world or even in the online world, just like you.
Dead by Meetings
And on the subject of video conferencing, of course, my initial topic with the question of dead by meetings. Do you know that? You arrive at the office in the morning, time is pressing. You quickly check your emails and head off to your first meeting. You have no idea why you’re sitting in this weekly jour fix. But it’s not about your topics at all. But you don’t have the courage to change that either. They’re all always there. After that, the video conference madness begins. Here, too, many of them are a waste of time. But fortunately, you can continue to work on your emails during video conferences. By now, you are very practiced at pretending to take notes when you are actually answering your emails. The great thing is that you can only jump from video conference to video conference every minute. The stupid thing is that many conferences are now planned without a minute buffer and, as in the analog world, are often overrun. You may be familiar with this when it comes to meetings. So I always say, what are the most common causes of the death of productivity? Dead by emails and dead by meetings.
And that’s not necessarily getting any better with the topic of online. To be honest, I’m not a fan at all and I found it quite interesting that Frank Thelen recently made a post on LinkedIn about going back to the office. That would be the only way to work productively again. Personally, I don’t believe in only in the office or only in the home office. I think it makes perfect sense to work in a hybrid way, to do both. And I would ask you to consider that if you are also more flexible in terms of where you work, you are no longer limited to the church tower when it comes to attracting talent, but can attract talent nationally or even internationally. American companies are showing us how to do this and are now also sourcing worldwide for people who can be reached in the home office. I often hear people complaining about the shortage of skilled workers, but creative solutions are not used. In other words, this issue of addressing employees all over the world or giving it some thought. I can highly recommend Martin Sänger and his approaches, who simply says, okay, maybe I shouldn’t put on my HR glasses, but rather my sales glasses. And just to pass on an impulse from Martin Sänger, he says that you don’t want people who don’t have a job. You want those who are latently dissatisfied and simply don’t feel like writing an application because they haven’t done so for 20 years. And there are also good strategies for this. And again, in my conversations with Martin Sänger in his presentations, everyone says it’s great and totally brilliant. And then who implements it? No, very few, because it’s easier to complain. So a lot of people have a second language, but in Germany, complaining is unfortunately sometimes the first.
The most common problems of meetings
Yes, what are my three main issues when it comes to meetings? Firstly, unfortunately we often have too many participants rather than too few. That may be true for some online meetings, but not for most. So a lot of time and resources are wasted here. Yes, then to say that it is sometimes difficult to listen when I simply have an extremely poor picture, extremely poor sound setting. That’s extremely exhausting. You may notice that I have my microphone right in front of my mouth when you watch the episode on video. That may look a bit irritating, but the closer a microphone is to the mouth, the better the sound quality.
You have this close-up effect from the radio. And if you look at good singers, they just bite into the microphone and that’s exactly what I do. Yes, and then to say that most of the time, when we use conference software with the tools, we often don’t use the possibilities that the new technology offers, but simply use what we know one-to-one. The classic situation is that instead of taking minutes in a paper notebook, we take them in a digital notebook, namely OneNote, instead of using a Kanban tool, namely Planner, which is also in Microsoft 365. That’s the difference between digitalization, the one-to-one implementation of existing processes, and digitalization, which is about using the possibilities of technology to make the process better. So digitalization for the sake of digitalization is rarely a good idea. Yes, problem one is that video conferences are often poorly planned and organized. So that means there is a good common ground. So the idea is always to think about who should actually be there? And also to exchange information, for example, I can do all that beforehand. Good news, by the way, we’ll come to AI tools later, there are already tools available today, if you say I don’t need certain participants until later in the meeting, then they can come in five minutes beforehand and can then use an AI tool to see what has already been discussed and are immediately up to speed. Or people who might otherwise have been there as spectators the whole time can simply watch an AI-generated summary afterwards, for example. So the question is, what meeting formats are there? Very few people are very clear about