Small talk. Soft skills. Subtlety.

16th February 2021

Virtual comms can be very dry

(Or as someone recently described them to me – “an unending morass of tedious rubbish”).

One reason for this is that face-to-face is more intimate.

And people aren’t working hard enough to replace this lost intimacy.

The solution?

Work hard to replace the intimacy!

For example:

  • Swap slides for questions. Instead of spending ages creating slides that guarantee only you talk – instead prepare great questions, to ensure they talk
  • More often; shorter length. Replace the weekly one-hour meeting with two half-weekly, 30-minute ones
  • Small talk. Discuss things that aren’t work – family, hobbies, sport… anything
  • Find the fun. Before every meeting, one of my customers Googles the meeting’s topic, plus the word “funny”. They then choose a funny comment, joke, quotation or image, and mention it in the meeting

To be honest, I miss some of the things we all used to do.

But I also miss the excitement of believing in Father Christmas.

But things are different now.

And it’s up to all of us to help each other – and ourselves – enjoy things as much as we did.

Are you doing your bit?

Action Point

Add more fun to your – and others’ – day.

This will help: it’s my short video showing how to be more interesting.

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