Guest Post - Cheng Song

Cheng is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about virual communication.

Virtual communication can represent any form of communication that is not face to face. For example, Video Conferences and Skype calls can both be considered virtual communication.

Here I want to share with you about some DOs and DONTs during Video Conferences.

DOs:

1. Do have a clear purpose of the meeting.

Compared to off-line meeting, on-line meeting is more demanding on clear purpose. Every meeting participant has to know the objective, things to be discussed and even the agenda of the meeting before video conferences. If people don’t know what is going on, they might get lost during the meeting because 1) they could not make preparation before the meeting; 2) once the meeting began, it is difficult to have a consensus about the objective and process of the meeting while everyone is sitting perhaps hundreds of miles away from each other.

2. Do have people participated in the meeting.

It is very dangerous to have a one-man show during a Video Conference. Unlike off-line meeting, in video conferences you cannot observe the eyes and faces of people accurately so in most cases, you could not know if people are bored about the topic or distracted by some other things.

So the only to guarantee that people are focusing on meetings is to get them involved. The meeting leader should assign major roles to different people, so people could share their ideas, have arguments and have a good feeling of participation.

3. Do have point in the meeting.

It is difficult to keep the meeting on the right way if people have too many ideas to share and too many arguments to settle. A good way to solve this is to have clear point of the meeting; statements like “The focus of the project is…” or “The most important thing is” are good examples of having points during a conference meeting.

4. Do set rules for the meeting.

To get people focused, the meeting should have some rules. Rules like “Everyone should get him/herself well prepared before the meeting”, “People should make notes about the meeting while others are concluding or valuable ideas are proposed.” Rules will make the meeting run more formally, because in most cases, people will not consider video conferences as serious as off-line conferences.

DONTs:

1. Don’t be distracted by other things during the meeting

When you are sitting in front of computer, there are always interesting things that might distract you from the meeting especially when the meeting didn’t reach you expectation and seemed boring. The right thing to do is to try getting focused, because unlike off-line meeting, there is no strict supervisor during a video conference.

2. Don’t refuse listening to others

“You create a wall before listening by evaluating what other people say.” In virtual communication, it is also true. You need to appreciate other ideas and voices during the video conference. If everyone refuses to do so, the meeting can have two alternative results: one, people are debating with each other which makes the meeting messy; two, people are talking, but others don’t consider it seriously.