6 MORE Quick Tips for Virtual Meetings: Engagement & Distractions
The transition to virtual has especially affected facilitators and visual practitioners whose roles are all about convening with people. The good news is, if you can do it in a room, you can do it online. Over the coming days, I’ll share best practices for you and your participants to make the transition to virtual meetings easier.
Tips 1-5 are in part 1 of Quick Tips for Virtual Meetings: http://www.lizardbrainsolutions.com/think-with-ink/2020/3/13/5-quick-tips-for-virtual-meetings
Today, it’s all about addressing engagement and distractions in virtual meetings.
6. Draw the line between presentation and participation. I hear this all the time: “Our people hate virtual meetings.” Actually, what they hate about virtual meetings is the same thing they hate about in-person meetings: being talked at and a slow death by PowerPoint. There’s a difference between presenting, which is sharing a screen, and participating, which is collaborating together in a way that participants can type, talk, or otherwise share their ideas as equals. If you must present, keep it short: 15 minutes or less. If you need to get more information across than that, don’t do it with PowerPoint. Put your content in a Word document or PDF and let people read it in their own time in advance of the meeting. Save the meeting time for discussion and participation.
7. Ask for engagement. That time when participants are joining a meeting is useful, even if not everyone is there yet. Use that time to have a written request for engagement on screen as the first thing your participants see. The request can be something like this: “Over the next 45 minutes, we’re going to discuss key actions that are important for our organization. I’m inviting you to be fully present and engaged. Your attention and informed decision making is crucial to our success. Please be mindful of where you are focusing your attention during our time together so that we can be as effective as possible.”
8. Remove distractions. Another message participants might see as they join the meeting is an invitation to remove distractions. It might read, “Please remove anything that might distract you from being fully present and engaged over the next 45 minutes. This could mean closing a door, hanging a Do Not Disturb sign, turning off a phone, closing other windows, or shutting down email. Before we begin, take a moment and remove a distraction.”
9. Body language can be deceiving. Most of our communication is nonverbal, transmitted via body language and facial expressions. If you’re not looking at me in the eyes, then you’re sending me the message that you’re not paying attention. And that can be a trigger for me, without me even knowing why. The problem is, your webcam and your screen are in two different places. You could be looking dead at me or what I’m showing you, and yet I’d still perceive you as looking away. This problem is exacerbated if you use two screens. Watch your reactions if you think people aren’t paying attention.
10. Use breakouts. Conversations between pairs or small groups to shift the energy away from the passive-receive mode that occurs in large groups are just as important in the virtual space as they are in the physical space. And it’s easy to quickly get people into small groups with many virtual meeting platforms. Here’s how to do it in Zoom.
11. Be clear on your role. You’re a facilitator, not an elementary school teacher. When a client wants me to guarantee that participants will pay attention, I gently say that my job is to treat adults like adults, and that engagement will be driven by the content and design of the meeting. If someone is doing something besides focusing on the meeting, then I’m going to trust that that’s the most important thing the person could be doing at the time. This is a phrase I also tell participants at the start of meetings. My own standard for participation is pretty simple: if someone’s awake, I assume they’re paying attention.
Take your facilitation practice online! If you can do it in the room, you can do it virtually. Our 3-hour Virtual Facilitation Workshop will show you how to shift your favorite in-person modalities into a virtual environment. Click here for details.