Zoom meeting after Teams meeting, click and collect, no choice but to buy online, bots to answer your questions, layers of IVR questions to call through to the right department … they can all lead to absence of humanity in your interactions with organisations. Absence of humanity can lead to disengagement.

After many months of lockdown, people are starved of human interaction.

We are all using technology to support our organisations and businesses, in many beneficial ways. It is vital that we add to our humanity, not diminish it, in the process.

One result of being starved of human contact is an overcompensation, whereby you attempt to be constantly connected to what is going on everywhere.

Constant Partial Attention … it’s a Thing!

How many Zoom meetings have you attended where most people are just a tile with their name (full name if you are lucky) written on it? They never ask a question – including in the chat – or show their faces. How does it make you feel?

Constant Partial Attention (CPA) is where a person is constantly scanning what’s going on, but not taking the information in at a deep level. When the term was first coined, it was attributed to a fear of missing out on something, rather than an attempt to be productive.

CPA has been accused of making people tired and unproductive; and that was before lockdowns and Zoom meetings began!

Are you accepting invites to online events because you can attend them while you cook the evening meal, or while you are getting exercise? Are you working on a document, with your email open on the other screen so that every time you hear the email notification ‘ping’ you can quickly see who the new email is from, and what it is about? Are you having lunch with a friend, but constantly looking at your phone, making sure that you respond to social posts at the same time? Is your phone (and maybe also your watch) set to notify you when you receive a new message in your Teams Chat, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google News, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal …?

Individuals need to take responsibility for their use of technology. You can discourage constant partial attention during meetings and events that you are holding over Teams / Zoom, by employing some of the following strategies:

1. Agenda. Have an agenda / plan for your meeting, displayed within the meeting for the duration. Refer to the agenda as you go along.
2. Outcomes. Briefly agree on what the desired outcomes will be from your meeting, at the start. That will encourage more active participation from attendees, as they are reminded they are there to strive for an outcome and not just being kept in loop. This also helps toward an efficient meeting that aims at the goal and works towards it.
3. Notes. If possible, make notes during the meeting which everyone can see (helpful if notes are taken by someone other than the main presenter or facilitator). Whilst you want to keep the notes very brief, it will also again help people to keep focused on the goals of the meeting.
4. Small Groups. For a longer online gathering, punctuate it with useful breakouts into smaller groups e.g. to discuss how what you have just heard applies to you, or to work on solving one problem while others work on another, or to brainstorm a topic and then come back to the group to discuss. Make these instructions easy for the group members to re-read after they have moved into the group. These smaller groups help to engage people in doing, not just listening, and can produce some excellent results from the collective minds “in the room”. Ask a representative of each smaller group to give a summary of the group’s thoughts on return to the main room.
5. Use Collaboration Tools. Sharing your screen to look at online data or a problem, or sharing the PDF you are discussing, helps to keep everyone “on the same page” literally! It helps to focus people into the meeting, rather than having a talk fest.
6. Ban Lurking. If you are going to be on a video meeting, make sure everyone is showing their face. Knowing that people can see you will help ensure that everyone is present, not taking another call, reading emails, working on something else, walking out of the room, folding the washing etc.

Other ways to add some humanity back into your use of digital technology are suggested below.

Chat with a Human

You might be selling online, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be there at your customer’s side to answer their questions while they browse. Done well, this will be much less annoying than the shop assistant who sidles up to the happily browsing customer, making the customer want to leave the shop … or is that just me?

Chat bots have been around for years now, and the best of them combine automation as well as real people. The automation tries to help get the right answer quickly to the enquirer, when the humans are busy, but makes it quick and easy for humans to step in to answer questions any time of the day. We have implemented online chat within Enudge to help people get help fast. It gets used much more than by people picking up the phone or sending an email asking for help. Service businesses, not just online solutions such as Enudge, should be implementing chat support. When people are looking at your website and have a question, it is very helpful when they can chat immediately with a person in your organisation.

You do need to be organised to have the chat solution monitored by appropriate staff members. This doesn’t mean they need to sit at that screen all day, though, as you can usually set up alerts to your own most in-your-face messaging platform (Slack, Teams etc) to make sure you know about the chat request as quickly as possible.

