
Practices from Experiences in Facilitating Virtual Meetings (Mittleman, Briggs, Nunamaker).
- It is harder to follow a meeting process from a distance.
- Be explicit in the planning of the meeting.
- Poll the participants for their vested interests.
- Whiteboard/flipchart the agenda and refer back during the course of the meeting.
- Do not ignore process transitions.
- Do things in an incremental fashion.
- People don't get feedback when working over a distance.
- Facilitate feedback.
- Encourage frequent milestones and checkpoints.
- Use of alternative methods for feedback.
- People forget who is at a distributed meeting.
- Use reflective techniques.
- Rollcalls.
- Link people in. Distribute photos and short biographies.
- It is harder to build a team over a distance.
- Create clear, unambiguous goals for the team.
- Have kickoff meeting face to face.
- Have mutual breaks.
- Network connections are unpredictable.
- Assume that there will be a technology learning curve.
- Have a fallback plan.
- Have a techie on-call.
- Establish a mechanism for meeting reboots.
- Provide a process map to participants.
- It is tough to sort out multiple communication channels.
- Don't chase new technology.
- Separate tasks and processes.
- Use video where it is beneficial.
- Video is not only about talking heads.
- Use collaboration tools.
- There is an art to using audio and video channels in a distributed meeting.
- Encourage dialogue rather adopt a briefing format.
- Leverage relationships.
- Be aware of the microphone location.
- Change the focus to different sites.
- It is harder to converge over a distance.
- Use ad-hoc teams to negotiate compromise solutions.
- Creat a team document repositary.
- Different time virtual meetings are different than same time virtual meetings.
- Make certain there arn't easier methods to complete tasks.
- Value output.
- Make instructions explicit.
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