The ultimate guide to becoming a Zoom Master
Skill Level One: I’m a Zoom Newbie
Name yourself correctly: Always start with your best foot forward. In Zoom, this means showing up with the right name.
In case your name is incorrect and needs to be updated, there’s a few ways to do this:
- Click on the three dots to the right of your video, and click “Rename”.
- In the participant panel (click on “Participants” in the panel), hover over yourself and click on More >> Rename.
Know how to mute and unmute yourself: You may be surprised to know that your colleagues are not interested in hearing you talk to your cat. To stay on everyone’s good side, mute and unmute yourself as needed. It’s simple: click on the microphone icon in the Zoom toolbar.
Note that when you are sharing your screen, the main Zoom toolbar “hides” behind the skinny “You are screen sharing” message. Hover over this bar to reveal the main Zoom toolbar again.
Get a great headset: Listen, if you’re working from home, there’s no way around it. You need a good headset. It’s unfair for your co-workers to constantly strain themselves to hear you – especially if you sound fuzzy or have considerable background noise. Even “little things” like squeaky chairs and keyboard clacks will start to drive your co-workers insane over time. (Note: It takes less time to drive everyone crazy than you think).
Choose the right microphone: If you’re WFH, you probably have several microphones of varying quality (a monitor, a headset (hopefully), and your laptop). This is not enough! You need to make sure Zoom is using the best option so your colleagues can actually hear you.
Click on the arrow to the right of the microphone in the main Zoom toolbar, and verify that the right microphone source is selected. You can also update the speaker here as well.
Gallery View
You (hopefully) want to see all your co-workers’ faces in larger meetings! Make that happen by switching to Gallery View. This is accessible by clicking on the View button in the top right corner, and selecting “Side-by-side: Gallery”.
When you are sharing your screen, you can view the most participants by selecting “Show grid video” and resizing the widget.
Share your screen: Need to present a few slides? Or maybe you need to enlist help troubleshooting an issue on your computer. Share your screen by clicking on the giant green Share Screen button, located in the bottom middle of your Zoom window. Here’s a few bonus tips for good measure:
- Share only the application you want your participants to see! This may save you from significant stress or embarrassment, as this prevents sharing of any unexpected messages that pop up or private browser windows lurking in the background.
- If you need to share multiple applications, create a new virtual desktop and move over only the applications you need (this is possible on both Windows and Mac). You should also disable notifications on your computer while screensharing. Once again, this may save you a few headaches by preventing you from sharing more than you intend.
- If you need to share audio or video, make sure you check “Share your computer’s audio” and “Optimize for video clip” so that meeting participants will hear and view what you intend to share.
- By default, Zoom takes over your entire screen when someone is sharing content. This is often less than ideal, especially if you’re on a monitor. You can always press ‘Esc’ to exit, or disable automatic full screen by updating the Window size when screen sharing setting to “Maintain current size”.
- You can also annotate a screen that is shared with you. This is particularly useful for helping others, as you can highlight buttons or add quick informational sketches.
Skill Level Two: I can brag about my superior Zoom usage to friends
Touch up your appearance: Make sure you look your very best! Isn’t technology the best? See Touch up my appearance for instructions.
*In a remote position, you may still have substantial social interactions (especially for roles that require significant collaboration) – however, the style will be different. In a good remote environment, you will still get to know your colleagues, develop relationships with co-workers, and potentially spend a good part of your day interacting with others via meetings and other collaborations. This is often more than enough if interacting with others is important to you, but not your primary source of motivation and energy. If you feel jazzed from the “the hustle and bustle” of the office, remote work will probably not be a good fit for you. If you’re not sure, taking the StrengthsFinder assessment is a great way to determine where you get your energy from.
Draw it up: There will come a time when you need to communicate an idea that’s easier to understand when accompanied by a drawing. This is a perfect time to whip up a Zoom whiteboard and sketch away! See Zoom Whiteboard user guide for instructions.
Record Meetings: Recording is a great way of preserving company history. It’s also useful for one-on-one sessions when you seek institutionalized knowledge from another employee. Make sure to ask permission first!
Fight Awkward Meeting Silence: Remember the last time a meeting host made a few (decent) jokes, only to hear awkward silence – followed by a quick decay in enthusiasm? This doesn’t need to happen! Here’s how you can show engagement in Zoom.
- Turn on audio to laugh or applaud. For convenience, you can either use your headset’s muting and unmuting feature or set up Zoom hotkeys.
- Use Zoom’s Reactions to express excitement (
) or feedback (
) via emojis.
- Send supportive messages through Zoom chat – for example “Thanks for all your hard work!”, “This is a great win for us today!”.
Understand How Zoom’s Chat Works: Chat messages only appear for individuals who were in the meeting at the time a message was sent! That means that anyone who joins a few minutes late (or halfway through a meeting) will miss out on any important links sent through chat. This means that you should use an external messenger if you want an easily accessible or permanent channel for chats. Or – if your messages are not important to preserve, you’ll just need to resend chats in Zoom for anyone who joined later.
Skill Level Three: I am a Zoom ninja and organizational overlord
Enable Breakout Rooms: Breakout rooms are a great way to break up the hum-drum in Zoom. It allows you to automatically split large groups into separate sessions for portions of a meeting. This is particularly great for brainstorming sessions and socialization activities. See here for instructions.
Enable Polling: Polls are great in a remote environment to make sure that you’re capturing the group opinion instead of a few loud individuals. You may already have a few polling services that you use (such as SurveyMonkey or polly), but Zoom polls are still worth checking out since it’s so integrated into the platform and meeting. See here for instructions on how to enable and use Zoom polls.
Disable waiting rooms for your co-workers: It is very rude to keep the people you already know waiting for no reason. The extra click it takes to let people enter from the waiting room makes it feel difficult to have spontaneous conversation, and sometimes people can get forgotten in the waiting room for unacceptable lengths of time by co-workers who start a rousing discussion. See here for instructions.
Aggressive mute your co-workers: There is nothing worse than interruptions from people who have not mastered basic Zoom etiquette (and are unaware of their unmuted microphone). This often results in a waste of time as people try to hunt down the source of an echo or extra noise. As the host, you have the power to stop this from happening! You have two options:
Mute everyone! Mwahahaha!
Mute offending individuals.
Allow participants to share their screen: If you’re in a work environment, you’ll need to share your screen a lot. And you won’t always be the host. So the extra interruption to figure out who the host is, request permission, and walk them through the steps of enabling participants to share their screens… is a lot. Prevent this situation by enabling participants to share their screen.