Dear Collaboration Colleagues,
Happy New Year! We hope that your holidays
allowed you to rest, reflect, and re-vitalize. Now it’s
time to implement some of those New Year’s resolutions.
One of ours is to explore some of the newer forms of online collaboration,
such as social media and other virtual communities (see the wikipedia for
a short description) . These are emerging as a significant method
for disseminating information. Granted, sometimes you get rants
and raves, but many blogs and social networks are well-documented
and useful sources of informed opinion. How can these new forms
of interaction benefit work teams and organizations? We’ll
let you know what we find out.
This month we conclude our discussion of the 6 critical success
factors for running a virtual meeting (see our Advisor's
Corner) . Once again, we offer
you the chance to evaluate your own virtual facilitation skills
by
answering
a quick online
questionnaire . You’ll get the results immediately. Try it!
The IAF (International Association of Facilitators) North
American Conference (http://www.iaf-world.org/conference/portland.htm) is
coming up fast, March 8-10 to be exact. This conference is not
just for professional facilitators. Good facilitation belongs
in the skills portfolio of decision makers, managers, teachers,
collaborators, parents and even politicians. We’d love
to meet you there.
Cheers,
The Collaboration Aficionados at Facilitate.com
Advisor's Corner
The Six Secrets to Successful Virtual Meetings, Cont.
How
ready are you to facilitate virtually?
Assess
your virtual meeting facilitation skills by answering a short
online questionnaire
Click
here to answer the questionnaire and then analyze your
score.
In our last issue we pointed out that everything we already know about good facilitation still applies in cyberspace, but there
are some critical success factors that are particularly important in the virtual environment. To have a successful virtual meeting
you must:
-
Plan a viable agenda or series of agendas
-
Use virtual meeting technology effectively
-
Prepare participants well for the meeting
-
Keep people focused and engaged during the virtual meeting
-
Build trust and social capital
-
Maintain momentum between meetings
We covered the first two in December's
issue, so let’s finish up
with the final four. For a comprehensive workshop on running
virtual meetings, contact us about “Getting
Great Results from Virtual Meetings”.
CSF
#3: Prepare participants well before a meeting
Because virtual meetings are short and fast-paced, you don’t
have the luxury of time to set expectations, establish ground
rules and bring participants up to speed at the start of the
meeting. Remember to:
- Clarify
participants' expectations before the meeting.
Send out a workshop of meeting overview well before the
meeting spelling out: goals, topics, participants, roles,
timing and any required pre-work. Use email or web meeting
tools to solicit feedback.
- Set
ground rules ahead of time. Examples include:
o Logon to tele/video/web conference 15 minutes before
the meeting starts (some products require downloads and
installation)
o Choose a quiet location from which to participate in
the meeting
o Keep the phone OFF mute so that you can join in the
conversation
o State your name when you speak
o Stay out of email until break time
- Use
pre-work to inform participants and focus the agenda. Online
tools such as surveys and brainstorming are particularly
useful for data gathering and information sharing that doesn’t
require real-time interaction. Completing pre-work allows you to fine-tune
the agenda and prepares participants to launch right into a productive
conversation once the meeting starts.
CSF #4: Keep people focused and engaged during the virtual meeting
One of the most difficult aspects of facilitating a remote
meeting is knowing when your participants are fully engaged
and when they are multi-tasking. Even without the benefit
of visual cues, you must pay attention to what your participants
are doing. Here are some ways to do this:
- Establish
rapport with the group on the phone. Have something for
early-birds to do. Make connections between participants
as you introduce them.
-
Make multi-tasking difficult. Reiterate the ground rules
through out the meeting: no email, no mute button, cleared
off desktop.
-
Vary ways in which people participate to keep them alert.
Use various verbal techniques, such as “going around the room” and “checking
in” and also use the features of your web meeting technology:
quick polls, online brainstorming etc.
-
Take the group’s temperature often by asking questions, listening
for sounds of keyboarding, or quick online polling.
CSF # 5: Build trust and social capital. Groups work better together
when they know and trust each other. Facilitators often include ice-breakers
and trust-building exercises into their agendas for just this reason. What
can you do to establish trust with a virtual group? Here are just a couple
of suggestions:
