Business Communication Notes

MCS 2000 DE - W25

Unit One: The Purpose of Business Communication

1. The purpose of effective business communication
2. Workplace trends
3. Objectives, critical thinking, active listening, and clear communication

Learning Objectives:
1. Identify the purpose of effective business communication and its importance to
personal career success
2. Explain key changes and trends in the workplace including workplace privacy issues,
ethical business communication, technology, and safeguarding information
3. Describe how to gain clarity with business communication objectives, critical
thinking, active listening, comprehension, and interpreting of messages

Video Notes
- The biggest difference in ‘business communication’ should be informative,
efficient, concise, persuasive, credible, and should include a call to action.
- Should be designed to achieve goals and objectives, which means that it
must be purpose-driven and action-oriented.
- Consider your objectives–purpose for communicating
- Be clear on the actions you are trying to instigate
- What do you want to achieve
- When do you want to achieve it
- Why do you want to achieve it
- Effective communication is delivered with content that demonstrates your
competence, your confidence, and credibility
- Competence is your ability to do something successfully
- Confidence is a demonstration of assurance, which builds trust and belief
- Certainty is the firm conviction that something is true, leading your audience
to act
- Ask questions during research and of yourself (who, what, why, when, how)
- Requires professionalism
- Focus on your audience and your audience’s needs

The Purpose of Effective Business Communication

 - Business communication refers to the effective written, verbal and non-verbal
communication that is necessary in business, applicable to organizations, academics,
and interpersonal communication.

Ted’s Secret to Public Speaking - Chris Anderson

- There's one thing that all good Ted talks have in common:
- Your objective as a speaker is to build an idea into the minds of your audience
- What is an idea? It's a pattern of information that helps you understand and navigate
the world
- They can be complex and analytical or simple and aesthetic
- Collectively ideas make up your world view, therefore, they need to be
reliable
- Four guidelines to achieve your objective:
1. Focus on one major idea
- Explain that one thing properly
- Give context, and examples, and link the whole talk to this
foundational point
2. Give people a reason to care
- Get their permission to welcome you in: Curiosity
- Use intriguing or provocative questions to identify why something
doesn’t make sense and needs explaining
- If you can reveal a disconnection in someone’s worldview, they'll feel
the need to bridge that knowledge gap
3. Build your idea with familiar concepts
- Speak their language, start where they are
4. Make your idea worth sharing
- Ask yourself: who does this idea benefit?

Workplace Trends
- Ethical business communication is the foundation of effective communication

Safeguarding Information
- Primary goal as a communicator is to achieve your goals for growth, while protecting
the assets and gains your business has already earned
- Growth is only valid if it builds on past success
- It is essential to safeguard information, protect your business’s intellectual
property

Objectives, Critical Thinking, Active Listening, and Clear Communication

- Your objective with all business communication should be to gain action on your idea
- Communication = Competence, Confidence, Credibility, and Certainty
- If the audience feels certainty about the communication they have received, they are
likely to act upon it
- Competence will boost your confidence, and confidence is contagious
 - When the audience has confidence in your skill, knowledge and ability, they
will gain certainty about the information you are communicating.
- Certainty oftentimes results in positive action

Effective Professional Communication

- Be clear about objectives for communication
- What do you want to achieve?
- When do you want to achieve it?
- Why do you want to achieve it?
- Should always have a strategic purpose–a plan
- Can be as simple as understanding your purpose for communicating
- Following the “why”, you can then determine what to communicate and how to
communicate it

Business Communication and Marketing

- Four P’s of marketing
1. Product: your a message or idea
2. Price: you must articulate its value and benefits that must outweigh any
objections
3. Place: you must reach your target audience in a manner that meets their needs
4. Promotion: you must present your message or idea so that its compelling,
attractive, persuasive, understood, and actionable

Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills

- Hard skills are practical tools or techniques that tend to be rile-based, technical,
mechanical, methodical, and replicable
- Soft skills are experience-based, people-focused, behavioural and intangible
- Harder to quantify
- Learned by practice, repetition, and experience
- Rooted in “common sense”
- The key to being “professional” is to put the needs of your audience first, so that you
can build a relationship for mutual gain
- Understand what your audience needs and wants, and understand what they
will respond positively to – then provide that in your communication.
- Empathy is important and helpful in professional settings
- Builds trust
- Allows you to meet their needs in a manner that provides mutual benefit

