8
OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES OF VIRTUAL FACILITATION
No matter what industry you work in, you will likely have to work virtually at least some of the time. The push for reducing costs and minimizing expenses is not going away; therefore, the pressure to do more and more without meeting face-to-face will continue to challenge facilitators. In addition, the expanding global nature of many large companies through mergers and acquisitions, increased usage of shared service centers, or companies moving their corporate offices to more tax-favorable locations calls for virtual meetings. On the plus side, facilitators do have an ever-growing number of tools and strategies that can help them work in their growing virtual world.
Common Challenges and What to Do About Them
The most obvious difference about working virtually is that people are not physically in the same place. This creates a variety of challenges for the facilitator.
First, people cannot see one another. There are plenty of funny videos on the Internet that depict the classic conference call: People continually asking, “Who just joined?” and talking over one another, or pregnant pauses waiting for somebody to talk. Virtual participants do not have the visual cues they rely on in face-to-face meetings. This also prevents people from being able to read one another’s feelings, so they cannot adjust their approach or accommodate others in the way they might normally. The lack of visual cues makes it particularly difficult to sense the mood in the room.
Second, bad habits that occur in face-to-face meetings get exponentially worse in virtual ones. An example of this is being late—most virtual meetings have participants who join late, either because they are running behind from a previous meeting or they simply lose track of time. Another reason for starting late is because the person hosting is not present on time. Perhaps the fact that people can’t see one another in most virtual meetings makes it more acceptable to be late. Or perhaps it’s our unconscious minds telling us that it doesn’t matter, because the meeting is going to be even more of a waste of time than a regular face-to-face meeting.
Third, people feel so overloaded that they already multitask in face-to-face meetings. When meetings are done via teleconference, it’s safe to assume that most of those present do not pay attention and engage in side work on their computers or cell phones. This final example is among the most annoying.
These challenges are just some that confront the virtual facilitator, in addition to those of facilitating a face-to-face meeting. It is therefore even more important to be intentional and creative with your design—not, as many people think, less prepared and structured. You also must be even more selective with the tools that you use for virtual facilitation. There are so many different technologies that it’s easy to just use the latest fad file-sharing platform (avoiding pretty much all need for human contact) or feel overwhelmed and not use anything other than email and perhaps a teleconference. The trick is to use your diagnostic mentality to choose the best technology for your situation.
As a rule of thumb, use videoconferencing for all important virtual meetings—ones that require an important decision to be made or require the buy-in of multiple stakeholders. This includes using platforms with screen-sharing capability, like Skype for Business or Zoom. The screen sharing allows everyone attending to collaborate on the same documents in real time and stops all the back-and-forth you get with multiple people editing drafts. Email still works well for sharing documents unless you need to be more collaborative, in which case something like Google Docs is a good option for small groups of people.
There are many books on virtual meetings that go into much more detail than this. However, as long as you are interested in facilitating a great virtual meeting, what follows is really all you need to know in terms of technology, apart from one more important thought: As the complexity of your technology increases, the likelihood of it actually working decreases. Keep it as simple as you can and test it out with plenty of time to spare.
An Example of a Virtual Meeting Design
Here’s an example of a meeting we held a few years ago in Paris. We had 13 participants in the meeting room and six virtual participants in four different time zones. We set up the meeting time to try to accommodate the different time zones as best we could, knowing that somebody was going to be up very late or very early. We had videoconferencing capability in the meeting room, one of the virtual participants was in a videoconference room in Mexico, two were in a videoconference room in New York, two were in an office in Japan, and the final one was in his home in California. We made sure that the virtual meeting participants not in videoconferencing rooms could join using their laptop-computer cameras.
We set up the face-to-face meeting room so all the participants could be seen by the videoconferencing camera and split the large screen into four, each showing a live feed from one of the four remote locations. The audio feed was much clearer using the phone line, and we also used screen sharing and instant messaging among all participants.
The purpose of the meeting was twofold: Train the team in administering, scoring, and analyzing a team-building instrument of ours (the Group Management Questionnaire; see Measuring What Matters by Rod and co-author Rich McDaniel); and model for the team and its leader the skills necessary for facilitating virtual teams in a focused and experiential manner.
