For the first time ever, we have data on how professionals tend to show up on video.
Over the course of 2022, hundreds of professionals assessed their virtual presence skills by taking one, or more, of our Virtual Presence Assessments.
While each individual gains significant value in understanding their own scores and improvement over time, we are also able to better understand some global trends in behaviors over video.
Our trends indicate that:
Framing is the biggest issue for professionals. 63% of professionals are out of frame.
When your are out of frame, you are at a disadvantage. Research has shown that your audience’s impression of you varies depending on where you show up in your frame.
For example:
- If you are too low, or your lens is too high, your authority decreases significantly.
- If you are too close to the lens, you increase the intensity of the viewing experience for your audience and you reduce the effectiveness of your overall presence because your audience sees less of you.
Taking at least two assessments led to improvement for a whopping 93% of professionals.
Our Virtual Presence Assessments are designed to develop awareness and benchmark improvement over time. As demonstrated by 93% of professionals who took at least two assessments, the average improvement rate was 17%.
This is the first time ever, that every professional on a distributed team can get access to convenient, personalized feedback on their presence and communication. And it works.
The top performing area on video is Authority Impression
Our data demonstrates that showing up on video with authority is the highest performing category in our virtual presence analysis.
Authority impression is influenced by your posture, your eye gaze when speaking and any tendencies to touch your face/sway.
While many professionals say they don’t feel as confident on video as they do in person, the great news is that 88% of professionals who took an assessment scored high on their impression of authority….now we can work on being more expressive:)
When it comes to expressivity on video, professionals struggle to use hand gestures, vary facial expressions and vocal tone.
This leads to low expression and low energy.
While this correlates with much of the research out there that shows professionals experience fatigue over the course of days of back to back video meetings, it also indicates that the way we show up may be a contributing factor.
Being more engaging and expressive on calls leads to higher levels of engagement overall.
As we head into the new year, we will be especially interested to see whether we can identify relationships between calls scoring higher in expressivity and energy (importantly, this doesn’t mean ‘happier or smile-ier’ calls!) and the overall quality and length of the call.
Conclusion
Taking a look at these relatively simple trends, we can start to understand the power of our virtual presence.
Video is a powerful, humanistic channel of communication. It requires special attention in terms of communication awareness, skill and strategy.
Here at Virtual Sapiens, we are on a mision to help professionals assess, improve and master their virtual presence – so they can leverage this tool as a core part of their communication toolkit.
To see how you do compared to these trends – try out our free assessment tool here.