Active Listening
- Essential to elicit information–ask effective questions, and listen carefully to answers
- Listen to understand your audience and listen to understand if your message has been
understood
- 5 W questions:
1. Who is able to generate action for this idea?
 2. What information do I need to share?
3. Where will they be most receptive to receiving communication? (face to face,
email, phone)
4. When is action required?
5. Why is this necessary?
6. Bonus question: How does this benefit both of us?
- Simple questions can provide simple answers–be open to simplicity

Interpreting
- A key to being an effective communicator is interpreting
- The act of assessing information and acting upon it effectively, efficiently, and
correctly

Summary
1. Business communication is the process of competently and persuasively sharing your
ideas
2. It is important to apply a sense of purpose to your communication
a. Set a clear objective
3. Your broad objective will likely gain action and move your idea forward
a. Will lead to success with additional effort and planning
Unit Two: The Communication Process
Major Themes:
1. The value of identifying a communication process with interpersonal communication
2. Acknowledging and overcoming barriers to effective communication
3. Non-verbal communication

Learning Objectives:
1. Describe core competencies for interpersonal communication and the communication
process
2. Identify strategies for overcoming communication barriers
3. Explain the importance of non-verbal communication
4. Define the flow of communication inside and outside organizations

Video Notes:
A. Nonverbal communication:
- 7% of meaning is derived from the words that you speak
- 38% of meaning comes through voice quality
- 55% of meaning comes from nonverbal expression. Whether it's hand
gestures, eye contact, or facial expressions
- In-person verbal communication is paired with nonverbal communication
- Facial expressions and hand gestures communicate along with your
words
- Key Point: Be aware that when you’re speaking to others, you communicate
most of your message before you say anything at all

The Value of Identifying a Communication Process with Interpersonal Communication

- Put yourself in your audience’s shoes
- Identify key facts about your intended audience so you can tailor your
communications accordingly to meet their unique needs
- What do they need to know?
- What do they want to hear – if anything?
- What's their preferred way of receiving information?
- What will stop them listening to what you have to say?
- How will you know that they have got the message?
- What will allow communication to grow?
- What will incentivize them to take action on your communication?
- Listen carefully to the answers you are provided for your questions
- Listen actively, not passively
- Identify your own needs
- What is your communication objective?
- What are you hoping to achieve?
 - Identifying your own needs, paired with an awareness of your own written,
verbal and non-verbal communication will allow you to develop more
effective, concise, and actionable messages.
- Exterior resource: “Start with Why” TED talk
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA

How you communicate

- Communication is
- Situated
- Dependent on the culture/environment
- Relational
- May be different at different times
- Transactional
- Cooperative–people adapt to one another and respond to each other
- Message modulation is essentially the adjustments of your tone and detail when
communicating based on your audience
- How would you explain your whereabouts on a Friday evening, when you
were out much later than you had originally planned, to a friend; your boss;
the police
- Tips for successful interpersonal communication
- Don’t get lost in the details – be as clear and straightforward as possible
- Be empathetic – and demonstrate empathy
- Avoid stereotypes and maintain cultural sensitivity
- Use active listening skills
- Show self-esteem and respect for others
- Be assertive, but not pushy
- Be likeable, but don’t give in too easily
- Be patient and don’t interrupt
- Specificity matters
- Detailed facts matter
- Your audience’s viewpoint matters – try to identify how your viewpoint may
disconnect with theirs and adjust your message if necessary
- Try to understand the speaker’s goals and purpose
- Try to understand how the speaker’s worldview and their chosen
communication medium shapes their argument (and your interpretation of
their argument)
- Remember the Golden Rule - “treat others as you wish to be treated.”
- In business communication, it is rarely “all about you.” You need to build
consensus, and empathy demonstrates your sincere interest

Organizational Communication
- Examples of internal communication include:
- E-mail
- Memos
 - Reports
- Newsletters
- Conversations
- Meetings
- Speeches
- Examples of external communication include:
- E-mail
- Newsletters
- Social media
- Advertising
- Press releases
- Financial and corporate reports
- Websites
- Letters and direct mail
- Within both internal and external communication, there is always a sender; the person
doing the initial communicating and encoding the message that is sent through a
channel directed to the receiver.
- Encoding is the converting of ideas into words, gestures, or other symbols to
convey a message
- Channel refers to the communication pathway such as email, phone, etc.
- Feedback is how the receiver responds to the message