this. And I’m not at all a fan of always saying that we should have fewer meetings, but definitely more targeted and shorter ones. So a daily stand-up, for example, makes perfect sense to simply say briefly what I’m working on at the moment? Where do I need support? Where can I provide support? It’s great, it’s done a lot in the software sector as a daily, for example. So you can really see a lot from software development. And when it’s always said that Generation XYZ and whatever they’re all called, Generation Z or Z are so lazy. Well, when I look at my daughter, for example, who works in software development and she recently said on the Daily, I don’t have much to do at the moment, is there anyone I can help? As baby boomers, I’m 68, we would never think of giving ourselves the audacity to say, I’ve got nothing to do at the moment, how can I help someone? That would somehow contradict our ethos. So from that point of view, I’m definitely someone who sees the productive approaches of Generation Z from our daughter’s own experience. Yes, well, the nice thing about video conferencing is that it’s a lot easier to join in and leave in between or later. It’s easier than in a face-to-face meeting, especially when it comes to travel times. So that’s why it definitely makes sense. And the fact is that this issue, which is unfortunately a bit of a shame, the issue of punctuality, is something that often takes a bit of a back seat in online conferences. This is often due to the fact that meetings are always scheduled on the hour or on the half hour and without a buffer. So keep at least a quarter of an hour free. A good idea. For example, it might be a good idea to start a video meeting at 15 o’clock. Yes, what has worked well in face-to-face meetings is to appoint someone to take the minutes. This is often forgotten in online meetings. And now many people are saying, yes, why don’t you use AI? But to be honest, when I look at the transcripts and things from AI, it’s a good summary. But it’s more about structuring it to a certain extent and saying who does what and when? And these are the responsibilities. I think the quality of a good minute-taker is much better than what I see via AI today. It’s a bit like this whole topic of human homework, I don’t have to do it anymore, I can do it all with ChatGPT. Yes, but when I go through a topic like this myself, I have a different depth to it. Yes, that’s why I’m now looking at this topic online. Of course, this personal contact is also lost a little when you come in to all the menus. But just imagine if nobody came in at 10 o’clock sharp for a sales meeting that starts at 10 o’clock, but instead everyone arrives a quarter of an hour beforehand and then you chat a bit. You can also do this in the online world by looking around a bit beforehand.
Camera settings for online meetings
Yes, the second thing I survive is simply the issue of camera angles. Here it’s important that you tend to orient yourself more towards television habits. I see people who are sitting at the bottom or have an untidy background, then you’re more concerned with the untidy background or the bad green screen. So if you’re doing a green screen, then please do it properly, if you can’t give it away properly and just like if you have a headset on that looks like a stormtrooper helmet, then you’d better leave it out. And what I experience is poor sound quality. The horror thing that I regularly experience when there are several people in meetings is that at least one of them can be heard again. And that’s because someone in the meeting hears the sound relatively loudly through their speakers. And then the sound comes in again through the microphone. And especially if the person has a somewhat slower internet connection, then at some point Zoom or Teams will no longer be able to calculate and then you have a double effect. And the nasty thing is, those who have that on their side, for them it’s all Chico, they don’t hear it, they’re the others. And that’s why it makes sense to test something like this. And I’ll tell you again how you can solve the problem.
The right choice of virtual background
Yes, that means problem number three is that new possibilities are not being used, such as virtual backgrounds. But please always say, only use them if it looks sensible. So don’t make stormtrooper helmets here, for example.
Recording of meetings and meeting structure
Yes, then also this topic. In my view, records are not used enough. So this topic is also in a structured form. And please don’t replace the paper notebook one-to-one with a digital one, but I’m a big fan of keyword-like minutes on a Kanban board, where you say, what is the topic memory, what are the topics in the current meeting, what have we discussed, who is doing what by when and where are we waiting for something? So that means saying, think about what are the solutions? Number one, think about a strategic meeting structure. So which meetings you hold. For example, I’m a big fan of the dailies I just mentioned, where you say, what am I currently working on? Where do I need help? Where can I perhaps help if I still have free capacity?
Do weekly jour fixes even make sense?
