By Damon Yeutter
For better or worse, value specialists are public speakers. Public speaking plays a fundamental role in every step of the Value Methodology (VM) process (i.e. the Job Plan) and can at times be intimidating for even the most capable facilitators. Surveys regularly indicate that public speaking is a significant fear for many people (often ranked higher than the fear of death), and this comes as no surprise given that successful public speaking isn’t as straightforward as just saying the right words. In fact, saying the right words plays only a small role in successful public speaking, a lesson I learned firsthand while managing a political campaign in 2016.
Shortly after primary season I had the opportunity to accompany a candidate for office to a one-on-one communication course taught by one of President Bill Clinton’s former public speaking instructors. The instructor emphasized that the content of a speaker’s message is markedly less critical to the objective of garnering a positive reception than the nonverbal cues a speaker conveys to his or her audience. The precise extent to which nonverbal cues are more important in conveying a speaker’s message is contested, but the most often quoted research on the subject states that 55% of communication is body language, 38% is tone of voice, and 7% is the speaker’s message. Stated otherwise, nonverbal communication or cues (i.e. cues associated with body language) are critical to successful public speaking.
Value specialists, like candidates for office, are professional public speakers and must pay careful attention to the nonverbal communication cues they convey while leading a study. The visual appearance, mode of dress, body language, and facial expressions of a value specialist all contribute to the successful (or unsuccessful) execution of their responsibilities.
This leads me to the crux of this paper. In late February of 2017 I was asked to co-facilitate a series of virtual value studies for an overseas client with participants calling in from as many as half a dozen time zones. Upon receiving this request, the above public speaking course came immediately to mind. What would it be like to lead a value study with nonverbal communication taken out of the equation? I agreed to help with the effort and over the course of the following eight months I successfully co-facilitated five virtual value studies. In what follows, I will discuss how adapting facilitation methods to technological constraints, inspiring confidence among value team members, and paying attention to communication cues throughout the process resulted in a series of studies that exceeded client expectations and were as successful as comparable in-person studies.
Adapt Methods to Technological Constraints
Much of what is lost by forgoing an in-person value team meeting can be regained by adapting usual value study practices and facilitation methods to suit the limitations of virtual space. If blank walls and flipcharts are the value specialist’s canvas during a typical study, a shared screen serves the same function in a virtual study. To successfully lead a virtual study the value specialist must first determine where participants will meet, how files will be shared among the value team, and how typical flip-chart based (or other in-person exercises) will be adapted to the computer screen.
To begin by addressing the obvious, a virtual study requires an online meeting space where participants can gather, talk and listen to one another, and share what is on their screen as needed. Think of this as the room in which the value study will be held. There are many online conferencing options available for this purpose, such as GoToMeeting and WebEx; some services offer slight advantages over competitors, but the key, must-have features are the ability to call-in to the meeting via phone and computer audio (Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP for short) as well as screensharing capability. It goes without saying that a decent internet connection is mandatory.
In addition to an online conferencing service, a filesharing service such as Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, or Dropbox will enable the simple and efficient exchange of files among team members without clogging up email inboxes. Imagine this service as the table or desk where binders of project drawings, estimates, templates and instructions, and other documents are located for the value team’s use.
While the above services provide the structure required to conduct a virtual value study, a value specialist must also adjust their facilitation methods and techniques for the virtual study to succeed. Exercises like FAST diagramming, for example, are not effective if the value team is unable to watch and actively participate in the effort. To ensure that the quality of a virtual study matches that of a traditional study, activities, materials, and resources must be adapted to work within the limits of a virtual environment. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but one simple method is to prepare Microsoft Word and Excel template files in advance of the study that can be opened on the facilitator’s computer and edited live with value team input via screensharing. The benefits of this adaptation are twofold. First, by ensuring that all study activities are facilitated on-screen, participants always have a mode of visual engagement with the value process. Second, by preparing files in advance, downtime is avoided and the momentum of the value study is maintained, preventing team members from becoming distracted or losing focus.
When adapting methods to suit a virtual study it’s vital that the value specialist keep in mind the importance of nonverbal communication cues. As discussed above, in-person communication relies heavily on nonverbal cues. While in-person value studies are normally enhanced by nonverbal cues like facial expressions or the value specialist’s professional appearance, these cues are non-existent in a virtual study. Instead, the value specialist must ensure that everything displayed on screen reflects the professionalism that their nonverbal cues in a traditional in-person setting would otherwise signal or convey. Practically speaking, this means that documents uploaded to the file sharing service should be well organized and intuitively accessible. Templates shown on-screen or used by the value team should contain clear instructions, be well-formatted, and free of spelling and grammar errors. In the absence of traditional nonverbal communication cues, what inferences might you make about someone with a desktop overwhelmed by random files and folders? How about someone with a Star Trek desktop background?
