Set up your meeting

To design an effective meeting, you must keep the participants in mind:

• How many are they and where are they based?
• How motivated are they likely to be to participate in this meeting?
• What prior knowledge or information do they already have?
• How independent are they as thinkers and decision-makers?
• What is the level of their authority and influence?
• What preferences do they have for particular methods or media?
• How comfortable are they with the use of web-based tools?
• Have they been trained in how to use the online meetings tool
• What are the existing relationships amongst the participants?
• What questions might they have, and can you collect them in advance?
• How well do they work together on collaborative group work?
• How freely are they likely to discuss issues that arise?

Web conferencing software does not constrain you in terms of how you interact any more than a physical meeting room does. The software provides you with opportunities, as well as some constraints, but it does not determine the structure or balance of your meeting – that’s down to you. But whatever strategy you have for your session, some preparation is vital. You’ll want to plan what you’re going to say; prepare any visual aids that you’ll need; design activities; prepare polls and other interactions; and allocate roles to those who will be running the meeting with you.

Pulling your design together

A typical virtual meeting might last between 30 and 90 minutes; go beyond this and you will find it hard to maintain attention and energy levels. If you need to cover a lot of ground on a single day, then provide a number of short sessions interspersed with actions to complete offline.

Without experience, it can be hard to judge just how much to cover in a single meeting. If in doubt, err on the side of too little rather than too much: if you try to cover too much ground, you’ll just cause cognitive overload; if you finish ahead of schedule, you allow everyone to get on with something else!

It’s up to you just how much of your meeting you commit to paper in advance. If you’re a less experienced facilitator, then you’ll probably benefit from a detailed outline, which clearly explains who does what and when, and for how long. You may even write out some of the things you intend to say on a work-for-word basis, perhaps just your opening comments and the agenda and how people should interact.

As for how many to invite, a good rule of thumb is to have no more than 75% of the number of people you’d seat at a face-to-face meeting if you want to achieve some meaningful outcomes and have everyone fully engaged.

Roles in online meetings

The person who takes on the role of facilitator is responsible for guiding the participants toward the desired outcomes by following the agenda. Good meeting design is the first step towards a successful meeting, but facilitators will use many techniques to keep the meeting moving, to include everyone in the conversation, and to handle difficult situations. First, facilitators need to explain the agenda and any special tools they may be planning to use, e.g., group brainstorming. Facilitators will make sure ideas and proposals are not lost. They will remind people of the time and point out when the conversation gets off track.

Often the team or project leader is the one who facilitates meetings. Although they may not think of themselves as the facilitator, they should be attentive to the process of the meeting as well as the content. Even meeting participants can act in facilitative ways by asking a question or making a suggestion to get the meeting back on track or to draw out a person’s idea.

When you set up your meeting, pay attention to who will be in the chair and who else will be supporting. Remember that most tools for meeting online require you to define in advance the privileges that belong to different roles. You would not want all participants to have the freedom to interfere with your data, your slides or your agenda for example. Nor would you want to enable 30 people all to speak at once. Setting privileges lets you restrict who can have a microphone, who can set up a new meeting space, who can annotate a slide or whiteboard or load a new document for sharing. These sorts of consideration are part of the process of setting up an online meeting, just as checking you have the right number of chairs, the projector works, there is enough coffee and biscuits, and somewhere to park your notes is part of the process when face-to-face.

What next?

Part five of this ten-part series is about managing the change to meeting online. We’ll talk about identifying stakeholders and working out how to win support and overcome resistance. We’ll post it in a couple of days time, so do please come back.

We’re hoping you will add your own ideas to these blog items too, so we can create of it something that is representative of the experience of a wide range of practitioners and helps us all to understand what works and what doesn’t.

About Phil Green

Phil Green has written 58 post in this blog.

Phil identifies himself as a perfomance consultant and teacher who helps people and organisations to do the best they can at work. He has strong skills in designing learning materials and workflow support, and draws from a wide spectrum of methods and technology. Co-designer of a certificated qualification in blended learning, he has trained hundreds of others from many industry sectors in how to create effective learning solutions, both online and offline.

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Related posts:

1. We can’t go on meeting like this – Part 2 Better Meetings
2. We can’t go on meeting like this – Part 6 Design Your Meeting
3. We can’t go on meeting like this – Part 3 The Right Tools
4. We can’t go on meeting like this – Part 5 Manage the Change
5. We can’t go on meeting like this – Part 7 Interactive Meetings