Faster internet and the trend of remote management were already pushing the corporate world towards virtual meetings. The coronavirus pandemic has placed the final nail on the fact that virtual is indeed the way forward. As management students of the present age, you are more likely to see or conduct more virtual meetings than your predecessors. You might also have to engage people who are uncomfortable with technology and do not possess the necessary skills to participate in a virtual meeting. Thus, it is crucial that you build the following 5 virtual meeting skills yourself to become efficient remote managers. Be it speaking to your client or team members, you will want to have the same effect as any other physical meeting.

1. Comfortable with all the major platforms

The world currently uses a few video conferencing platforms that will surely see more users in the coming age. The college is your time to become comfortable with platforms like Skype, Zoom, Slack, Google Hangouts and more. The rest is similar to these. The major tools will create the base necessary to work your way out in any other platform. In the top PGDM colleges in Delhi NCR, you will either have sessions to gain exposure to video conferencing tools or have regular webinars that create acquaintance. You will want to say yes to any platform when the opportunity to connect virtually comes up in your work.

2. Speaking in front of the camera

This is certainly the most underestimated skill of virtual meetings. Management students generally receive oration training where the crowd is right in front and the stage is physically present. But when things go over to the virtual world, a lot of parameters immediately changes. One, you can no longer maintain eye contact by looking at your audiences’ eyes. You will have to look at the camera, ignoring the face on the screen. And two, your environment can now be distracting as the physical ambiance is not of listening. So, to ace your virtual meetings, practice speaking in front of a camera often.

3. Designing presentations for virtual meetings

Again, the absence of the physical conference room changes the way your audience will interact with your presentation. You can no longer point to a specific section of the graph to make your point. You cannot let a relevant picture hover in the background while speaking about the issue. With virtual meetings, you will have to state the data, use a whiteboard and focus more on your speech than visuals or media. The best PGDM colleges in Delhi NCR teach this basic nuance when it comes to virtual presentations. Often, managers miss out on this fine detail and fail to get their points across to their audience.

4. Maintaining virtual etiquettes

You simply cannot put on a shirt above your pajamas. The virtual meeting is still a meeting where your impressions will count as much as the physical world. If a time comes that you have to get up and fetch something, your improper dress will leave a negative impact on your audience. This mindset where you start treating your virtual meetings as actual meetings takes time to develop. And the work must naturally start in college. Figure out what patterns work well with the camera and which pieces of jewellery do not go well. Even the body language you maintain comes under the umbrella of virtual etiquettes.

5. Creating virtual engagement

Just as you are prone to distractions during a virtual meeting, your audience suffers from the same problem as well. They just have your voice, face and content to go ahead with and their minds are bound to wander around. Here, you need to pick up skills like voice modulation to create emphasis and curiosity, learn where to pause to create an effect. Find out an engaging way to bring the group on board and bring back attention if things start going out of control. Engagement is difficult to achieve in virtual meetings. And this where the good colleges in Delhi for PGDM focuses heavily.

A recent study on the digital economy stated that future entrepreneurs will rarely know what physical meetings actually looked like. This should be your cue to understand the current importance of virtual meetings. B-schools like the EMPI, New Delhi, are closely working with their students to build such futuristic skills where acknowledging the upcoming demand is a priority. EMPI’s curriculum is entrepreneurial and futuristic. Skills of virtual meetings are embedded in the PGDM lessons. No B-school can deny that the world the current management students are heading into is going to be very different than what it is now.