Virtual meetings are making it easier for people located in different places to interact with one another. By now, it is well known that virtual meetings might be either Synchronous (“Same Time” i.e. all the participants come together at the same time for a live meeting) or Asynchronous (“Not the Same Time” or “Different Time” i.e. there is no ‘live’ meeting, and participants make typically written contributions at their own convenience over a defined time period).
There are more and more interesting ways to combine both Synchronous and Asynchronous techniques into a ‘blended’ meeting (some have started to refer to it as a ‘flipped meeting’) in which the content is shared ahead of time, there is some asynchronous discussion (often in a dedicated online meeting space or on a listserv), and the time in the Synchronous meeting is used to synthesize the discussion and make decisions for action. This is an area to which we are going to see a lot more attention being given…
One persistent challenge that we hear from our clients is that it is hard to translate all their meetings into a virtual format. They can see ways of doing this for shorter meetings (such as departmental meetings or project status update meetings, many of which can run for up to two hours). They tell us that meetings longer than two hours are particularly challenging – it is hard to keep everyone’s attention, and hard to maintain equal participation.
The Challenge
One of our clients was beginning a strategy process, and one early step was to bring all the key people in their department together for a consultation about potential strategic priorities they might explore. This is a common approach, and makes good sense to engage people with information and experience in the strategy formulation process. However, the 50 staff in this department were located in two offices – one in North America and the other in West Africa. They soon realized that it was going to cost them more than $50,000 to bring together all the people that they wanted to contribute to the 2-day strategy discussion, and the alternatives were not very appealing:
- running separate meetings in each location would mean a loss of diversity of experience and cross-exchange;
- bringing only a few people from the second location would mean losing the breadth of voices and the opportunity for whole-team engagement.
We thought that we could help them bring their whole team together, engage in a rich strategy discussion, and do all of this virtually, saving them not only the travel expenses, but also the travel time.
The Approach
Our experience with teams and virtual meetings has shown us that there are ways to combine meeting tools in order to create a rich communication environment. Specifically, we have found that there are easy ways to complement the verbal discussion with a visual display that can reflects real-time developments in meetings, and gives all participants equal views of the information.
This is what we set out to do with this client:
Bring 60 people together for the strategy consultation using a video conference to mimic the format of a half-day retreat.
The video conference format allowed everyone to participate, while also enabling them to see and hear one another.
(Tip: Have someone in each location who actively manages the camera to pan around the room and zoom in on whoever is speaking – and remembers to zoom back to the whole group once they have finished!)
(Tip: Have someone in each location who actively manages the camera to pan around the room and zoom in on whoever is speaking – and remembers to zoom back to the whole group once they have finished!)
This presented a substantial time and cost savings for the client, especially as no-one had to travel to attend the meeting.
Introduce a visual display to share information between the two locations by using a web-meeting tool to visualizing all the tasks, reports and discussions.
We had to arrange the room setup required to support this interaction. We added a laptop, LCD projector and additional projection screen to the existing video conference equipment in each location. This allowed participants to see the Video Conference view and the Web-Meeting display side-by-side.
(Tip: Make sure that there is someone in each location who is familiar with the web-meeting tool, so they can optimize the screen layout and view for local participants).
There are many Web-Meeting tools that you can use for this purpose – including IBM’s Sametime, Adobe Connect, Webex, and GotoWebinar.
We prepared in advance certain slides – the Agenda, Small Group Discussion tasks, and so on. This allowed announcements and instructions to be easily visible to everyone.
(Tip: When working with groups in which participants speak different languages, having written Tasks and Instructions will be very helpful to those not fluent in the main language of the meeting)
(Tip: When working with groups in which participants speak different languages, having written Tasks and Instructions will be very helpful to those not fluent in the main language of the meeting)
Design a 5-hour strategy consultation for all 60 staff that took advantage of having the whole team together, and made allowances for the reality of being in two locations with a virtual interaction.
We designed the 5-hour meeting to minimize formal presentations and to promote small group and large group discussion. This took advantage of the whole group being together.
We had to arrange the small group discussions so that people in each location formed into small groups. If this had been a completely virtual meeting, with everyone in their own offices, we could have created Virtual Break-out Groups that mixed people from the different locations). So we planned that they would have enough time to generate ideas and reactions in their small groups, but then we allowed plenty of time for discussion and ‘sense-making’ after all the groups gave brief reports on their discussions.
Facilitate the meeting by using a two-person team (the facilitator and the documenter) to manage the meeting.
The facilitation team agreed on clear and specific roles that they each played:
- The facilitator was responsible for the traditional facilitator role, such as managing time and tasks, and moderating discussions.
- The documenter was responsible for capturing and visualizing all the information and reports, with the web-meeting tool serving as an electronic replacement of the traditional flipchart. In this meeting, we used Microsoft PowerPoint (to display information about the Agenda and Group Tasks) and then moved to Microsoft Word to rapidly capture reports and discussions. And we used the ScreenShare feature of our web-meeting tool to easily share what we were typing.
As the web-meeting screen was displayed alongside the video conference screen, everyone had simultaneous views of the other participants as well as the shared display.
The Results
By the end of the meeting, participants in both offices had many opportunities to interact with each other, sharing opinions and views about priorities for the new strategy. The recorder consolidated all the comments into the document, which was circulated to all members of the country team within a few hours of the meeting’s conclusion.
This document and the consultation created a common foundation for the next stage of strategy preparation.
By thinking creatively, we were able to help the client face the challenge of convening a longer strategy meeting and engaging more staff, while making a significant saving in the cost of the meeting.