You are eight minutes in. Fourteen cameras off. Someone has typed “sorry, have to hop to another call” in the chat. A dog is barking on an unmuted mic and nobody can work out whose dog it is.
Everyone who presents online has had that meeting.
The standard presentation advice does not rescue you from it either. Smile more. Tell a story. Show your passion. All perfectly good advice, all written for a room where you can watch people react.
Fix your setup once and then forget about it
Put your laptop on a stack of books. That one change probably does more for how you come across than anything else on this list, because a camera below your face gives everybody a view up your nose and a permanent expression of mild suspicion.
After that, get a light in front of you. A window works if you face it. A window behind you turns you into a hostage video.
Then buy a headset. People will sit through terrible video without complaining. They will not sit through audio that echoes, clips or picks up your keyboard, and they will quietly assume you do not care very much about the meeting.
On virtual backgrounds, mild opinion: blur is fine, and the beach is not. Nothing says “I am not really here” like a palm tree with your left ear flickering in and out of it.
Cut a third of your content out
Take whatever you planned to cover and remove roughly a third of it. Not because your material is bad, but because a forty minute deck that worked in a training room becomes an endurance test on a laptop screen in someone’s spare bedroom.
Plan your interruptions
Left alone, an online audience drifts within about five minutes. So do not leave them alone for five minutes.
Build in something for them to do, and be specific about it. “Any questions?” gets you silence, because nobody wants to be the one who unmutes. “Sinead, you were dealing with this last month, what did you find?” gets you an answer. So does a poll, or asking everyone to put a single word in the chat, or asking for a thumbs up if people want you to go deeper on something.
Those moments serve two purposes. They wake people up, and they tell you whether anybody is still listening, which is the information you have otherwise lost.
The camera thing
Look at the camera lens, not at the faces. It feels ridiculous. You are essentially talking to a small piece of plastic while ignoring the humans on your screen, and it will never stop feeling odd.
Do it anyway, at least on your important points. From the other side it reads as eye contact, and everything else reads as somebody looking slightly past you at all times.
Leave longer pauses than you want to as well. Most connections carry a lag of a second or two, so the silence you interpret as “nobody has anything to say” is often just three people waiting for you to finish.
When it breaks
Screen share will fail on you eventually. Usually on the day it matters.
Keep your slides open in a second window and know how to dial in from your phone. Decide beforehand who takes over if you drop out completely, and make sure they have the file. Then when it goes wrong, say so plainly, fix it and move on. Nobody thinks less of a presenter whose laptop misbehaves. What they do not want is someone who spends four minutes narrating the troubleshooting.
Turn the captions on
Live captions take one click and help far more people than you would guess, including anyone in a noisy office and anyone working in their second language.
While you are at it, say what is on your visuals instead of pointing at them, and send your slides out beforehand so people can read at their own pace. This costs you almost nothing and it is the difference between a session some neurodiverse colleagues can follow and one they cannot.
If you want to go further
We built a short course on this called Presenting Virtually. It takes about half an hour, covers your setup, audience engagement, connecting through the screen, dealing with things going wrong and adjusting for everything from a team huddle to a webinar with two hundred people on it. You work through it at your own pace and get a certificate at the end.
It costs €20 a head, with discounts for groups of 25 or more, and we can brand it or adapt it if you want it for your own team. Have a look at the course page or ask us for a group quote.