Chat tools usually also give you the option to quickly refer customers to articles that answer their questions in more depth, or you can simply ask for a phone number so that you can call and discuss the problem right now.

We also incorporate chat tools into the mobile apps and web applications that we build for our clients. Chat tools can be configured to gather useful information about what the user was just doing before they asked for help, which will make it much easier for you to diagnose the issue and assist the customer.

Video (that doesn’t have to be Universal Studios quality)

It may make you feel uncomfortable at the thought of doing this, but scrappy, personalised video conversations to your team or your customers can make a huge impact. Video will be much more personal than a well written email. Over the pandemic, some large organisations have started sending out video addresses instead of written updates, to provide a message to their team that is much less likely to be misinterpreted.

In the last few years, video tools such as Vidyard have popped up, making it quick and easy to record a video introduction or follow up to send to sales prospects. These videos have shown to provide great cut through, because they have a much more human touch than a written follow up email.

The article “Why Should Brands Keep Making ‘Scrappy Ads’ Post-COVID” describes how the pandemic has forced fashion brands to allow the creation of much simpler ads, and the results of these low cost ads has been the same or even better than big budget productions. If your products and services are targeting a younger audience, they will likely engage more with scrappy ads.

Social influencers, also mentioned in the above article, are followed by many people because of their way of engaging and bringing people together around shared interests and values. That’s why we engage influencers to participate in real use of products, particularly to help promote consumer products.

Podcasts / Audio

Even easier to create than video, are podcasts or simply, voice recordings of the message you want to deliver. Your voice recording can be easily delivered for playback when your audience has a couple of minutes to tune in. It’s likely quicker to listen to your message than read it, and is a great replacement for requiring everyone to join into a Zoom meeting to get a one way update.

An audio message can be used in a similar way as the “scrappy video” mentioned above, to follow up on leads as a salesperson (for when you only have an email address). Of course, if you have their phone number, picking up the phone is a great way to connect also!

Creating a podcast channel, in which you regularly talk with people in your niche to add value and progress excellence in your field of expertise, can be very powerful to engage your audience. Podcasts lend themselves to storytelling about your experiences. People resonate with, and remember, stories. For more thoughts around the effectiveness of storytelling, you might like to read: storytelling in podcasting which was posted in 2020.

The Sound Cartel blog post on Ford’s Hit Podcast deeply explores the use of storytelling.

Invite Interaction, and then Engage

People want to voice their opinions (just look at every main news story these days, and that will be obvious).

You add humanity back into your use of technology, when you give people the opportunity to engage, and then respond and keep the conversation going. You might do this on your social media platforms, or in your blog comments.

It is important to be authentic. People will smell disingenuous a mile away. But if you really do care what people think, then give them lots of ways to provide that information to you, even when you can’t meet in person.

Keep the Conversation Going Offline

You may still be constrained by lockdowns or social distancing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep the conversation going by telephone or other offline means.

Sending something physical to a person might even shock them! It will certainly be memorable!

Ecommerce stores that take the time to nicely wrap, and slip in a little gift, are appreciated and remembered for much longer after the delivery. Compare that with goods that arrive poorly wrapped with a stained picking slip shoved in the box. Again, it’s the human touch that counts.

In Summary …

People are starved of real, human interaction. Help people re-engage again, with you and your team. I expect it will help your bottom line, as well as do a very nice thing for the world at large.

For more reading on this topic, I recommend:

4 Strategies for Building a Hybrid Workspace that Works – HBR article which looks at the way the physical layout of offices and use of the office, is likely to change because of our forced working from home.

Are you paying attention … really? – article from Lingford Consulting on the impact of CPA (continual partial attention) and how to combat it.

‘You can’t show empathy over email’: Business leaders turn to internal podcasts to stay connected with workforces – Digiday article on how podcasts have been embraced since the pandemic to better engage with employees.

Your Turn

Please share with everyone reading this blog by posting your comment via the ‘Leave a Reply’ form below on how you have felt the benefit of humanity being injected into the digital world. I promise I will respond!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 30th, 2021 at 1:32 am and is filed under Online Technologies, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.