I strongly believe that there is too much emphasis on the ‘differentness’ of remote work vs. in-office work. In my Venn diagram, the overlap is huge. Work is work, relationships are relationships and good meetings or bad meetings can happen in any environment.

Looking at your points individually:
1. Planning a viable agenda or series of agendas – As necessary in-house as remote. No agenda meetings don’t run well and don’t drive towards results.

2. Effective use of technology – Yes, I give you that remote requires more technology, but there are countless stories of in-house meetings gone wrong because of technology glitches that usually have to do with laptops and projectors. Even in an in-house conference room there are times when people can’t hear each other or can’t see the slides. making sure your meeting technology is working before the meeting is essential.

3. Preparing participants and pre-work – I started my career in Marketing in the last 80s (OMG, did business exist back then with no web and no email?). And early in my career I got great advice from a mentor about pre-selling ideas and preparing meeting participants. If your meeting is to get buy in or agreement, this pre-work is a must no matter the meeting format.

4. Keeping participants focused and engaged during a virtual meeting – Again, just a big an issue with in-house meetings. Pre-laptop, people just doodle and pass notes. Now, at almost every in-house meeting I attend, everyone brings his/her laptop anyway “to take notes.” So the in-house and virtual environment for the meeting is not that different. What is great is when the online access adds to the meeting by allowing participants to gather information in realtime. Certainly the lack of body language and visual clues in a virtual meeting has its disadvantages, but many of those are hard to see even in-house. Is that person taking notes on his laptop or checking email or skyping another participant?

5. Building trust and social capital – again, I just don’t see any difference here when it comes to meeting format. No trust or social capital dooms an in-house meeting too.

6. Maintaining momentum between meetings – Again, just as important in-house as virtual. In some ways, I think a distributed group has an advantage here over an in-house one. They have to communicate in distributed ways (email, IM, etc) and that often facilitates better group communication.

I do agree that there are aspects of communication that are more challenging in a distributed environment than face-to-face, but your ideas are crucial to any good meeting.

Problems with the meaning of words…
I really like this story and see it as a very useful example to open a conversation about language and understanding in future client and group situations. I am struck but how important checking for understanding is in all situations – when we meet in person, when we work together from afar and especially when we work across cultures. Paying attention leads to awareness, and awareness allows us to take action. I think that the need for attention and awareness are the same whether meeting face-to-face (a term open to misinterpretation?) or virtually, but that we need to be even more attentive in a virtual environment. Seems like you have a great ice-breaker exercise in the making with this story.

As one who runs a number of virtual meetings of an international variety where not all of the participants share the same first language, I wanted to mention one or two pitfalls and open the general question of cross-cultural/language virtual meetings.

1. Problems with the meaning of words. Let me give you an example. In planning several virtual meetings, I had occasion to work with a senior colleague whose first language was Spanish. He spoke English quite well nonetheless we had some interesting and illuminating communication issues. He wanted the agenda we were working on to address what he called the “outstanding” issues. Most native English speakers would understand the word “outstanding” in this context to mean something like “not yet completed or resolved.”

I agreed we need to cover “outstanding” issues and dutifully made by list of topics that needed to resolved. He was supposed to do the same and then we would compare and combine as necessary. When we met (virtually) to discuss the lists and develop the agenda. I discovered that his list and mine were completely different. He was senior to me and asked what happened and implied that I had not done the task correctly. What ensued was a Monty Python like conversaton in which we both claimed to have listed the “outstanding” issues.

To make a long story short, it turned out that we meant different things by the word “outstanding.” I meant “not comleted and in need of completion” and he meant “most important.”

I am not sure that there is a really easy way to catch all of these sorts of things beforehand. What I am sure is that when you have an obvious disconnect with an internatinal colleague, one place to look for the root of the problem is misunderstandings of word meanings.

Subsequent to this experience, I have found it useful to contract with international colleagues and set the expectation that we may misunderstand each other from time to time because of language issues.

2.People who attend virtual meetings in a second language are sometimes less talkative than native speakers and less able to express affect. Many second language participants are more comfortable typing in the chat box in an applicaiton like GoToMeeting of LiveMeeting. Ground rules and procedures for this need to be established. It is also a good idea to have a co-facilitator who speaks the dominant second language fluently to serve as an interpreter especially when summarizing critical points and checking for understanding. Also, I have found that this co-faciliator is particularly useful addressing issues of affect. He/she can ask how people feel or clarify a statement made in the secong language.

Language issues are also related to the whole question of maintaining the active participation of all participants.

3. Social networking and teambuilding are very important in multi-country collaborations. We need to put a human face on all the participants. Photos, background biographies, even webcam tours of the other folks offices can help. There are lots of tools and techniques but the more you can bring all the participants into the same virtual space as people and co-workers the better.

I could go on with this list. But, I am runing out of time just now and would love to hear others thoughts on this topic.

tom

Empower all participants to use their voice assertively.

Virtual meetings risk drawing out the extroverts and sending introverts more deeply into their own thoughts. Its a special challenge to the facilitator to manage these tendencies to assure that all available wisdom is being tapped.