How to Make Home Video Conferencing Less Awful
Only virtual meetings are worse than meetings. This is especially bad when you work from home, in clothes that you usually do not wear in the office, in an area that may not be as clean as you would like, when children, partners, pets, and roommates demand your attention. – not to mention the heightened coronavirus anxiety we are all experiencing right now.
I can’t help you deal with anxiety (trust me, I have one too), but I can help you make your video conferencing sessions less horrific. I have been working from home full time since 2012, so I know all the secrets of video chat. These tips will also help you when it’s time to talk to your grandma on Skype, organize a virtual happy hour with your friends, or schedule a FaceTime play date for your kids.
Let’s start.
It’s all about the front lighting
The best way to make your video calls crisp, crisp, and professional instead of blurry, shaded and gruesome? Buy yourself front lighting. This means “make sure the light source is illuminating the front of your face.”
You should also make sure that the light source is the brightest light source in the room. For example, I live in an apartment with west-facing windows, and at certain times of the day it doesn’t matter how many book lights I attach to my laptop and aim right in the face (Pro tip: Clip a book light onto your laptop and point it at yourself face), because the SUN WILL WIN. My laptop’s camera will focus on the light streaming through the windows because it is designed to make the brightest in the room the most important and my face, which is actually the most important thing in the room, dim.
So, determine where you need to position yourself – and your laptop, phone, or tablet – to make sure the brightest light source is right in front of you. (If you have a lot of free time and want to make your video chats look even more flawless, you can set up some kind of side lighting. But I would not do this just for the Zoom call.)
Sit up straight and tilt your head slightly forward.
Ideally, your video conferencing device sits at about table level; You really don’t want to have work meetings with your laptop on your lap because it will make you look stupid and do weird things from the bottom of your chin.
Instead, find a way to sit up straight during a video call and then tilt your head slightly forward.
Why? Because it will make your face look a little bigger in comparison to the rest of your body. You’ve probably seen people apply this technique on Instagram; giving your face a little more visual space on the screen will make you look more attentive and photogenic. (Not that you have to worry about looking photogenic, but it’s such a simple trick that you can use it.)
Wear in-ear headphones
Fun fact: If you don’t have headphones, you can end up with a kind of audio loop for a video call where your boss’s voice is picked up by your laptop’s microphone and then redirected back into the conversation as fresh audio, creating a cascade of echoes that annoy everyone.
If you wear earbuds or headphones, your boss’s voice will go straight into your ears and your microphone won’t pick it up at all, not to mention if you have noise canceling headphones you’re less likely to pick up anything – or. your roommates are arguing in another room.
Wait your turn to talk and remain silent when you are not talking
While we’re on the subject of audio, keep in mind that some video conferencing systems don’t handle simultaneous audio streams very well. In other words: if you and your colleague are talking at the same time, the app can select one audio stream to share with the group and, for example, leave the other silent . This means that your important contribution to the meeting will not be heard!
You can fix this problem by being careful not to talk to other people. I have held meetings where we were asked to literally raise our hands if we wanted to speak; it might be a little overkill, but at least it keeps you from crossing audio streams.
You should also not mute the sound when you are not speaking. Some video conferencing systems automatically mute non-speaking participants (and by “automatically” I mean “when the meeting leader chooses to enable this feature”). If you actively mute everyone, you save everyone from having to listen to dogs barking, flushing the toilet, children arguing, the fact that you keep pressing the little button on the top of the pen due to coronavirus anxiety or whatever. noise is currently entering your home.
These are all the tips I have to help you with upcoming virtual meetings and video conferencing; If you have any other tips, the comments section will open. Plus, if you have a funny story about the video conferencing disaster, I’d love to hear it – and I’m probably not the only one.