Most people I know love working remotely. They say they get more done, prize their freedom and flexibility and have better work/life balance. But there are others who really miss being with people and feel isolated and lonely much of the time. People often ask me what qualities are the most important predictors of a successful virtual collaborator. Here are seven that come to mind.

  1. Social butterflies tend to thrive.
    May seem ironic, but sociable people crave contact with others and are motivated to maintain connections, either virtually – through phone, email or social networking tools—or face-to-face, when they can. Introverts who find it painful to stop and chat with an officemate may find it harder to cultivate social connections in a virtual world. For someone who’s introverted, social bonds are almost impossible to create and keep up when working from afar.
  2. Continue Reading »

Before the latest economic downturn, many of my clients would bring together people from all over the world, put them into a conference room with pots of coffee and carbo-loaded snacks, and kept them there until they emerged with a raft of creative new ideas. Now, with organizations imposing travel bans for most internal meetings, the question becomes: How can we translate this type of high-energy, face-to-face brainstorming experience into a virtual session where we wring innovative ideas out of each person, using a phone and a computer?

Continue Reading »

In my last post, I made the case that facilitators should take a new look at how to make pre-work more valuable and compelling. There are great benefits to be gained from designing engaging pre-work activities (and incentives to complete them) before your virtual or face-to-face event. They range from raising the level of investment and preparedness of the participants to enabling the facilitator to set the tone for the meeting ahead of time.
There are two reasons why thinking out a communication plan for the meeting, and particularly the pre-work, is very helpful. First, it is a way to communicate the value, urgency, incentives and consequences of doing the pre-work. Second (and this is particularly true for those facilitating virtual events), time spent in advance connecting and building personal connections is enormously valuable in creating a trustworthy and enlivened environment for true sharing and interaction. In other words, a bit of advance phone and email work will pay huge dividends.
When constructing your communications plan, be sure consider the following.

Continue Reading »

Designing Interactive Webinars & Virtual Meetings
How to Keep People Engaged

We received such enthusiastic feedback for our fall 2009 series that we are offering a new series of complimentary webinars where you, the participants, help build the agenda. Please join us Wednesday, February 10th or Thursday February 18th as we demonstrate eight principles for designing interactive webinars by engaging you as participants!

Are you spending too much time in ineffective virtual meetings and boring webinars?The one-way nature of most webinars and web conferences misses an opportunity to engage an audience and draw on the wisdom of the group.

The opportunity presented by a more interactive and collaborative approach to webinars and virtual meetings is to reclaim the many learning methods used in face-to-face workshops and adapt them for a virtual environment. The promise of interactive webinars is to increase learning, shorten meetings, promote greater participation with less multi-tasking and foster on-going collaboration. Ready to enroll? Click here.

Continue Reading »

Open Space Technology is a meeting methodology that enables self-organizing groups of all sizes to deal with complex issues in a very short period of time. A quick description of this method of meeting preparation might be “the art of facilitation by getting out of the way.” Beyond its specific purpose and approach it offers useful lessons that apply to many kinds of meetings including virtual meetings and webinars. Here are five facilitation reminders drawn from Open Space.

Continue Reading »

Most facilitators and team leaders I’ve talked to see the value of assigning some sort of pre-work before a virtual meeting and bemoan the fact that only a small fraction of the participants take this request seriously and complete their assignments. It’s time to take a new look at how to make meeting pre-work more valuable and more compelling.

There are two important reasons to design pre-work into your webinar, online conference or workshop. The first is to get your participants ready to take full advantage of the session by thinking ahead about the content, beginning to formulate ideas or getting to know the group. Participants who have completed well thought out pre-work are “primed” for active and open participation in the real-time event.

The second is to get you ready to facilitate the session effectively. By knowing more about your participants and their interests, you are in a position to develop focused questions that will stimulate ideas. In a virtual setting this becomes even more critical, as you typically have less time in which to achieve your meeting objectives and lack the visual cues that make it easier to adjust your course in mid-stream.

Continue Reading »

Lately I’ve been interested in the use of smart phones paired with web-based tools to make meetings more interactive. (see blog post For This Meeting, Turn on Your Smart Phones). Recently I helped facilitate a session of 150 people where a variety of smart phones were used to allow meeting attendees to provide instant input to the session organizers. There were several useful take-always from this experience.

1- Explore what resources and tools you’ll need to achieve your meeting objectives

  • If the objective is primarily to provide “information by presentation “, then making sure your speakers are available and setting up a good projection system may be all that you need. If your speakers can’t physically be present at the session you’ll need networking, video conferencing or telephony capabilities to enable their virtual presence.
  • If, on the other hand, your meeting process calls for an interactive session with group input (especially with a group of 50 people or more), using smart phones or other devices is a good way to efficiently collect the information from all participants without disrupting the meeting flow. Make sure that the majority of your audience own smart phones and that you offer alternative input options so no one feels excluded. Provide loaner smart phones or Apple iPod Touches , or have a few laptops around the room for people to use.

Continue Reading »

I recently plunged (well, maybe dipped a toe or two) into the world of Twitter. It was inevitable, despite some of my early protestations. Pretty much all of my colleagues are doing it, as are my competitors, and more and more of my clients. Social networking (SN) tools like Twitter really are opening up new ways for virtual workers to connect, communicate and collaborate. SN tools do what email, instant messaging and other more traditional communications means cannot: They foster emergence, meaning that people and groups can naturally and easily link together based on their common interests, skills or profiles, often with people they never even realized existed.

Of course, any tool can be disruptive in a group if used in inappropriate ways. Based on my work with clients and colleagues who work as part of geographically dispersed teams, here are just a few helpful ways to use SN tools.

Continue Reading »

In my last Research Brief for FacilitateProceedings, I shared the quantitative results to date of my study on the effectiveness of six different meeting venues on the bottom line of organizations. This month I thought I’d share some of the qualitative results.

I noticed the questions I received from my first blog posting asked my opinion about why we were seeing some of the results. In the larger, long-term study, I analyze the data using not only statistical techniques, but also by using “qualititative methods of inquiry,” a newer research method that helps researchers and practitioners understand not just “what” they are seeing in the research results, but “why.”

As a reminder, each Research Brief refers readers to the full published article. The research I summarize for you in this blog has already been reviewed and deemed credible by top scholars in my field. The ultimate result of this research is to design meeting models and processes that will help practioners choose the most effective methods to conduct meetings globally, across time and space, using the latest technology.

Continue Reading »

One of my clients was just anointed as the project lead for a new virtual team of a very visible project. She confessed that she has very little experience as a manager of virtual teams, though she does know what it’s like being part of a poorly run team, and she does not want to replicate this experience for her new team members.

Here are a few tips I shared with her to help her get her new team off to a fast start:

1. Choose the right people.

When you can choose your team members, look for people with diverse perspectives with a blending of skills, knowledge and experience. Important competencies include tolerance for ambiguity; sensitivity to cultural differences; willingness to work independently; ability and openness to communicate using a variety of methods; and keen listening skills.

Continue Reading »