Abhor or Adore, Online Will Linger

Mar 2

Prepare yourself and your team to master the new normal

There is light at the end of the vaccine tunnel. Perhaps by this time next year, our upturned lives will turn back to something closer to what we knew. Not everything, though, is going to revert to the original model.

Online meetings are a plague. Well, face-to-face meetings were a plague, too. We used to shuffle zombie-like from one meeting room to another, cradling our oyster-shell laptops on our forearms, partially open, like some hungry chick in a nest looking for its next meal. The shift to virtual has cut down on the shuffling, but has it contributed anything to improved outputs? Poor communicators in person are still poor communicators—only now they are in a tiny box onscreen. The major difference is that we can ignore them and multitask in the background, escaping to a place more interesting.

Master the Medium

So, how do we get more oomph out of online? Business is an incremental game. We have been working online for close to a year now, yet how many people have been properly trained in mastering the medium?

The great sin of most online meetings is the lack of drive focused on outcomes. The majority of people are passive observers, sitting there in multitask-distraction mode. We talk about how engaged people are at work, but engagement rates for online meetings must be close to zero for a lot of staff. Give yourself a score. How would you rate the quality of your meeting interaction on a scale of one to 10?

Many leaders are lost, too. They try to approximate their standard routines to the online world. The real potential of online delivery never occurs to them, because they don’t know what that could look like. Ask yourself:

Why is there no great concept of driving the technology hard to boost productivity, communication, and coordination?
How many leaders have had any training on how to facilitate a highly interactive online meeting?
How many actually understand the engine under the digital hood and what it is capable of?

Most platforms have standardized their functionality over the past year, so platform agnosticism is now possible. But we still need to know the entry points, pathways, and possibilities. How many leaders have mastered even one of the many mediums?

Online isn’t going way. We may return to the office, but the migration back may not be complete and there will likely be a mix of arrangements. Flex- time has been around forever, although not many companies in Japan allow it. They prefer conformity, predictability, and line-of-sight management. But having been given a taste of freedom, many staff will want to continue this regime. Are we concerned with micromanagement or production? Do we need everyone to be in the office every day?

Train for Success

Salespeople spend a lot of time doing useless stuff, such as traveling to see clients. If the trust has been built, could we skip the face-to-face ritual and still have a meaningful business discussion online? Of course, new clients will need that face-to-face element, but do all need it, all the time, every time? How many new clients could each salesperson search for and talk to if two-thirds of their existing clients were being engaged online rather than visited every month?

How many members of your sales team have been given professional training on selling virtually? Do they know how to master the online environment to make the most of the medium? Are they effectively engaging the buyers when online together? Are bad habits still dominating, just in a different format?

We have long learned how to conduct face-to-face meetings, but not everyone does a professional job of it. In the same way, if our competitors are doing a much better job online—and if they can arrange their work- flows to spend less time traveling and meeting existing clients and more on prospecting and contacting new ones—they will get more business than we will.

If leaders are doing a better job driving the full potential of online, then their outcomes will be superior. The biggest differentiator will be mastery of the new environment. Winners won’t be waiting for osmosis to kick in, they will be proactive about making that mastery real. What are you doing about making online really work for you in 2021?

Power up your virtual team with corporate coaching & training by Dale Carnegie Training Japan.