Speaker 1: Have you sat in a video meeting in the last
Speaker 1: twenty four hours? Was it super enthralling? Did you not
Speaker 1: want it to end? I'm imagining that your answer is
Speaker 1: probably a big, fat no. Let's face it, most of
Speaker 1: us are suffering from death by zoom. And despite the
Speaker 1: fact that the average video meeting goes for forty five minutes,
Speaker 1: research by Microsoft suggests that brain fatigue sets in at
Speaker 1: about the thirty minute mark. This is not ideal, especially
Speaker 1: when our days are filled with back to back video meetings.
Speaker 1: So today I want to share with you some tools
Speaker 1: for making video meetings suck a little bit less. My
Speaker 1: name is doctor Ramatha Inba. I'm an organizational psychologist and
Speaker 1: the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is
Speaker 1: how I work, show about how to help you do
Speaker 1: your best work. So let's get into my favorite tools
Speaker 1: for having better video meetings. My favorite app right now
Speaker 1: for dramatically improving video meetings is mm hm. Yes that's
Speaker 1: right spelt mmmm slightly confusing. So mm hmm is a
Speaker 1: really easy to use version of OBS, which is something
Speaker 1: that only the total nerds like me will have heard of.
Speaker 1: So on OBS with a lot of training, you can
Speaker 1: configure your video screen in a way that you can
Speaker 1: resize yourself, add things into the background, and do things
Speaker 1: like show slides while you're in the foreground and the
Speaker 1: slides are in the background. It's very cool, but it's
Speaker 1: very complicated, and personally I have not been able to
Speaker 1: learn how to use it, not that I've dedicated much
Speaker 1: time to doing so, but my dad, who is a
Speaker 1: tech wizard, did, and I think because it was so complex,
Speaker 1: I was never motivated enough to actually use regularly. But
Speaker 1: when I discovered m HM, it's basically the idiot's version
Speaker 1: of OBS. So why I love it so much. One
Speaker 1: of my pet hates about doing presentations in virtual meetings
Speaker 1: or doing virtual keynotes, which I do almost every week,
Speaker 1: is that the slides end up taking up the whole
Speaker 1: screen and the human in this case me ends up
Speaker 1: being the size of a postage stamp. And when I
Speaker 1: think about presentations, like you're connecting human to human, and
Speaker 1: when you can't really see the human that is talking
Speaker 1: to you and you can only see their slides, you
Speaker 1: lose a lot of that connection and that empathy and
Speaker 1: report that comes from doing face to face presentations. So
Speaker 1: the thing I like most about is that you can
Speaker 1: have your slides in the background and you can be
Speaker 1: in the foreground on the same screen. So it says,
Speaker 1: if you're just doing a normal presentation and you've got
Speaker 1: slides on the wall behind you, just like you would
Speaker 1: in a real life scenario, and look, then there are
Speaker 1: these other fun things that you can do with m
Speaker 1: Like there are lots of different virtual backgrounds, some of
Speaker 1: which are animated, which is kind of fun, although possibly distracting.
Speaker 1: You can easily resize yourself, make yourself bigger or smaller,
Speaker 1: you can reposition yourself on the screen, and there are
Speaker 1: different visual effects that you can add in and it's
Speaker 1: really really awesome. So it's something that I'm now planning
Speaker 1: on using whenever I do virtual keynote presentations, which is
Speaker 1: about once a week, and I'm also going to use
Speaker 1: it in meetings where I need to be sharing slides
Speaker 1: as well and still want to make sure there's that
Speaker 1: human connection. So check out HM which is mm hmm
Speaker 1: dot app. I'll link to that in the show notes
Speaker 1: as well. Okay, something else that I've been loving for
Speaker 1: doing better virtual presentations in meetings is using a combination
Speaker 1: of Google slides and integrating that with slide o. So
Speaker 1: Slider you can find Slider at sli dot do and
Speaker 1: Google Slides you just google that and slider might be
Speaker 1: something that you've experienced in conferences, normally in the form
Speaker 1: of a mobile app where you can vote on poles
Speaker 1: or do q and eight all from me mobile phone.