Acknowledging and Overcoming Barriers to Effective Communication

- Areas of communication research include:
- Rhetoric: Use of language to persuade
- Semantics: The words and symbols chosen
- Semiotics: How meaning is assigned and understood
- Cybernetics: Study of how information is processed and how communication
systems function
- External resource: “What Is Semiotics”
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7VA95JdbMQ
- Barriers to effective communication include:
- Channel overload
- Too many messages coming in at once
- Information overload
- Too much information in the message
- Emotional interference
- Feelings distract and get in the way
- Semantic interference
- Sender and receiver interpret words differently
- Physical and technical interference
- Mixed messages
- Channel barriers
- Environmental interference
 - Strategies to overcome these boundaries include:
- Be timely with your communication
- Be time-sensitive (to acknowledge the needs of your audience)
- Be a good, active listener
- Be a careful reader (read in a manner similar to active listening to interpret
messages effectively)
- Be context-sensitive
- Be proactive – reach for solutions, rather than just identifying challenges
- Consider the differences between what the sender believes, and what the receiver
believes:
- How might your worldview shape your perception of the information?
- How might your worldview differ from theirs?
- How do your own perceptions and expectations shape the way you “hear”
messages?

Comedy, Misunderstanding, and Improv Comedy

- The rules of improv comedy are simple but effective for driving a funny story – and
they are also very effective rules for driving many business communication scenarios
forward:
1. Say Yes (acknowledge the mutual need to proceed – a ‘no’ gives the
conversation nowhere else to go)
2. Say Yes, AND… (provide solutions and new ideas to keep things moving
closer to solutions)
3. Make statements – don’t just ask questions (whatever the problem, be part of
the solution, and keep the discussion progressing forward)
4. Adhere to the belief that there are no mistakes – only opportunities
- External source: “A Lesson on Improv Technique”
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFO5PWrncGw
- Consider the value of always listening, embracing, positivity, hearing things
and not shutting them down

Non-verbal communication
- Communicates emotions, attitudes, greetings, and status
- Non-verbal communication can include:
- Tone, inflection, and other acoustic properties of speech
- Eye gaze and facial expression
- Body movements, posture, gestures, and touch
- Appearance (bodily characteristics and clothing)
- Personal space
- When speaking, there are a lot of things you can do to improve your delivery that
have nothing to do with your spoken content:
- Dress appropriately (attire can have a powerful non-verbal influence)
- Arrive early (so you aren’t rushed or flustered)
 - Maintain good posture (keep your shoulders back and chin up – it affects your
vocal delivery)
- Take pauses (don’t rush – breathe deliberately, collect your thoughts, and
pause frequently to emphasize key points)
- Maintain eye contact (this is fundamental to establishing trust)
- Avoid long sentences and complicated words
- Speak as clearly as possible – don’t rush
- You’re a human, not a robot – so don’t get hung up on “errors”
- External resource: “The importance of non-verbal communication”
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6NTM793zvo

Summary
1. Effective communication is a process, and it benefits you to consider engaging this
process actively to make your communication more effective and action oriented.
2. Always consider your audience in any business context - your audience’s needs
should always come first.
a. Consider how they receive and process information and identify steps you can
take to communicate with them more directly and successfully.
Unit Three: Planning, Writing, Revising Business Messages
Major Themes:
1. Creating content specifically for business
2. Writing purposeful messages: outlines, content generation, revising editing, and
proofreading
3. Generating content that is informative and compelling

Learning Objectives:
1. Apply five key concepts in the business writing process
2. Create written messages that acknowledge purpose, scope, audience, medium, design,
and content
3. Describe types of content used in business messages
4. Employ guidelines for creating informal and formal outlines, content generation,
revising, editing and proofreading messages

Video Notes: Content Generation

- The challenge with business communication is that you need to share information
and tell stories to instigate action for people who maybe don't know you and
probably don't even really care about you
- you'll rarely have the opportunity to take your time while getting to the point
- need to be concise, action-oriented in your communication, and you need to
be persuasive, which includes building trust
- Requires planning, writing and revising
- Planning
- Analyze your audience
- Their needs
- Analyze your purpose
- Understand your intended outcome
- Content requirements
- Writing
- Dont edit, just write
- Get out all of your ideas
- Develop a lot of content
- Revising
- Edit your word
- Shift ideas around
- Look for gaps in information
- Make sure your content is backed up by research/support
- Proofread!!