So ideally, this would also replace the usual weekly jour fixes, which usually have more of a justification character. It is important to simply say that meetings are not there for information, but for exchange, for development, for live Q&As. In other words, to say that you have these things here. Just like this open door issue, I’m not a fan of it at all. Especially in phases of mergers, for example, I’m more of a friend of saying, okay, there’s a Q&A meeting once a week, the board members are there, the management is there and they answer all questions on the topic of where we are with the merger, have a cell phone ban and are then present for the team in the area. What can also be useful are large kick-off meetings for major projects, but information can also be provided promptly afterwards. It’s more about conveying spirit and motivation.
Yes, agile teams work in sprints like this, in a week or 14 days, where certain things are done. And a good point here is the retrospective, simply looking again and again at how well we worked together in the last sprint.
What can we do better in terms of collaboration? You can get a lot out of the agile area and I often hear agile, no, we work in a more structured way. There are hardly any more structured ways of working than agile working methods. Especially if you look at this whole scrum methodology, it’s very structured, very organized, this whole topic. Yes, so you bring structure into it.
Solution number two is video conferencing technology. Firstly, if you have a computer with a webcam. It’s a good idea to clean the camera a little with a glasses cleaning cloth. You should make sure that the thing is at eye level. You can do this by using a kind of bookend if you have a laptop. Because if you normally just put it on the table, you’re looking into the camera from top to bottom. And then it reminds most people of the perspective they had when the teacher was looking at them. And unfortunately, most of us have rather negative associations with our school days against this background. You can also put a saucepan or a salad bowl in your vacation home. Or I’ve already put books and pilot’s cases underneath. So eye level is a good idea.
Which camera is suitable for video conferencing?
Yes, you can, if you don’t have a camera in the computer or it’s bad, I’m a big fan of the Logitech C920. It works anytime, anywhere. You plug it in. You don’t need any software. Yes, the Brio is a little bit better, but it just tends to be more buggy. That means it doesn’t work with all software straight away. Sometimes it doesn’t work 100% in the IT security environment that you often have in banks and insurance companies. And to be honest, they don’t transmit more than Full HD anyway. And the Logitech C920 can do full HD. Good lighting is then more of a bottleneck in this area. The idea of the most neutral background possible is also ideal. This can be a suitable roll-up as a green screen, if you have good lighting, perhaps a Atem Mini like I’m doing here. But quite pragmatically, when I’m traveling, on vacation I often have a dark grey roll-up with me. I simply pull it up behind me. No green screen, dark gray roll-up, looks super professional. Alternatively, I used to have a matt white one as a DIA screen, which you might have as a child. Dark gray usually looks a bit more elegant. So that’s why it’s always quite practical.
Also use haptic things
Yes, then the idea is to use the extended possibilities of video conferencing, for example with haptic things. So I have a big Facebook thumb here. Let me have a quick look. So if you like things, for example, then you also have the opportunity to give a thumbs up to those who see it on video and I have Ernie and Bert, a cookie monster. So hold objects up to the camera when you do something like this. So use it. You can also just draw notes. Just hold items up in the area. Raise your hand, by the way. I’m a big fan of raising your analog hand. As long as you can still see everyone, it’s much quicker than raising your digital hand. So you don’t have to do everything digitally just because it’s digital.
Work with random breakouts
Yes, breakouts are always a good idea, to work together with random breakouts, to let different people come together so that they can exchange ideas. So sometimes you have even more exchange than you do in the face-to-face form. Because the same people are always together during the breaks. That’s why you use it. Use the topic of automatic transcription and simultaneous translations for different languages. So that’s definitely something else.
What are my accessory recommendations?
Yes, on the subject of accessory recommendations. Headset is something I highly recommend in addition to the webcam. Webcam C920 from Logitech Headset PC 7 USB, so I recommend from Sennheiser, is single-ear and has the great charm that it sounds very, very good, also has sound suppression. And you don’t have the double audio effect that you would otherwise have. Of course, it’s now an SM 750 as a microphone, which is now purely via a Focusrite Scarlett. That gives you even better quality, of course. I have a microphone boom here, but to be honest, I also use my Sennheiser PC 7 USB when I’m out and about, and that costs less than €20. So that’s really great.
