Quick and simple techniques for remote participation
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Good meetings are full of participation. Participation:
- ensures all of the different perspectives are included
- enables people to feel that their views matter and are respected
- raises the energy of the group and increases the pool of ideas
- enables solutions that people can appreciate as ‘fair’
- builds commitment to the outcomes.
In remote meetings, there are many tools that can be used to ensure that people engage with each step of the decision making process, and each of these adds to the quality of the conclusions, and to the ownership people feel for them.
However most remote meetings do not take place this way. Many of them mimic traditional patterns found in typical physical meetings with uneven contributions, disengagement, and general antipathy to much of what goes on.
The reason for this, in large part, is that the organisers of the meetings feel more comfortable organising their meetings this way. The traditional route seems to work, from their perspective at least, and they are reluctant to spend time in including new things which they are not yet confident in applying. The consequence of this however, is the current level of dissatisfaction and inefficiency experienced in meetings, and particularly in remote meetings.
So how do we change this?
Probably the best way is to take small zero-risk steps to help build that confidence and to help re-establish the value of participation in people’s minds. Little devices that take barely a minute and yet help to better engage people in what is going on, and deter them from ‘multi-tasking’ on their emails and other distractions.
The first of these is the check-in tool. This is a simple set of options for people to select to indicate where they are in respect of how the meeting is going to this point. You can access this tool (and other similar ones) for immediate use from our page on micro-polls.The blobtree is a more sophisticated (and fun) example of this kind of approach, as is the mood indicator for real-time presentation feedback.
You can use the same ‘cursor positioning’ technique to facilitate: rough voting on options; consensus reaching, and any number of self-disclosure activities.
Another useful tool in the humble sticky note. These are easily created in whiteboards, and enable easy contribution to brainstorming, perspective gathering, or capture of current information (for example in a SWOT Analysis or Fishbone).
In fact, any activity where you might normally suggest that people shout out their contributions can be done quicker and more inclusively by means of those same people generating sticky notes of their contributions. The end result may look a bit of a mess, but this is easily resolved by means of an Affinity Diagram.
It is a very easy step to show people how to create their own post-it notes as an alternative to verbally contributing ideas. If you remain concerned about reluctant participation, there are two simple strategies to reduce the threshold to engaging people.
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The first is, get everybody to simply write their name on a sticky-note and arrange them into alphabetical order – this ensures they demonstrate to themselves the technical skills required
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The second is to create a circle with the title ‘Still thinking’ and get people to place their cursors in that circle. Then, before anyone contributes their first idea, everyone has to think up two of their own, and remove their cursor from the circle when they have – this ensures that people don’t simply switch off and leave ideas to everyone else.
Once you have taken your group this far, the (slightly) more ambitious tools and techniques available to you will be an easy further step for both you and your team, and then that is it – you have participative meetings.
All you need to do is … start.
Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.