Creating Content Specifically for Business

 - Message planning contributes to effective business communication by making your
communication purpose-driven, audience-focused, and concise
- Understand your specific purpose for communication
- Is it to convey information?
- Solve a problem?
- Persuade your audience?
- What is your purpose?
- Why are you communicating?
- What are the objectives your message is meant to achieve?
- Have a purpose statement when applicable
- Think about your desired outcome
- Helps to refine content; thinking carefully and strategically
- Keeping your purpose and desired outcome in mind as you write your message
helps you evaluate whether your content supports your goal
- Acknowledge your intended audience
- What do they need to know?
- What do they want to hear?
- What's their preferred way of receiving information?
- What will stop them listening to what you have to say?
- How will you know that they have got the message?
- The medium you use to communicate your ideas is often critical to successful
communication
- Design can be as important as the content in your communication, so if you identify
aesthetics as something that your intended audience will appreciate, then provide
well-written content that looks great too

Writing Purposeful Messages

Effective editing of your ideas is essential
- Creating an outline
- Brainstorming
- Try to capture as many ideas as possible, allowing for no “wrong”
answers
- Yes, and…
- Mapping/clustering
- Collect your ideas, and find ways for visualization of your main data,
topics and subjects
- Ask questions
- Ask journalistic questions of your subject (who, what, why, when,
where, and how?) and then answer these questions in writing
- Research and find relevant or supportive data
- In-house company documents, and verbal discussions with colleagues
- Digital media, social media, podcasts, video
- Traditional published sources (books, library and online research, etc.)
- Databases (Ipsos Reid, www.Sedar.com, Statistics Canada)
 - Business writers still benefit from following a structured process
- Analyze the research question and topic – what’s the problem?
- Identify audience concerns and needs – what solution do they need?
- Establish the scope of the research – what is relevant (and more importantly,
what is irrelevant)?
- Define research activities – focus on relevant, trusted sources of information
- Develop a work plan – identify your intended outcome / solution, and work
towards that

Five key steps in the writing process

(You don’t need to follow these steps in a straight line, you can return to steps anytime)
1. Pre-writing
a. Identify the purpose of your communication.
b. Estimate the scope of your message – what must be communicated, and what
may be irrelevant?
c. Consider the audience’s needs – what do they want to know? What do they
need to know? What do they already know? What questions might they have?
d. Select a communication channel – for example, is email appropriate, or should
you communicate on the phone or in person?
e. Collect information – do your research, know your stuff, show your stuff.
f. Develop supporting points, stories, and examples to illustrate facts in a more
meaningful way.
2. Organizing and outlining
a. Clarify the topic, purpose, and desired outcome of this communication
b. List your main ideas
c. Organize and arrange your main points and ideas
d. Build upon your core ideas with relevant content and sub-points beneath each
major idea
e. Evaluate, revise and adjust your structure
3. Drafting–expanding your outline
a. Begin with the easiest part – go with what you know, providing your authentic
understanding of the topic
b. At the drafting stage, don’t worry about making anything perfect, just write
freely.
c. At the drafting stage, write first, edit later. Don’t even think about perfection
at the drafting stage – just write.
4. Revising
a. Work from a paper copy
b. Read slowly – read each sentence independently of the overall content
c. Consider the reader – must make sense to your intended audience
d. Read it multiple times
e. Experiment with re-structuring entire blocks of content around like game
pieces – it may increase the intelligibility of your argument or reveal new
perspectives.
 f. Read the draft aloud
g. Use spell/grammar checkers
5. Editing and proofreading
a. Pare the content down to really essential components and ideas
b. The value is in the quality of the writing – not the quantity
- Identify the words and concepts that create the shortest possible path to
action
c. Proofreading is the final step
- Shouldn’t be changing any content at this point
d. Check for errors and inconsistencies
e. External resource: “Five Steps to Improve Your Proofreading”
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRVL8f-_TPw

Generating content that is informative and compelling

- Content is the foundation of your communication
- Storytelling can be used to persuade, dissuade, or provoke an emotional response, and
it can be hugely valuable when it comes to the persuasiveness of your business
communication
- Stories connect the communicator better with the listener, and they can heighten the
credibility and intelligibility of your ideas
- Albert Einstein is mistakenly credited as once saying “You don’t really understand
something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”
- The first step in sharing a clear understanding of a difficult topic is to clearly
understand it yourself
- Stories help your audience to remember and recall otherwise complex information.
They can help people to solve problems by relating information to something more
familiar. Effective stories should be:
- Brief
- Believable
- Told from one perspective
- Focused on a problem, and directed towards a solution
- Be inspiring, or have a positive ending
- Induce a call to action
- Relate well to your topic – relevancy is critical!

