Using nonverbal feedback

- If you've spend any time in video meetings, you know how difficult or awkward it can sometimes be to try to interject with your own thoughts or ideas. It's tough to find the right moment to jump in when someone else is talking, and oftentimes, someone else is waiting to get a word in, too, and you end up talking over each other, trying to figure out who should go next. Or the person speaking might ask the group something like, "Does everyone agree?" and you end up with a bunch of people just silently nodding their heads during an awkward silence. So Zoom has a collection of useful tools that can be used to provide nonverbal feedback, letting the meeting host and other attendees know that you have something to say, and in this way, the host of the meeting can moderate responses and whose turn it is to talk without as many incidents of people trying to talk over each other. So first, let's make sure the nonverbal tools are enabled. We're going to start here in the Zoom portal in your web browser, and we're going to click Settings. And I'm going to go to In Meeting Basic. And then I'll scroll down and find the nonverbal feedback tools, which you can see I already have enabled. Now note that the nonverbal feedback features are only available in the Zoom app, and they aren't available through a web browser-based Zoom meeting. So everyone in the meeting should download and use the most current Zoom client app to participate in your meetings. All right, so with that said, I'm going to enter a meeting I've already joined. And I'll go full-screen here so we can see everybody. So I'm joined here again by Nick, Jess, and Oliver. I've got them all muted. Now we've already seen some of these meeting tools in action, but enabling the nonverbal feedback tools gives us even more options. So we know that, for example, if Nick wants to respond to something I'm saying while I'm talking, he can go to the Participants button at the bottom of the screen to open up that panel and then raise his hand. And we should see a notification pop up. There it is. And then I can pop open the Manage Participants panel and we can also see his raised hand here. So I can keep talking and doing what I'm doing in the presentation, and at the appropriate time, I can say, "Nick, do you have something to add?" which lets everyone know that it's Nick's turn to speak in that case. And then I can come over here and choose to lower his hand. Now notice at the bottom of the panel, we see these additional buttons now. These are great, for example, if I have to ask a general question of the group, like, "Does everyone have a copy of the agenda?" Instead of waiting for everyone to verbally respond and possibly not being able to tell who said yes or no, everyone can just click the Yes or No button at the bottom of the screen. And we can see those answers come in. And I can clearly see who answered yes and who answered no. And I can also come down and click Clear All to clear those responses. You can see we also have buttons that say Go Slower or Go Faster. I can click the More button here for some other options, like Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, I need a break, and so on. Now for times when people want to react to what you're saying, but in a less formal way that doesn't require you to clear their responses, if you look at the bottom of the screen, we have this Reactions button. And if I click that, we see some emojis we can select from. So if I tell everybody that we can leave work early on Friday, everybody can react to that. And those will just appear on the screen for about five seconds or so, and then they'll disappear. By the way, if you go to your Preferences, under the General Settings, you can change the Reaction Skin Tone in this location. Now of course, we also have the Chat panel. So this is a great way to communicate with everyone or for people to communicate directly with each other during the meeting. It's a good place to put links to documents and other content you want to share with your participants and they can also ask questions, again, without interrupting the person who's speaking. So just keep in mind that these options are available and if you host a lot of meetings, be sure to take a moment at the beginning of the meeting to let everybody know that these tools are available and where they are, because it can help make your meetings go a lot more smoothly, especially if you have a large group of people to work with.