Interesting article from Ram Srinivasan with some great tips on working with distributed teams, including research why having co-located teams is better can be found: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/remote-teams-and-virtual-facilitation
Here are my major takeaways.
- Facilitator tip – Rather than merely trying to replicate a technique that works for in-person meetings, try to deconstruct why that technique works and reconstruct that technique for virtual meetings
- Participate in the virtual meeting with the same level of attention (or more) and engagement as though it is an in-person meeting (that means no multi-tasking)
- There is a self-fulfilling prophecy with regard to virtual meetings – you experience poor virtual meetings, you expect bad meetings, you get bad meetings, and the cycle perpetuates itself
- Set expectations upfront – very clearly and this is how you break the self-fulfilling prophecy
- Ban phone only meetings, use videos for ALL the meetings.
- People get a lot of cues when seeing the face and having a video helps in non-verbal communication, not to mention that it actually engages people
- Have you heard the toilet flushing sound when in conference calls(because someone forgot to mute their phone)? Bet you will not hear that when you have your participants turn on the video.
- You got to be on the video, else we close the meeting right away. You join on video, else you don’t. Period.
- You got to join the meeting from a quiet place, not “dial-in” it from the bus when you are on your way home. And you must be on the video. Period.
- Even if one person breaks the expectations once, we close the meeting right away. We break it once, it is an excuse to break it the second time and we are back with the self-fulfilling prophecy of bad virtual meetings
- Ban phone only meetings, use videos for ALL the meetings.
- Normalize the communication channels – One person is remote? Then everyone is joining remotely using their own video from their laptop. Two people cannot join using the same video. Don’t have a camera? GET ONE !!
- Facilitator and participant tip – try having the video right below the camera (than having the video on a different screen) in your laptops/computer. It creates an impression that you are looking into the camera when you are looking into the video
- In-person meetings and co-located teams work because we “socialize” quite a bit. Try having some “social” time in virtual meetings as well. Try “bring your own cider” (the choice of drink will depend on the timezone of the participants)
- As a facilitator, you got to have everyone engaged – here are a few tips
- Get everyone on video.
- This minimizes the participants’ tendency to multi-task
- This also prevents people from anonymously snooping in. Have you had people join a conference call and not announce themselves? Will you let someone walk into your in-person meeting with a mask on? If no, why would you have someone snoop into your virtual meeting?
- Avoid PowerPoints – it is just one-way broadcast. Use tools that support “virtual” break-out rooms.
- Increase psychological safety (more on this in a different blog later) so that people can actually speak up.
- Get everyone on video.
- Facilitator tips –
- Like my friend Mike Dwyer says – use the NOSTUESO rule – No One Speaks Twice Until Everyone Speaks Once. And the participant has the right to pass. This creates space for people to speak up. Also, if participants speak up in the first five minutes, they are much more likely to speak again.
- Hard to pass a talking stick and figuring out who should talk next in a virtual meeting when facilitating round-robin discussion – try this idea – Have a participant speak and then nominate the next person. And repeat till everyone speaks
- Prepare… prepare… prepare. You cannot wing a virtual meeting. You need more preparation. And you need a Plan B as well. What if the internet connection fails? What if your laptop crashes?
- Pay attention to discomfort – participants can only sit in once place for so long
- Bring psychological safety and engagement from everyone into the working agreement. What might be the few ways that we damage psychological safety (sometimes unconsciously)?
- Have someone paraphrase what a speaker said. This makes people pay more attention and also ensures that the speaker’s message landed as intended
- If appropriate, use tools like https://www.mentimeter.com/ or https://kahoot.com/ to increase engagement during the meeting by having participants answer questions.
- When women speak first, the probability that other women speak is higher.
- Remote meetings are a lot smaller than in-person meetings. It is hard to have more than 12 people in a virtual meeting (and then expect them to be engaged). If you are new start with six, then build up.
