Friday, January 20, 2023

[New post] On the foolish hope that remote work alone would improve webinars

On the foolish hope that remote work alone would improve webinars

T Coe

Jan 20

When COVID happened, webinars were suddenly everywhere—an unavoidable part of our changed work landscape.

Almost three years later, with in-person meetings possible and a diminished hunger for any kind of human interaction, the deluge of webinars in my life has slowed to a trickle.

So what surprised me the other day, when I hopped into my first webinar in a few months was how BAD it was. The webinar was hosted by an A/E/C consulting firm with years of experience running these events. How could this be?

It had all the hallmarks of a bad webinar:

a text-heavy PowerPoint presentation
"technical difficulties" with the presenter unable to get the presentation to appear on the "right" screen
the host (not the presenter) rambling about the weather while this was happening, after muttering an apology for "not having any jokes"
a younger colleague of both piping up to point out the button the presenter needed to click to switch screens
no hosts on video—just audio and professional headshots
no sense that there were other webinar participants (or how many of us there were)
an unclear sense of the audience (the webinar covered two different but conflicting products)

We had a glimpse of a better webinar with two survey questions offered to participants. (Woo! Interactivity!) But even those moments were neutralized when I realized that the presenter had no intention of drawing on the question results to reorient the direction of the webinar. She was always going to saw what she said. The survey questions amounted to no more than a feeble gesture in the direction of a better webinar.

Most mysterious of all was the failure to ask a critical question:

Could this be an email?

Alternatively:

Could this be an article on our website?

Maybe it's too hopeful to think that COVID changed anything other than where we work and where we meet.

The continuing failure of webinars suggests that we are still failing to ask why we do what we do.

Does this need to be a webinar? How could we make this webinar more engaging? Who is our audience? Does Susan know how to properly present her slides? What should Mark do when we have a "technical difficulty"?

These are hard questions. But they're worth asking! The alternative is to just keep muddling through our meetings and webinars.

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