Facilitate Proceedings » Virtual Meetings

The Art of Steering a Virtual Session

Julia Young — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:50:36 +0000

Recently I responded to a question from one of my LinkedIn professional groups. Someone asked: “During web conferences involving several locations, I often find myself sending SMS’s to my boss at the same time so as to steer or modify the meeting/discussion on the fly – does anybody else do this? Yes, indeed I do.

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.

Inside All of Us is a Great Virtual Collaborator

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 02:35:44 +0000

In any given team, there are bound to be differences—in cultures, personalities, communication styles, work habits, expertise, seniority, and many other aspects. Rather than view differences as a challenge the team must address, think instead about how we can leverage differences, and at the same time nurture each team member to thrive in a virtual work setting.

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.

Strategic Planning in Second Life

Julia Young — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:38:45 +0000

Strategic planning in Second Life plays out in this YouTube video of a session with IBM and Schneider Electric. I am left wondering if the technology really creates the engagement that the narrator mention or if the technology simply prompts the meeting planners to design in more interaction than a typical virtual meeting.

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.

7 Ways To Coax People Out of the Box in a Virtual World

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:25:08 +0000

Before the latest economic downturn, many of my clients would bring together people from all over the world, put them into a conference room with pots of coffee and carbo-loaded snacks, and kept them there until they emerged with a raft of creative new ideas. Now, with organizations imposing travel bans for most internal meetings, the question becomes: How can we translate this type of high-energy, face-to-face brainstorming experience into a virtual session where we wring innovative ideas out of each person, using a phone and a computer?

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.