The two-day design began with participants identifying a vision for their team by first sharing what turned out to be deeply personal stories about a great team to which they had once belonged. The key here was to have them identify not only what they did, but what felt truly special about being on that team. We divided them into small groups—two groups of four people and one group of five for the face-to-face participants, and we put the virtual participants together on the screen to make a group of six. The virtual participants all had their own cameras trained on them, and all four locations showing on their screens. This allowed them to talk together without any external facilitation or moderation required.
In their groups, participants began sharing stories of teams from childhood, adolescence, war, and work. They created lists on flipchart paper of what they believed were the characteristics of a great team. In the virtual team, one person was nominated as scribe and trained their camera on a piece of flipchart paper, so the other team members could see what they were writing. (Some videoconferencing software might even allow you to create virtual flipcharts.) We then brought two pairs of groups together and gave them time to develop their collective lists of aspirations (using our Collapsing Consensus design from chapter 5). The virtual team came together on the screen with one of the face-to-face groups. Doing this gave team members a compelling view of what their team could be, and a reason to work together toward this shared goal.
The group then moved to the second part of the design—scoring, analyzing, and interpreting the Group Management Questionnaire (GMQ), a tool for making any shared vision of a high-performing team a reality. This instrument consists of 72 best practices observed in high-functioning teams; the participants either agree they are happening or not. It is quick and easy to use, and was time well spent in getting the individuals over their defensiveness at being imperfect. The results of the team’s GMQ, combined with the newly established team vision, allowed the members to recognize a need for strategies for pursuing areas of opportunity that were not currently available to them. Through the art of design and practice of structured conversation, the team began to see what was possible for them as they took their initial steps to closing the gap between their team vision and their current reality (as identified through the GMQ).
By working collaboratively, engaging in dialogue, soliciting needs and issues, and sharing personal stories, participants made sure their input was reflected in the content and expected deliverables for the meeting. Through our design, both the quantity and quality of ideas were at least equal to (or better than) face-to-face meetings, despite the challenges of working virtually.
Virtual Facilitation Can Work
Achieving true collaboration is a challenge in any work environment. In teams working virtually, it can be all the more difficult to attain. This is especially true when team members are practically strangers to one another and are from different cultural backgrounds (as was the case with this team). The key is to build a mutual sense of purpose and focus on the process (the “how” of the work to be accomplished) and the evolving relationships. In any design involving teamwork, there is a need to initially build rapport, to care for how people are treated, and to be sure that participants believe their ideas are valued—even if all of them aren’t used. These ideas, discussed in earlier parts of this book, are foundational for achieving our stated goals in any virtual meeting.
Our example took nearly two days to accomplish, plus a half day of planning. If we estimate that these 19 leaders were valued at $100 an hour, the investment made in our meeting time alone was more than $30,000. Imagine how many similar meetings result in people sitting on the phone for hours, with a few individuals dominating the conversation and others distracted and uninvolved. And that assumes that those facilitating the meeting have some understanding of both the design technologies and the use of modern teleconferencing. But was our meeting worth the money? Without question, yes. And yet, this kind of well-designed initiative remains a rarity in the world of virtual facilitation. The good news is, most of our designs can, with a little creativity, be adapted to virtual meetings.
We talk about having a “design mentality,” and that applies to any meeting. Because virtual meetings present meeting organizers with new complexities and challenges, we have found that many people actually do less planning and are less creative. Clearly the first question to doing a virtual meeting right is this: Is the meeting necessary? Is it worth the cost in preparation and execution? Done poorly, and without attention to how to engage those present, the result will predictably be a boring, less than productive use of people’s time and energy.
If you understand the fundamentals of any well-designed meeting, having a well-articulated, worthwhile virtual meeting is within your grasp. But, will it require more planning time? Yes. Will it demand some familiarity with how to bring members into the room and into participation? Most certainly. Finally, a commitment to conducting regular, substantive meetings virtually assumes a commitment to investing periodically in face-to-face meetings with these same people. Familiarity with both leaders and participants leads to trust, shared commitments, and the motivation to support one another from a distance so that collaboration, especially between meetings, can be effective.