Overcoming writer’s block

a. Start early – don’t wait until the last minute
b. Use your computer to shift blocks of text around – restructure ideas to reveal new
combinations or insights
c. Talk it out verbally
d. Move around – action creates action
e. Write what you know – personal viewpoints are always more interesting than
impersonal analysis
 f. Change perspectives – does it help to look at your topic from someone else’s
viewpoint?
g. Take a break – give your brain a “time out”
h. Practice freewriting
i. Adopt a positive attitude
j. Budget your time – set yourself limits and try to stick with them
k. Limit distractions
l. Get the most from software – use online grammar checkers and writing assistants
m. Plan the structure – revisit your outline if it isn’t working for you
n. Remember your reader – always consider your audience!!
o. Go with the flow – remember that Talk – Action = Nothing
- Write now, edit later
p. Leave refinements for revision – write more content than you need

Summary
There are a lot of moving parts to effective communication, and it takes a lot of effort to write
simply. Effective communication can be really challenging – and the greatest resource that
you can leverage is time, effort and informed insight. You must do the work but remember –
effective editing of your ideas is essential. There are a lot of good ideas out there. To cut
through the clutter, you need to have excellent ideas, and you must communicate them with
excellence.
Unit Four: Interpersonal Communication
Major Themes:
1. Public speaking, presentation skills and verbal communication
2. Effective teamwork
3. Group communication

Learning Objectives:
1. Demonstrate public speaking and presentation skills including audience analysis,
content generation, delivery methods, and handling questions and objections
2. Organize, participate in, and/or manage meetings effectively
3. Apply productive verbal communication approaches through a variety of media (in-
person, phone, video, conferencing)
4. Identify the importance, types, and characteristics of workplace teams and models for
team decision-making
5. Implement methods for effective group communication, including collaborative
writing

Video Notes: Public speaking

- Audience analysis
- Self-analysis
- Tips
- Know your stuff–show your stuff
- Confidence comes from competence
- Do the work in advance
- Know your content
- Practice your approach
- Be yourself (within reason)
- Authenticity matters
- Conversational tone
- Body language
- Relax
- Watch out for “uhh/uhh”
- Demonstrates lack of confidence
- Well-developed content helps to avoid these
- Take a deep breath
- Keep your head up
- Eye contact matters
- Connect with your audience

Public Speaking, Presentation Skills and Verbal Communication

strategies/tips for public speaking

 - Focus on your audience – make eye contact, and consider their information needs and
wants as you share your ideas
- Share a conversation – engage the audience, and don’t always monopolize the time
with just your ideas
- Use clear, concrete, unambiguous language
- Support your message with appropriate nonverbal communication
- Avoid upward inflection – don’t raise the tone of your voice at the end of each phrase
like you’re punctuating each sentence with a question mark (unless you’re asking a
question, of course)
- Ask questions, and listen actively to answers

Verbal communication approaches through a variety of media

- Examples: meetings, interviews, phone discussions, teleconferences, video
conferencing
- “Media richness” is key
- Media Richness Theory (MRT) is the study of all types of communication,
comparing different media to each other for their ability to convey
understanding to another person.
- “Rich” refers to the quantity and quality of information
- Oftentimes it is better to communicate good news over email and bad news
over the phone to avoid any misunderstanding
- Media richness matters in communication – so choose your medium of
communication carefully.

