Virtual Presence: How to Show Up on Video Calls as Yourself

Why Presence Disappears on Video

Kara and Stephanie saw this play out over two months of one-on-one coaching with the product marketing team at a fast-growing, fully remote company. Each coachee came with the same issue: on video, they were getting outshone by colleagues who simply talked faster or more often, whether or not what they said was any good. Most of the people struggling weren’t junior. Several had fifteen or twenty years of experience and plenty of command in a physical room.

Presence on screen runs on the same two signals it runs on everywhere. Competence tells people they can trust your judgment, and warmth tells them they can trust your intentions. (We dig into that balance in our piece on executive presence.) What changes on video is the bandwidth. Your body is cropped into a box, your eye contact is off by a few inches, and every signal you do send carries extra weight because people have so little else to go on.

That’s also why video is the worst place to tone yourself down. The real version of you already has to work harder to be seen. None of the people in the stories below needed to become a different kind of communicator. Each needed a small adjustment so the capable person already there could come through.

Get Your Setup Out of the Way

Start with the setup, because it’s the easiest fix and the one people skip.

Sound first. People forgive bad video faster than bad audio. In a 2018 study, researchers played listeners the same talks with clear sound and with slightly degraded sound. With the worse audio, listeners rated the research as less important and the researchers as less intelligent. A plug-in headset or a decent external microphone is the cheapest presence upgrade you can buy.

Put the camera where your eyes go. That means at or slightly above eye level, on the screen you’re looking at. If your camera lives on your laptop and your meeting lives on a second monitor, you become Stephanie’s prospect: completely engaged and looking somewhere else. Either move the meeting window to the screen with the camera or move the camera to the screen with the meeting.

Frame, light and background. Frame your head and shoulders with a little room below for your hands, so your gestures make it on screen. Face your light source instead of sitting with a window behind you. And treat your background as a curated piece of you. In one study of video-call backgrounds, people judged speakers in front of plants or bookshelves as more trustworthy and competent than the same speakers in front of a living space or a novelty virtual background.

Look at the lens (almost). Drag the video of the person you’re talking to so it sits right under your webcam. When you look at them, you’re nearly looking into the camera, and to them it reads as eye contact.

When You’re Not Talking

A different leader on the same team described a moment almost anyone who has run a video meeting will recognize. Mid-presentation, she noticed a colleague’s brow furrow, read it as confusion, and did what most of us do: she slowed down, backed up and re-explained the point in more detail. Afterward she found out the colleague had glanced away to answer an unrelated Slack message. Nothing about the presentation had confused her at all.

Kara’s reaction was sympathy and an unfortunate truth: people have really bad “resting faces” on video. The same person who reads as attentive in a room reads as bored, skeptical or lost on screen, because the hundred small cues that would fill in the gaps aren’t there.

When you’re the listener, give the speaker what a room would give them. Nod a little bigger than feels natural, react, and come off mute once in a while to say what’s landing. And once you’ve checked your frame, hide your self-view. Stanford’s Jeremy Bailenson, who studies videoconference fatigue, compares watching your own face all day to spending the workday in front of a mirror. Nobody looks engaged while they’re critiquing their own hair.

Read the Room Out Loud

When you’re the speaker, the furrowed brow is a trap. Multitasking is common enough on video (a Microsoft study of remote meetings found people sending email in about 30% of them) that any single face tells you very little.

Our advice: stop guessing and check in. Say what you’re noticing and ask. “I’m seeing some thinking faces. What questions are coming up?” Or, “Give me a thumbs up if you’re ready to move on.” It takes five seconds, it gets you real information instead of a guess, and it reads as command of the room, which is exactly the impression the guessing was costing you.

Take Up Space with Questions

One coachee, a senior product marketer, was good at her job by every account, including her manager’s. But in big meetings, she froze. She had plenty to say. In the moment, though, she’d second-guess it (What if they think that’s irrelevant?) and stay silent. Afterward she’d think it through and set up a one-on-one with whoever hosted. Her manager put it plainly: her thinking was great one-on-one, but leadership wasn’t seeing it.

Several leaders had told her some version of “we need your voice to be heard.” When she did speak up, she made statements, and the conversation moved right past them. Stephanie’s advice was to change the form: ask a question instead. “Contributions to a conversation are actually more noted when people ask good questions,” she told her. A good question gets noticed the same way a good opinion does, without the risk of floating a thought before it’s ready. Then keep it short: about eight words and lead with what, where or how. Skip why, which tends to read as confused or accusatory.

Here’s what that sounds like. What’s important about this? What have we not considered? Where else should we look? Who else should be involved? Direction matters too. “How did we get here?” asks the room to catch you up. “Where should we go next?” moves the conversation forward, and the room can see you’re thinking ahead. To practice, Stephanie suggested starting in a lower-stakes meeting and aiming for eight questions in 30 minutes, no statements required.

If you run those meetings, some of this is on you. As Stephanie told her, “It’s not only your responsibility to take [airtime]. It’s also the responsibility of your leaders” to make room for it.

Sound Like Yourself, Even with a Script

Video makes it tempting to read. A third coachee scripted every word of every webinar she gave, because presenting made her anxious and a script made her feel safe. In her session, Stephanie asked her to read part of it out loud. She got partway through a line about an “elevated voiceover” delivering a “seamless, out of the box experience.” Then she stopped herself. “It is very marketing-y.”

Stephanie’s question back was barely a question. “In your day-to-day conversation, how often do you say seamless? And how often do you say empower?” Or, from the next line of her script, “high-quality inbound and outbound calls”? Who the heck says any of that? When you write to sound polished, you write yourself right out of your own voice, and the microphone (and the camera) catches it.

Scripting is a perfectly good way to figure out what you want to say. Treat it as a step, though, and not the finish line. Write it to get clear, then strip it down to bullets before you deliver. If you need a safety net, script only your first line, your transitions and your last line. Then slow down, pause, and let your voice drop at the end of a sentence so it lands with a period instead of a question mark. What comes out of your mouth should sound like you in the moment, instead of something you wrote three days ago in a different mood.

Add to Your Presence Instead of Subtracting

Two other people, on two separate calls, had gotten almost identical feedback. One had been told she laughs too much in meetings. The other had been told her face shows exactly what she’s thinking, whether she means it to or not. Both had taken the feedback as a signal to tone themselves down.

Kara and Stephanie pushed them the other way. If people read you as warm but not especially competent, keep the warmth and add a competence cue on top of it: a firmer close to your sentences, a clear point of view, a crisp summary at the end. The leaders people find most charismatic send both signals at once. Subtracting the thing that already works just leaves less of you on screen, and on video there’s already less of you to go around.

W&H calls this Keep It Real, and the camera raises the stakes on it. Virtual meetings are where the real version of a person has to work hardest to be seen, which makes them the worst place to hide it.

Try This

Record yourself in a real meeting this week. Watch it back once, on mute. Ask the question Stephanie couldn’t stop asking her prospect: if I were on the other side of this screen, would I feel like this person was with me? Then fix one thing (the camera, the light, the resting face, the scripted opener) and do it again next week.

If you want a friendly room to practice being seen, that’s what Story Hour is for.