Here’s one little thing you can do to make your video meetings better.
Smile.
Just smile. That’s it. See what happens.
I bet you’ll be surprised by how the tenor of the meeting changes. How people respond. How they engage.
Most of all, I bet it changes you. Your thoughts, your reactions, your outlook.
Try it. In Zoom, Teams, Skype, BlueJeans, WebEx, whatever video conferencing app you’re using. Go ahead. Smile.
You talk using short words. You use second-person pronouns. You use lots of contractions. You speak in short sentences.
Then you start writing. You think you need to sound smart and intelligent. You think you need to impress people with your fancy words, like you did when you wrote your college papers.
Next thing you know you’ve got 40-word sentences that makes you look very intelligent.
Or do they?
That intelligent word salad you wrote that has all those 20-dollar, four- and five-syllable words? No one knows what you’re telling them.
That “leveraging” of your “utilization” of the English language for the “cascading messaging” you dropped on them drowned them in a waterfall of meaningless words.
Try this instead. Get in, get out and make things plain and simple. Make sure they know the “why” of what you’re telling them. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs in the active voice.
Prune your writing for vigor. Less is more. Always, less is more.
My company just gave every employee $100 for margaritas.
Well, Mexican food and margaritas. The occasion was celebrating National Margarita Day. The 250+ employees from Aptive Resources pumped a good chunk of money into the economy to take part in this momentous holiday with dinner and drinks on the company.
It was totally unexpected. They let us know in an email in the morning that they gifted us $100 for food and drinks. I had to ping someone at work on Teams to see if it was a legit email. It was. Straight from our COO.
It’s the third unexpected gift my company has given to me since I started just two months ago. And word has gotten out. I may have shared my good fortune in my circle of friends.
Now two of them are asking for referrals.
Generous. Caring. Empathetic. Kind. Professional. Smart. Talented. Listeners. These are just a few of the words I use to describe my colleagues and company in just a few months on the job.
How does that compare to your company? What would you say are the things that define your co-workers, your leadership, your company culture?
And how do you contribute?
I worked with a company that was changing the way it operated. The strategy was interesting.
It was a huge company and their communications strategy was to send an email to all their employees telling them about this new way of doing things.
Here was the problem. The company told the employees to go read this very long, dense document that would explain everything. It literally read like an academic paper.
I read it many times. I’m still fuzzy on what it was all about.
That’s not a good approach.
It’s better to give employees an elevator speech.
Here’s why we’re doing this. This is where we’re going.
We’ll be great together. Now let’s get to work.
And hey, tell a story. People like stories.