In our workshops and webinars about leading virtual teams and getting great results from virtual meetings, we use the following schematic to discuss how to select virtual meeting technology to match the type of interaction we need.

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.

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.

A new class of worker: the Collaboration Worker

The authors recast the workforce sector known as Knowledge Workers (a venerable term coined by Peter Drucker in the mid 20th century) in terms of what most non-production or transaction workers do: collaborate to solve problems, nurture ideas, serve customers and engage with partners. Their research reveals that “the performance gap between top and bottom companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times that of production- or transaction-intense sectors”. It follows then that productivity improvements in this sector of the workforce could have a significant impact on the bottom line. As we have a plethora of collaboration tools available to us today, we’ve got ourselves a real opportunity to nail this one. Right? Yes (the article describes how Cisco saved more than $100 million in travel and business expenses and increased productivity by 78 percent), and it’s not quite that simple.

Today, smart phones are front-line devices for collaborative work. With their growing sophistication we’re starting to see more interest in using them effectively to make meetings more productive.

I’m currently working with a company that is organizing a large conference for their customers. They’d like to use smart phones to conduct simple voting, brainstorming and soliciting feedback on presentations. They did a quick poll to find out which were the top 5 smart phones in use by their clients and came up with the following:

Back in the very early 90’s, when I first started exploring the use of computers for collaborative work, there were a number of technical issues. Of course, in those days we had the usual issues of reliable networking, software and hardware infrastructure to support collaborative environments. As challenging as these were however, the tougher issue for most organizations to address was whether managers and executives would resist participating in online collaboration if it meant that they needed to contribute via a computer keyboard.

From childhood, though we may fear standing up in front of people, we are trained to present our ideas. We do it in school with the essays and papers we write, the science projects we – with that little bit of help from our parents – assemble and the tests we take. With that desire in all of us to produce beautiful things, by the time we enter the workforce we’re primed for the task of creating PowerPoint presentations.

How many of us, however, were taught how to bring a group of people together for a purpose, structure a meeting agenda, start with a discussion to draw out the best and most innovative ideas from the group, keep people focused and lead them to efficiently develop and prioritize those ideas, build consensus around the best ones and end with a decision or implementation plan?

Here is the thought process behind this project:

How do social media really impact collaboration? Sharing information builds relationships around a common interest. From this “community of interest” can emerge a collaborative solution or work product. What transforms it from community sharing to collaboration is an outcome-oriented facilitation process. And that’s where facilitators come into the picture.
Several facilitators weigh in.