Speaker 1: And what I found is that Google Slides and Slider
Speaker 1: integrate really, really well, and the combination creates an awesome
Speaker 1: way to make sure your presentations are super interactive. So,
Speaker 1: for example, if you want to integrate poles into a
Speaker 1: meeting with slider and Google slides, you can actually see
Speaker 1: the results coming up live on the screen that you're sharing.
Speaker 1: So I reckon this is really fun, particularly for presentations
Speaker 1: or larger meetings where you're looking for points of interaction
Speaker 1: and engagement. And let's face it, any meeting could do
Speaker 1: with a little bit more interaction engagement, I think most
Speaker 1: of the time. So I strongly recommend checking that out.
Speaker 1: I know I've enjoyed that a lot. Now, a final
Speaker 1: thing that I'll recommend is really useful for making your
Speaker 1: virtual backgrounds look great, because let's face it, virtual backgrounds,
Speaker 1: which so many people use, can look a bit rubbish. If,
Speaker 1: for example, you have dark hair like I do, and
Speaker 1: you have a chair that has a high back that
Speaker 1: is also dark. Virtual backgrounds don't like this because it
Speaker 1: makes it hard to distinguish between what's the human and
Speaker 1: what's the inanimate object or objects in the background that
Speaker 1: you're trying to disguise with a virtual background. So I
Speaker 1: found this really cool thing that is a green screen,
Speaker 1: but not your normal green screen, not one that's going
Speaker 1: to take over your entire study. So essentially, if you
Speaker 1: imagine a big circle about two meters in diameter that
Speaker 1: literally attaches through velcrob onto the back of your office chair,
Speaker 1: and if you're sitting close enough to your computer, which
Speaker 1: you probably are based on how most people position themselves,
Speaker 1: it actually acts as a green screen, which means there'll
Speaker 1: be a high contrast between you as the human and
Speaker 1: the background. So if you're using virtual backgrounds in your meetings,
Speaker 1: they're going to come up a whole lot clearer. And
Speaker 1: to take this a step further, if you're using the
Speaker 1: m app to share slides or deliver presentations and you
Speaker 1: use the virtual backgrounds included in that as you should,
Speaker 1: it means that it looks super clean and professional. So
Speaker 1: those are three things that I have found to be really,
Speaker 1: really brilliant for creating better video meetings and presentations. And
Speaker 1: you know, specifically when you are presenting slides in a
Speaker 1: meeting or if you're doing a presentation to a group
Speaker 1: of people, it makes for an infinitely better experience. That
Speaker 1: is it for today's show. Now, if you've been loving
Speaker 1: How I Work and need something else for your podcast fix,
Speaker 1: you might also enjoy Mum and MEA's podcast Lady Startup Stories.
Speaker 1: Each week, Georgia Love, who you might remember from The Bachelorette,
Speaker 1: sits down with female entrepreneurs to ask how they built
Speaker 1: their businesses. Georgia was recently joined by Nicole lu the
Speaker 1: founder of kin Fertility, which is an online service that
Speaker 1: brings the contraceptive pill to your door.
Speaker 2: How call that?
Speaker 1: So they talk career pivots, disrupting a very regulated industry,
Speaker 1: and what it's like being a female founder at twenty five.
Speaker 1: Take a listen to this excerpt.
Speaker 2: I think one of the first main things I would
Speaker 2: have loved to know and just like be mentally prepared for,
Speaker 2: was that not everyone is gonna like you. I think
Speaker 2: growing up, I've always been a people pleaser, and I think,
Speaker 2: like I've always wanted to like get everyone to love me.
Speaker 2: And I think like when you launch something out into
Speaker 2: the wild, you actually just have to learn to accept
Speaker 2: that not everyone is going to be your customer or
Speaker 2: not everyone is going to be the person that needs
Speaker 2: your brand, especially when we launch the pill, Like no,
Speaker 2: not everyone actually is even for the pill. But we're
Speaker 2: not actually trying to sell the pill. We're just trying
Speaker 2: to so like a way to access it if you
Speaker 2: need it. I guess what keeps me going is like
Speaker 2: seeing the reviews of like the lives were changing, and
Speaker 2: like how much it's impacting people, And that's what I
Speaker 2: have to keep focusing on rather than the people who
Speaker 2: are like will just never actually need this.
Speaker 1: You can listen to Ladies Startup Stories with Georgia Love
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. So that is it for
Speaker 1: today's show, and I will see you next time.