Meaningful Collaboration => Creativity and Innovation
In the recent quest to maximize collaboration, many large companies eliminated telecommuting and trashed flex schedules.
These policy shifts may provide small creativity boosts, but large companies still have teams and partners spread across the world. It’s not practical to meet face-to-face consistently–teams need to collaborate virtually.
So, how do we transform our typical mind-numbing and ineffective conference calls to engaging, collaborative, maybe even fun, virtual meetings? We need to overcome virtual meeting obstacles and add a few tools to our facilitation toolbox.
Why are virtual meetings difficult to facilitate?
- Difficult to get input/consensus from all attendees.
- Can’t watch body language.
- Harder to build relationships, rapport.
- People multitask.
How can we overcome these challenges?
- Consider your current facilitation skills. How do you manage these challenges in a face-to-face meeting? How can you adapt your techniques to fit in a virtual environment?
- Try a few new virtual collaboration tools like stormboard or innovation games and use them for virtual brainstorming or prioritization.
- Experiment with your current corporate conference call tools/desktop sharing tools to see if they offer sticky notes, whiteboards or breakout rooms.
A great facilitator, with a diverse set of tools and techniques, can make virtual meetings just as engaging, interactive and collaborative as the best face-to-face sessions.