Public speaking presentations

- Presentation types include
- Workshops, seminars, training sessions
- Staff meetings
- Management meetings
- Sales presentations
- Speeches
- Oral reports
- Key principle to remember is to deliver your message for easy comprehension,
retention, and action
- Simple structure: specific purpose, clear main idea, build your content to
support the main idea, and make sure your listeners know what to do next
- Analyze your speaking situation
- What is the purpose of your presentation?
- Where are you speaking?
- Do you need a microphone?
- Is the setting formal - or informal?
- Do you require additional equipment (e.g. PowerPoint projector)?
- Do acoustics and seating matter?
- When are you speaking?
 - Be extremely aware of time:
- How long do you have to speak?
- What’s the attention span of your target audience?
- Does the time of day matter?
- Will your audience’s energy level different depending on the time of
day?
- Are there other speakers? How does their timing influence yours?
- What will happen before and after the presentation?
- What action do you need your audience to take? How will you clarify that in
your speech?
- Identify your purpose:
- Why are they there?
- What do they expect from you?
- What is their attitude?
- Who is in a position of authority – are you directly addressing the decision
maker?
- Are there tensions within the audience?
- What do they know already?
- What are their needs?
- Tips for speaking:
- Open strongly, close strongly – if you do nothing else, remember that a strong
introduction will establish your credibility, and a strong closing will drive your
audience to act
- Know your content, and rehearse it carefully (especially if it’s critically
important that it be shared successfully)
- If you are nervous, remember that fear is an energy, and you can use fear to
your advantage – as far as your audience knows, energy = passion. Don’t say
“I’m nervous” – say “I’m excited!”
- Try to build an “ebb and flow” into your speaking – build towards your key
point and create “moments” with storytelling, anecdotes, and relatable ideas
- Be yourself, and take pride in your uniqueness
- Most audience members want you to succeed – embrace those in the audience
that are already on your side, speak to them, and don’t focus on the few
individuals who seem less engaged
- Focus on what’s working, not on any “mistakes” – you will notice any
“errors” much more than your audience will
- Any time you speak in public, is it a performance:
- You are sharing information to elicit a response.
- You should be confident in your delivery.
- You must “know your stuff” - be confident in your content.
- You should be well rehearsed and professional.
- You need to be good.
- If you’re speaking, then you are the expert – so demonstrate expertise.
 - Give your audience something they know, and give them something they don’t
know.
- Avoid the temptation to “do more” – you are driving the “show” – so be self-
aware, but more importantly, be your authentic self.
- Don’t just read your content – perform it (though don’t necessarily over-
perform).

Visual aids
- Audiences often expect visual aids. Visual aids can include:
- Chalkboard, whiteboard, blank flip charts
- Prepared flip charts and posters
- Overhead projector transparencies
- Videos, models, samples
- Handouts
- Multimedia and computer visuals (e.g. PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi)
- Key is to make them as simple and consistent as possible
- Strongly consider aesthetics
- Ensure visuals are relevant and clear
- Proofread!!
- External resource: How to Create Better Visual Presentationsopens a video in a new
window
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so9EJoQJc-0&t=24s

Handling questions
- Important steps to remember:
- Listen carefully
- If you are already formulating an answer while the audience member is
still asking their question, you risk missing important information or
context
- Don’t be afraid to pause and collect your thoughts
- If you are considering your response carefully, your audience will wait
patiently
- If they have asked a two-part question, separate two-part questions and answer
them individually
- Watch the length of your answer
- You don’t owe anyone a lengthy answer unless it’s justified, and you
don’t have to answer each question
- If you don’t know an answer, admit it immediately
- With the added promise that you will search for an answer “offline”
after the meeting, if they are interested
- Be firm in your responses, as much as possible, and try to stay on topic
- Never put down a questioner
 - Nothing will turn a room against you more quickly than disrespecting
an audience member, and don’t ever assume a question is hostile (even
if it completely seems to be)
- Even if a question is “stupid,” you should still strive to provide a clear,
quick, authoritative answer
- End by thanking the audience.

Speaking on video
- Consider your appearance
- You should always meet professional expectations
- Prepare a script, and adapt while speaking
- Avoid being too rigid
- If recording a video for later viewing, film it in small segments, and edit to share only
the best segments
- Consider audio quality and vocal tone – how do you sound?
- Watch your body language
- Video can actually amplify non-verbal elements
- Never just read your presentation material – be prepared, and maintain “eye contact”
with the camera as much as possible
- Stay hydrated
- Video camera microphones can pick up “dry mouth” and it’s a really
distracting sound
- Consider lighting
- A bright light behind you can shadow your face – ensure you can be seen
clearly
- Remember what’s in the background behind you
- Consider image framing
- Are you centred in the camera frame, or are you only filling the lower 25% of
the frame? If so, adjust the camera so you are “filling the frame”
- Know your stuff, show your stuff

Effective Teamwork
- Collaboration is an essential business skill, either as an employee or an entrepreneur
-