The online environment has a tremendous range of options for fully engaging people and their ideas in meetings. So how do you make use of these?
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Regrettably, people’s use of Online Meeting rooms tends to be limited to a traditional paradigm of meetings – the idea of meetings focused primarily on presentation and debate.
However the traditional model of presentation and debate thrived at a time in our history when leadership was more autocratic and directive, and it has a number of limitations in the modern age where we want more from our people than lip-service and obedience.
The result of these limitations has been frustration and inefficiency, as evidenced by the current level of criticism received by meetings in general. Furthermore, these limitations are even more detrimental to participation and engagement in the online environment, and stories of people doing other work while in web meetings are rife.
But the internet has a wealth of tools and opportunities to achieve participation at a level that is impractical in physical meetings. There are now a plethora of resources to enable people to contribute their ideas and opinions in parallel and to rapidly assess consensus and highlight what is required to build commitment and assure progress.
The most powerful of these is the virtual whiteboard (our favourite is ConceptBoard) wherein people can concurrently generate post-it notes, move around ideas, post concerns and encouragements, work on templates, indicate preferences, vote on outcomes and update progress. It can also act as a virtual project room between meetings, and can be ‘decorated‘ to create an environment more conducive to the attitudes you wish to engender. Click the links above to understand more.
The whiteboard can also contain links to other useful tools for participation and consensus, and while much of what they do can be created in the whiteboard by means of templates, there is much to be said for variety in approaches to maintain interest and a sense of movement.
Additional tools I would encourage you to consider within your meetings are:
- Trello – which is an amazing kanban board (although that term does not do it justice) where people can allocate and manage tasks, track progress, evidence decisions, and plan out next steps.
- Poll Everywhere – which is great for engaging peoples opinions in a quick fun way, and can be integrated with PowerPoint
- Tricider – which enables people to suggest and develop ideas, and refine them via voting
But there are many more, in fact, un-believably many more, and part of the fun lies in trying them out.