Without the many nonverbal communication cues concomitant with traditional in-person meetings, the value specialist must attend to the aspects of a virtual study from which participants may otherwise receive such cues. This requires looking beyond the web-based services that make a virtual study possible in the first place and carefully considering the nonverbal cues associated with anything the value specialist may display on screen during the study.
Inspire Confidence Among Team Members
Anyone who has participated in a value study knows how challenging it can be for team members to feel comfortable sharing their knowledge and contributing to technical discussions about a project/process/product with which they have limited familiarity. This challenge is even more acute in a virtual setting as value team members are unable to rely on nonverbal cues like body language to support communication. Furthermore, many of the facilitation and elicitation techniques that a value specialist may use to set team members at ease and encourage participation do not translate well to a virtual setting; self-deprecating humor may be misunderstood without the added context of one’s body language and facial expressions, and long pauses intended to elicit information or creative ideas may be misinterpreted as disappointment in the team’s output. For a virtual study to succeed, the value team must remain actively engaged and this is only possible when team members feel confident in their knowledge of the project and the value study process.
Perhaps the most important step a value specialist can take to inspire confidence among virtual study team members is to attend diligently to the pre-study phase of the VM job plan, well before the study is scheduled to begin. The value specialist should take extra care to provide project information as early as possible, thereby equipping team members with the knowledge they need to contribute confidently during the study. Additionally, the value specialist should set clear expectations for participants regarding availability, collaboration, acceptable break times, and when it’s appropriate (if at all) to work on other projects. This will help team members understand the flow and cadence of the study, especially if they’ve never participated in a traditional value study before. The value specialist should also review the VM process and deliverables with team members before the study begins so that they are familiar with the study’s objectives and the steps that will be taken to achieve said objectives.
The more confident team members are in their knowledge of the project and of the value study process, the more likely they are to remain engaged. Team members will check-out and stop contributing if they feel overwhelmed, uninformed, or left behind during a virtual study even faster than would be the case in a traditional study. In a virtual study the value specialist doesn’t have the luxury of looking around the room to measure team engagement, the lack of nonverbal communication cues makes it impossible.
Inspiring confidence among team members is an ongoing exercise and shouldn’t stop after a robust pre-study phase. For a virtual study to succeed, the value specialist must engender confidence in team members throughout the study by regularly checking in with team members and slowing down while presenting.
Regular check-ins with the value team are key to maintaining team member confidence throughout a virtual study. Touching base with the value team after each activity or study milestone provides an opportunity for the value specialist to confirm that participants are tracking with the process and are not bogged down by questions or uncertainties. Over the course of five virtual studies I’ve found that keeping a list of team member names taped to the side of my computer screen and using it to check in with one or two individuals by name as frequently as I would otherwise look around the room to read facial expressions during an in-person study was quite effective.
Two final strategies for inspiring confidence among value team members can be summed up by the words slow down, and this applies to both on-screen movements and the value specialist’s speech. During a virtual study the value specialist should scroll slowly through documents that are being shared on screen and switch between windows with purpose so that team members have time to read and process what is being shared. The more frantic the value specialist’s on-screen activities, the more quickly a team member will disengage. Similarly, the value specialist should speak more slowly than normal and pay careful attention to their tone of voice. By speaking clearly and confidently in a measured tone, the value specialist sets a positive example for all involved and prioritizes the communication cues (i.e. tone of voice, rate of speech) that are still applicable in the context of a virtual study.
Persistently Overcommunicate
At the completion of the second of five virtual value studies, I asked the team what could be done to improve future web-based studies. One of the civil engineers on the team noted that not being able to see other team members was difficult and that it was necessary to “overcommunicate to communicate effectively at all”. Her insight immediately reminded me of the point President Clinton’s public speaking instructor sought to convey. Whether we realize it or not, what we say as value specialists – as team leaders, facilitators, public speakers – is just a small part of the message our audience receives. Virtual meetings upend how we communicate in a way that is unfamiliar to most people and challenging regardless of how comfortable one might feel on a conference call. Value studies require detailed analysis, problem-solving, and collaboration; activities that can be difficult even when meeting in person. Our civil engineer team member was exactly correct: for these activities to succeed in a virtual setting, the value specialist must over-communicate both verbally and especially non-verbally to successfully communicate at all.
If there is a deeper lesson to be extrapolated from this analysis, it would be that the entire experience of performing virtual studies has impressed upon me that successfully performing values studies isn’t simply a technical exercise in reducing resource consumption while maximizing performance, but rather two exercises completed in parallel. As much as a value study is a technical exercise, it is also a communication exercise, and a successful value specialist cannot ignore the latter in favor of the former.
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