Facilitate Proceedings » Running Effective Meetings

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.

Death by PowerPoint or Web Conferencing?

Julia Young — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:24:03 +0000

The New York Times reports on Death by PowerPoint in the US Military. Is web conferencing going the same way?

So, you want to solve problems and generate quality ideas in your meeting?

Donna McAlister Kizzier — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:29:37 +0000

If solving problems or generating high quality ideas are among your primary meeting goals, which of the many meeting venues available to facilitators should you select? Face to face? Teleconferencing? Audio and video conferencing? Text messaging? Asynchronous or synchronous? With or without collaborative systems? Does it make a difference which meeting tools you select or the time frame you select? This month’s Research Brief addresses these questions, with a clear winner emerging.

As a reminder, each Research Brief refers readers to the full published article. Click on the link to read today’s full Research Brief. These Briefs are intended to communicate the results of my already published research to practitioners in the field. I appreciate and encourage your feedback; you are the best qualified to judge the relevant application of my research in the workplace.

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.

Facilitation by getting out of the way – Lessons from Open Space Technology

Julia Young — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:13:40 +0000

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.

5 Tips For Using Smart Phones To Make Large Meetings Interactive

Mike McCall — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:31:31 +0000

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.

Bad Manners in Virtual Meetings – Are You Guilty?

Julia Young — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:27:18 +0000

Twenty minutes into a one hour web conference I found my mind wondering. I was still listening (sure!) but I checked my email. Five minutes later I was working on a spreadsheet. When the facilitator asked the group a question I waited for someone else to answer so I could work out what I had missed. Does this sound like you?
Here are my top ten ground rules. They’re simple but easy to ignore, to the detriment of the meeting. Too often we take shortcuts with virtual meetings that we wouldn’t dare do if we were sitting down with others face-to-face.

Blended Facilitation: Have Your Cake (And Eat It Too)

Danuta McCall — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:27:13 +0000

Several blogs and news portals have picked up on a Forbes Insight Study conducted in June ‘09 that found 84% of the 760 business execs surveyed preferred face-to-face meetings over virtual contact, even though the economic downturn had obliged many of them to reduce travel and adopt technology solutions for virtual meetings. Executives identified the following benefits from face-to-face meetings: building stronger, more meaningful relationships (85%), the ability to “read” another person (77%), and greater social interaction (75%). 80% felt that face-to-face interaction with co-workers is necessary for effective teamwork and complex decision making.

As I read, I frequently felt like chiming in with “yes, AND….” (as a consultant, I rarely if ever say “yes, but…”). In my opinion, the paradigm of either/or – virtual or face to face – is a limiting context in which to evaluate business collaboration. Thanks to collaborative technology, it’s simply no longer an all or nothing proposition.

We at Facilitate.com are great proponents of “blended facilitation”.