Meeting Facilitation Training Organizational Communications

Forego Face-to-Face and Make Virtual Meetings an Everyday Reality

Bringing people together for face-to-face meetings can be costly. Travel and food expenses continue to spiral out of control, while travel time takes a bigger toll on organizations trying to do more with fewer people. If your organization is one of the many calling a halt to most face-to-face meetings these days, you're probably wondering how you can achieve your goals in different ways.

Some may insist that there's no acceptable substitute for eye-to-eye contact with people in the same room, especially if a key goal is to build new relationships or mend broken fences. And while that may be true in some cases, we believe that there are in fact many viable options that can replace face-to-face meetings, both temporarily and permanently.

This edition of Communiqué explores a few of the options your organization can consider when meeting face-to-face simply is not possible or practical especially in light of today's increasingly tough economic times.

  • Break down your objectives into manageable bites. Most meetings have multiple objectives. Say, for example, you had planned a three-day project team kick-off meeting intended to build new relationships among participants, reach agreement on the project scope, clarify roles and responsibilities, create a shared team communications plan, brainstorm the top issues facing your division, agree on priorities, and map out an action plan. Each of these objectives can probably be met in ways that do not require any face-to-face meetings by all (or most) team members. Create a three-column table with objectives down the left side, one per row. Next to each objective, list participants who need to be involved in the middle column, signifying the nature of their involvement (e.g., provider of input, decision-maker, idea-generator, approver, etc.). Finally, in the right column, list possible ways to achieve each objective. Compartmentalization of meeting objectives is the first step to designing workable virtual options.
  • Consider who really needs to be involved and in what way. Does the entire team really need to be involved in every single activity? Or is it possible for a subset of people to tackle some of these objectives, such as brainstorming solutions to top issues or mapping out a section of the overall action plan? Ask yourself who needs to provide input or feedback before or after a meeting, and who really needs to be involved in the actual conversation at the same time. By paring down the number of people involved in a synchronous (same-time) conversation, more people can be engaged more fully and productively when meeting remotely. Team calls with 10 or more people on the line simply don't allow people to participate in surfacing and addressing complex challenges in ways that small-group conversations can.
  • Make it easy for people to participate at a time and place convenient for them. One of the great benefits of meeting virtually is that more people can participate with relatively little effort and at practically no cost. Consider how you can use asynchronous means, such as setting up a virtual conference room with electronic flipcharts, to hear input from those who won't be participating via con call, given time zone differences, language barriers, or role. You'll save precious phone time by coming to the virtual table with top issues or proposed solutions in hand for discussion. You can use the same virtual conference room later on by inviting feedback, posting minutes or other meeting documents, or asking people to build on ideas generated during the call. Use the same web meeting tool for the actual meeting as you do for any asynch work, so people have had a chance to try it on their own before the call.
  • Provide multiple communication paths to generate more ideas from more people. Using the telephone alone places unnecessary constraints on a group's ability to generate ideas or solve problems, especially given how brief a virtual meeting must be to keep people actively engaged. Try using web meeting or conferencing tools that enable people to enter ideas for all to see and build on during verbal discussions. Tools that allow participants to prioritize and vote are especially helpful when time is of the essence. Enabling anonymous contributions can help reduce barriers to participation, especially if topics are contentious or participants are reticent to speak openly due to fear, shyness, or language differences. Find out what meeting tools your organization already has in place, and determine whether they have the capabilities you need. If not, such tools can be licensed, purchased or rented per event. Some require downloads while others simply require internet access. When evaluating the cost, consider how much time you may be able to save, given the hourly cost of participants' time, as well the value that can be gained by accelerating results.
  • Insist on homework by everyone. Remote meetings, whether via videoconference, con call, web meeting or some combination, must remain focused and relatively brief if you hope to keep everyone from diverting energy and attention to email or other fire drills that compete for attention. To ensure a sharply-focused meeting, people must come fully prepared to contribute from the first minute. That means sharing and reviewing documents, including slide sets, in advance. (After all, nothing shouts "time to read email" like a long-winded presentation!) Give people a reasonable amount of time to prepare. Establish conventions and ground rules to support thorough preparation by all. Examples: Preparation work must be able to be completed in no more than 90 minutes. Documents must be available for review at least three business days prior to the call. All documents will be available for viewing on the team's SharePoint directory in a place clearly labeled with the meeting date. Participants who enter the meeting unprepared will have to catch up on their own time. Make sure to enforce ground rules equally for all, regardless of role.
  • Know when face-to-face is really critical. Certainly, there are situations when meeting face-to-face will be crucial to achieving goals--especially when a high degree of trust is required among certain members. Consider which relationships are most important to the team's overall success and the quality of existing relationships today. In cases where people are heavily dependent on each other for their success and where no trusting relationships have been created, meeting face-to-face may be essential. Or when a subset of the team needs to collaborate intensively to accomplish a great deal of work in a short time, investing in a face-to-face meeting can have a huge payoff. When requesting a face-to-face meeting, be sure to make a persuasive business case, quantifying expected results both with and without the meeting. Also consider how videoconferencing can help achieve some of these objectives, especially if you have access to high-quality "telepresence" videoconferencing solutions where participants feel as though they are all physically present. Not all videoconferencing capabilities are created equal, and some systems may actually interfere with collaboration, rather than enabling it.

While it can seem like a setback when you can't bring people together in one room to build relationships and get important work done, think of it more as an opportunity to rethink how you can achieve successful collaboration across time and space from now on. If you create viable alternatives for this one face-to-face meeting, you'll soon discover that the discipline and tools you used this time can be applied to achieve your goals more frequently in the future. And soon you may find that if done right, meeting virtually can actually be more effective and efficient than meeting face-to-face, and will no longer be regarded as a consolation prize.

Company News

Leading Remote Teams Increasingly Vital Skill in Down Economy

Want to model best practices for planning and running virtual meetings while learning how to successfully lead remote teams in a very compressed period of time? Join one of the many companies and organizations who are signing up for our Leading Remote Teams webinar, customized for each group of participants. Click for more details or call us at 978.263.2545 or drop us an email to find out more.

Just Released: New Handbook on Electronic Collaboration

The Handbook of Research on Electronic Collaboration and Organizational Synergy, edited by Janet Salmons and Lynn Wilson. The two-volume handbook offers exhaustive research on collaboration in education, business, the government and social sectors. Nancy Settle-Murphy was honored to act as reviewer for the 50 in-depth contributions from scholars in 16 countries.

Guided Insights in the News

Bridge Communication Gap Between Generations by Nancy Settle-Murphy and Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts was featured in the December issue of Women's Business. On a related note, Nancy and Sheryl's latest article on intergenerational differences appeared in this month's IT Performance Improvement, a monthly ezine from Auerbach Publications.

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