Online Meetings: Body Language Tactics

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Once upon a time, I was working with some talented lawyers in their firm’s Partner Assessment Center (i.e. the evaluation process for promoting new partners). Since we were managing the whole process online, it allowed me to witness the important impact of body language in virtual meetings.

One promotion candidate really stood out - in a negative way. After his performance, my evaluation colleagues started leveling serious criticism against him due to a “lack of engagement” and “failure to take the process seriously”.

I had a different take on his performance. I found the content of his communications to be quite good, better than several of the other candidates. However, he distracted everyone from the quality of his content by displaying body language that clearly signaled a lack of comfort and understanding about how to behave online.

If you would like to ensure that your body is not sending the wrong signals online, read on for some simple tips about effective speaking in your virtual box. In particular, you will learn how to do the following:

  • control your eyes to comfortably connect with your audience,

  • leverage the value of your facial mimicry to avoid sending mixed messages, and

  • utilize your upper body gestures to convey energy and confidence towards your audience.

Eye Connections

We know that it’s always important to make eye contact when speaking with others. (When people don’t make eye contact with us, we tend to make negative judgments about them.)

Unfortunately, when we speak online, it’s extremely difficult to make eye contact due to those stupid boxes. Naturally, our instincts tell us to speak towards the faces in the boxes. But when we do this, those faces are not receiving eye contact from us.

To avoid this problem, you need to make eye contact with everyone by looking into your camera. But, nobody likes to look into that cold, robotic eye.


If you feel uncomfortable with looking at the camera, let me share two tips for solving this problem.

First, if your online platform allows it, you can move those boxes towards the top of your screen - closest to your camera. In this way, you can still speak to the boxes, but it’s more likely to feel that you are making eye contact with your audience.

Second, you can also place some colored tape right next to your camera and focus on that. With this approach, you will definitely feel like you are looking at the audience.

Facial Mimicry


When we are speaking with others, we collect a lot of information about their responses by simply looking at their face. This is why we are all so frustrated when people fail to turn on their cameras in online meetings.

However, even if people turn on their cameras, they can still make meetings frustrating with insufficient lighting to read the expressions on their faces.

To solve this problem, either position your desk so that your face receives some sufficient sunlight. Or else, buy yourself a ring light to brighten your face and highlight your facial mimicry for your audience.

Upper Body Gestures

As we’ve all experienced, online meetings can get boring and tiring quite quickly. To fight against this problem, you can add substantial energy to your meetings by communicating with your upper body (i.e. hands, arms and shoulders).

Unfortunately, it’s oftentimes difficult to position your camera to get your upper body onto the screen. To solve this problem, let me give you some positioning tips - both for laptops and for desktop setups.

First, if you need to use a laptop, stack it on some books so that the camera is at your eye level or a little above. If you can adjust the zoom on your camera, zoom out so that your head is near the top of the screen and at least your chest is at the bottom of your screen. If you can’t adjust the zoom, try moving the camera away from you to create a similar effect (i.e. head close to the top and chest near the bottom).

Second, if you are using a desktop pc with a camera on our monitor, try to position the camera so that it is close to or just above eye level. (If necessary, you may need to raise or lower your seat to get the ideal eye level.) Then, just like with a laptop, zoom out so that we can see your head near the top and your chest near the bottom.

Learn More

If you would like to see a great presentation on effective speaking, check out this YouTube video by Matt Abrahams at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Or, join us for our next course about Engaging Presentations.