Do you remember the telephone?
Christmas is less than a month away and here we are facing the same uphill struggle to overcome COVID-19 as when the pandemic started ten months ago. Out of necessity, we’ve all become pretty adept at video meetings using applications like Zoom. We’ve also become pretty familiar with the challenges that come with this super helpful and useful technology.
In July, I blogged about the anatomy of a virtual meeting, laying out the need to shift some of the content and activities that would normally be part of an in-person meeting to happen ahead of or after our virtual meeting. This would allow the virtual meeting to be shorter and not overwhelm our attention span. My thinking at the time was to take the bits of the meeting usually designed to establish safety, define the problem, and gather perspectives on the problem into the time ahead of the virtual meeting (the pre-meeting). This would allow the virtual meeting to focus much more on solution building and allow the meeting time to be much shorter.
It makes sense. And it doesn’t work (at least not exactly as I described it back in July).
People love shorter meetings. I’ve taken to scheduling meetings of no longer than 90 minutes, which feels really short when you have a group of 20 people working on a project and you want to hear from each of them in a meaningful way. Participants like a meeting won’t take up a lot of their schedule. But now that we’ve ‘discovered’ the convenience of virtual meetings, we schedule a TON of them. It’s completely normal now for people to sit unmoving in front of their screens for hours, jumping from one meeting to the next. And even more insidious, is the issue of multiple, overlapping meetings.
It has become commonplace for some in my virtual collaborations to jump off so they can attend another virtual meeting happening at the same time. Sometimes, it’s multiple simultaneous meetings. They jump from screen to screen, trying to catch the stream of conversation and contribute before they jump again.
So, it’s really no wonder that we aren’t able to get people engaged between meetings, to prepare for or follow up. We’re exhausted and just not interested anymore.
Is there a solution?
I’ve not come up with anything so neat and clean as ‘the solution’, but some tactics that can work. Check them out:
Provide multiple ways to respond in a meeting. I’ve been using the Miro app, which is an online whiteboard (similar to Mural and Jamboard), alongside a Zoom call and its chat function. Meeting participants seem to really like being able to see others putting up notes on Miro and also hearing the discussion. One nice thing about an online whiteboard is that it allows for asynchronous input between meetings. The downside, of course, is that not everyone is fond of learning another new application.
Make the meeting more engaging than anything else going on by making it really visual and making it really fun. Consider asking meeting participants a question and have them write one-word responses on a piece of paper to hold up to the camera. Just warn people in advance so they can have a sharpie and some blank paper at hand. It also helps to make meetings fun. I usually start with some kind of icebreaker, but you can also do a pop-up poll in the middle or even at the end of the meeting. A recent poll I did focused on pumpkin spice lovers and pumpkin spice haters was a lot of fun. Interestingly, it was basically a 50-50 split on responses.
Use the phone. Seriously. Help your participants get ready for a Zoom call by giving them a phone call. Not only does this help them get their thoughts in order, it helps you prepare and even prompt them for their input. It’s difficult for people not to be engaged in a regular telephone call, because it’s a one-on-one conversation. You might not think that it would help engagement in a virtual meeting, but I have found that the elevated engagement you get from a phone call ahead of a virtual meeting carries over to the virtual meeting itself. Just keep your preparatory phone call within a day or so of the meeting, so it’s still in recent memory.
I’m sure our virtual meeting tactics and strategies will continue to evolve. Who knows, maybe I’ll be posting a year from now having used and moved on from the tactics above. In the meantime … happy collaborating!
Scott Millar often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together. Through Collaboration Dynamics, he offers a program in High Performance Collaboration, where he guides groups to explore the nature of collaboration, inclusivity, and innovation, and acquire new abilities to create the conditions that enable groups to contribute and thrive in challenging environments.
Scott is also the host of the Cool Collaborations podcast where he explores fun stories and insights of successful collaboration with guests from around the world, and then dives into what made them work. Cool Collaborations is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