Use Telepromter
Yes, if you’re working with the screen, it’s a good idea to have it as high as possible, with the camera above it. I even have a teleprompter like that here, a small one. They are now even available from Elgato, as an all-in-one fit solution. I don’t even need the teleprompter for the texts, it’s the gallery behind it. And now, for example, I look at my own picture when recording and behind it is the camera. In other words, you simply have direct eye contact again. When I’m out and about, I use the built-in webcam on my MacBook, but then I have a folded-up book stand and in the show notes I’ll also link you to my page with the accessory recommendations. You’ll also find them there.
Using multiple sound sources with audio mixers
Yes, what is also a good idea is to say that if you have a Atem Mini, for example, you can bring in several sound sources, several image sources via HDMI. Even a document camera, for example, if you are drawing something or using other computer charts. And if you have a stream deck with these buttons, then you can say, okay, I’ll put pictures in front of me, behind me. It takes a bit of effort to set up, but once you’ve done it, you don’t have to think about it too much during a conference. I also have buttons here above the stream deck for zooming, for example, just for muting, switching off the camera, showing or hiding chat participants and things like that, so you can also put that on buttons or go on in PowerPoint and things like that. It all works wonderfully. So, as I said, here are a few tips.
Settings and setups for hybrid meetings
Yes, in hybrid settings, so there’s always this issue, I’ll come back to it in the next chapter, if you’re not so experienced, then it’s a good idea to have someone who is responsible for the online participants, who also keeps an eye on the chat, who also makes sure that things are collected here from time to time. Otherwise, you can simply use a PTZ camera, pen, tilt and zoom, you can also use the remote control to press several buttons and then say you are on air, viewers are on air, flipchart is on air, you can set it to several positions and then you can deliver something like this in Zoom. With the Rode Wireless GO II you have two microphones, one that you plug in and one that you can output with a handheld microphone adapter. So please feel free to contact me if you need more support for these settings, or you can also find a QR code at the back of the book where you can register for my monthly consultation. Yes, so with that in mind, don’t make it so complicated.
Top 10 tips from chapter 6
Yes, last but not least, what are the top 10 Chapter 6 tips? Develop a meeting plan with different types of meetings for your team. Have better meetings rather than fewer. Think about the best way to bring face-to-face and online participants together. Make sure that the webcam is roughly at eye level. Make sure you have a neutral professional video background without windows. Always use headphones to avoid audio echoes. Use the chart preview in Teams. And that again, by the way, I didn’t go into that in detail. Many people always say that Zoom is much cooler than Teams. No, I think Teams has some great functions. One of them is that you can say in the release that I’m uploading my PowerPoint charts. Then, without having to open PowerPoint first, you can simply upload your charts. You see the preview, the participants only see the charts and you can then do that with a screen. I have a set of three screens when I’m out and about, which I attach to my notebook screen. I have my notebook screen in the middle and then have two folding screens on the left and right. Of course, this also works on the move. Yes, share your camera as a second camera in Zoom to get a sharp image. Another tip: screen sharing always has the focus on much more sharpness, because charts want to be seen in focus. This is a trick that disables the camera and enables the camera. Fast movements are then chopped off a little. But as long as you’re not doing Zumba in video conferences, this is sometimes the better idea. Yes, use the existing interaction options of Zoom and the like. New ones are added regularly and use mentimeters or sliders for anonymous queries – not just online, by the way. Because if you ask, for example, how good you think my performance is as a manager, as a supervisor, and you do this openly, then you will certainly get a different answer than if you ask this anonymously. And if you then perhaps ask in the next step, what is there still room for improvement in my leadership behavior?
Conclusion
Yes, after dealing with the topic of video conferencing in this chapter, we will deal with chapter seven in the next chapter next week, namely turning your digital event into a live stream event. Because yes, there is still a difference between a Teams call and a live stream event. And what the differences are and how you can reach the quality level relatively quickly will be the subject of next week’s chapter.
Until then, I wish you every success. Your personal IT coach for managers Thorsten Jekel.
Also available in: Deutsch