Facilitate Proceedings » Virtual Meetings

Season’s Greetings – Last Webinar of the year in our Designing Interactive Webinars Series

Editor — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 01:20:50 +0000

Are your teams connected for productivity or wired for distraction?

This free webinar takes a slightly different twist in the ongoing exploration of how to design highly interactive webinars and virtual meetings that keep people engaged. One of the biggest challenges facilitators and trainers face is the effect of participants multi-tasking on the productivity and creativity of the group. The first reaction is to think about how to STOP participants from multi-tasking so that they will focus on OUR agenda. But in this age of 24/7 information access and communication, wouldn’t it make more sense to design in productive multi-tasking, for example contributing ideas or responding to questions at the same time as we listen to a presentation? We call this Multi-tasking On Task. Register now for Friday December 17, our last webinar of the year.

Productivity in the Digital Age – Is your business wired for distraction?

Julia Young — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:15:28 +0000

A recent article in The NY Times about young people Growing up Digital, Wired for Distraction got me thinking about the impact in the business world of instant communication and the resulting tendency to multi-task. Here is my point counter-point on the subject.

Select virtual meeting technology to support the group process, not the other way around

Julia Young — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:22:11 +0000

Remember that old piece of advice: Don’t put the cart before the horse? The Number One Challenge that facilitators and trainers have with virtual meetings and webinars is: How to keep participants engaged? I suggest that this is directly related to the Number One Trap that we fall into when moving from face-to-face to virtual events: starting with a piece of technology and then trying to make engagement happen. While technology can accelerate great communication, meeting effectiveness and virtual teamwork, it cannot create it. Rather we need to 1) start with our meeting or learning objectives, 2) understand the different types of interaction we are seeking to create during different parts of our agenda or process and then 3) select technology to support the desired interaction.

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.

Engagement – Is It the Holy Grail of Virtual Meetings?

Julia Young — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:18:01 +0000

This is an open letter to my colleague Nigel, who participated recently in one of our “Designing Interactive Webinars” events. In the pre-work reflection, Nigel asked:

Is engagement, all the time, the goal? How, as facilitators, and participants, can we be totally comfortable with nil, or minimal engagement? If we had little engagement, then can a webinar still be successful (from the organizer’s and the participant’s point of view)?

Make Virtual Meetings Worth Your Time – Join Us!

Danuta McCall — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:13:08 +0000

Over the past year we have been offering a free webinar series entitled “Designing Interactive Virtual Meetings and Webinars that Keep Participants Engaged”. Every webinar has been unique, as each group molds its session from the participants’ collective experience, creative thinking and interests. Two upcoming events cause us to reflect on how our thinking has evolved from running these dynamic, highly participatory open sessions. The first event is our next webinar, scheduled for next week on Thursday September 23 at 8 am PDT, 11am EDT, 3 PM UTC (register). This webinar is a warm-up for Julia Young’s interactive session “Getting Great Results from Virtual Meetings” at the upcoming OD Network Conference in New Orleans

We know that every successful meeting relies on a well-thought out objective, outcomes and agenda. And, good facilitation that engages participants in open, thoughtful thinking and learning But there are some especially gnarly challenges associated with meeting and collaborating remotely. We’ve created a conceptual structure to frame them for discussion called The Six Critical Success Factors.

Come join the evolving conversation! You will experience an interactive virtual event and help build solutions to one of the biggest challenges facing virtual teams today. Register here.

July Webinars – How to keep participants fully engaged

Julia Young — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:50:17 +0000

With our Interactive Webinars series, we’ve been exploring the concept of building highly interactive elements into virtual meetings and webinars. We invite anyone who is interested in exploring these ideas with us to engage in an interactive experience of creative thinking about ways to design collaborative activities in what is too often a one on many, presentation heavy format. Our series continues this month with more opportunities to collaborate on ideas about designing interactive webinars and virtual meetings. We’ve got two great webinars planned for July.

Public Webinars – Leading Virtual Teams

Julia Young — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:29:43 +0000

Our colleague, Nancy Settle-Murphy at Guided Insights is offering a rare set of public sessions this month for her two most popular virtual classroom offerings: Leading Virtual Teams on June 29 and Planning and Running Exceptional Virtual Meetings on June 30. Designed with busy people in mind, each of these virtual sessions delivers a wealth of vital information, skills and tools within a compressed period of time. In fact, participants receive about five hours’ worth of content by participating in a two-hour virtual session. Registration is strictly limited to 15 people for each session. Please click on the links above for more information or to register, or contact us directly for more information.

Paying Attention to the Virtual Meeting Place

Julia Young — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:12:29 +0000

As virtual meeting facilitators we don’t control the meeting space in same way as we do for face-to-face meetings but there is value in paying attention to the physical surroundings – props, physical space and prompts – of our participants in order to optimize participation, attention and stimulation.

Every Productive Virtual Meeting Needs A Communication Plan

Danuta McCall — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:20:23 +0000

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.

Interaction: The Key To Successful Webinars

Julia Young — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:38:42 +0000

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.