Using the potential of the internet to fully engage participation
The biggest advantage of remote meetings over their traditional counterparts is paradoxically the one that is least often utilised. Participation – the ease with which people can be engaged in activity.
Start small
High participation meetings provide great advantages in terms of energy, insight, and commitment. However, we don’t need to start big. We can still gain benefits and build confidence by adopting much smaller steps. These might include encouraging participation using sticky notes, and selecting options with avatars or cursors.
Use a range of participation options
Brainstorming is very easy in an online meeting. But there is also a much wider range of helpful participation tools to address specific things you might want to do within the meeting. For example, review where you are, group ideas, or plan next steps. And using them is simply a matter of clicking on the one that you want. Or to start really simply, use the Google Jamboard Toolchest.
Gain the benefits of participation
Furthermore, such activities help your meeting be more inclusive. This is because participation activities can accommodate all aspects of the learning cycle. And they can reduce the emphasis on speaking out, which helps quieter people and introverts to participate.
Participation tools are also largely self-documenting, which means that the meeting contents are always available. This helps people to easily remember key points, and to share them with others. All of which build greater ownership over the outcomes.
Finally, such multi-channel activities provide a huge scope for creativity and innovation. There are a number of activities that support this directly. But the real benefit is in the way activities can enable everyone to participate simultaneously. We call this multi-channel.
About multi-channel techniques
The single-channel nature of meeting discussion (only one person contributing at a time) inherently leads to narrowing of options and early determination of a solution. Conversely, multi-channel contributions (e.g. everybody contributing sticky notes in parallel) creates a better sense of opening-up and inclusion. This widens the potential pool for creative options.