You know. You hold an online conference call together with three colleagues. At least, you try. Because one of the colleagues has a poor connection. Work on the network, a house that is too well insulated, kids who flock to Netflix after school.
Apart from the fact that this “connection frustration” (®;)) does not really help with the atmosphere of the meeting, it also has an effect on the way in which you value the skills of your colleague. A published study from 2014 showed that a delay of more than 1200ms in the connection led to people perceiving their interlocutor as less competent. With a poor connection, the interlocutor was valued as less “sharp”, extraverted and precise. (NOTE: Some grain of salt is appropriate here, as this research was carried out by the research group of a German telecom provider #wijvanwceend).
People just subconsciously assign things to you as a person. Even if your qualities and personality are completely separate from that bad internet connection. It is the same reason that people get angry with newsreaders when they bring bad news (as is the case with weathermen in hurricane areas). In psychology one then speaks of the classic attribution error.
It’s also one reason you can have more structured job application interviews to counteract these kinds of preferences, biases, attributions, and other brain errors as much as possible. Do you want to work on unbiasing your hiring process? Read a Havard Business Review article about structured interviews here and one more about the entire hiring process. The Correspondent has also written a good article about it
Can I say something?
You can see that leading an online meeting is indeed a different sport from leading a physical meeting. We now understand that a good internet connection is a requirement. So it is important to really work on that turbo connection.
One way to avoid scenes from the video is to put the spotlight on the person who lets you speak. This person now appears in a large screen with all participants, which prevents people from talking through each other. What is often forgotten is the function to raise your hand. Therefore, encourage participants to raise their hands or use the chat for questions.
¹ Shoe mountain. K., Raake A., Koeppe J., Why are you so slow? – Misattribution of transmission delay to attributes of the conversation partner at the far-end, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 72, Issue 5, 2014, Pages 477-487
NOTE: At the time of the research, the researchers were affiliated with the T-Lab part of Telekom.de and although the two experiments were well conducted and the publication went through the peer review, we are very curious whether the research was replicated later and whether the results were so powerful back then.
2. They cite extensive research from the University of Groningen. Unfortunately, they apparently do not really engage in science communication, because there is little accessible material available of their work.
Debatrix is a leading expert in (remote) persuasive communication. Based in Europe, we offer executive coaching, persuasion consulting and trainings on TED-worthy presenting, how to influence and inspire, storytelling, debating, framing and dealing with difficult questions.
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