How to get your design team to actively participate in virtual meetings?
Holding your teams undivided attention during physical meetings is already a challenge as it is, and now with a global lockdown forcing you to manage your projects from home you might be asking how to get everyone to actively participate in virtual meetings and actually be productive.
I prepared a little checklist to help you with this roadblock.
Let’s face it. Not everyone is trained for high productivity and even during work hours, whiles you overlook your teams work you always search for ways in which you can boost their accountability. Now the time has come when for the next month or so you will work from home, and your biggest concern is how to keep your team productive and focused especially when they are on a payroll and clients cancelled or suspended their projects.
Working form home is significantly different than from an office.
When we are together in a room we often compensate with coercive eye contact. Participants feel some obligation to feign interest (even if they’re staring at their phones). In situations where you can’t demand attention with ocular oppression, you have to learn to do what we should’ve mastered long ago: create voluntary engagement. In other words, you have to create structured opportunities for attendees to engage fully.
There are four reasons why you cannot give up on holding virtual meetings in the times of isolation and why you need to keep your team highly engaged. You are responsible for influencing others and it’s down to this action that you can help people make decisions, solve problems and strengthen relationships within the team. Since all of those are active processes, those team members who act as passive passengers rarely respond in productivity. As a result you end up with mediocre results and still pay a high price for it.
The only way to succeed in this challenge is to thoroughly understand and embrace the practice of voluntary engagement.
Here are the key 5 rules that help naturally evoke voluntary engagement in your team:
The 60-second emotion
Working on design and architecture projects with your team is constant trouble shooting.
Rule number one is: never engage a group in solving a problem before they felt the problem. It may sound weird and almost like a school exercise but study shows that an emotionally felt reason is a much stronger impulse response than a logical conviction.
Take a 60-second moment to create an emotional connection to the problem you and your team are focusing on. You need to help your peers experience the problem. How can you do this?
Depending on the context you can either: share shocking or provocative statistics, anecdotes, or just bring up analogies that dramatize the problem.
Example? Lets say your client cancelled construction due to the corona outbreak, this affects your business significantly financially as well as physically, reducing your teams ability to work. There are consequences in numbers and finances that affect you as a business owner. You can allow yourself for a moment of vulnerability and disclose one of the results of such changes to your team. You can say it in form of a story or simply by mentioning numbers. If you feel more on the lighthearted side you can engage emotions by making an analogy to whales feeding far more effectively when they work together to encircle large schools of krill — and then take turns gorging on the feast. No matter what tactic you use, your goal is to makes sure the groups empathetically understand the problem (or opportunity) before you move into trying to solve it.
Make them responsible
When people enter a social setting they tactically work to determine their role. In each space they determine ways in which they will interact depending on the behavioral demand of the space. In a sport facility you start training, in a lecture you stay quiet and listen, in a bar you talk loud and introduce yourself to new people. In some places we automatically become actors, in some observers and in some listeners. So your role, holding a virtual meeting is to create a place of engagement. The biggest engagement threat is allowing team members to unconsciously take the role of observer. A natural behavioral pattern adopted by members who get an invitation link to a virtual meeting is to assume a role of an observer, hence your biggest focus should go into consciously creating an environment of responsibility and you need to communicate that clearly at the very beginning of your presentation. The trick is that saying “I want this to be a conversation, not a presentation” rarely works. Instead, create an opportunity for them to take meaningful responsibility. This is best done using the next rule.
Nowhere to hide
Some of the most unnerving social behavior in the world is a phenomenon called “social diffusion”. This term is often used to describe a behavior when an individual getting a heart attack in a public space is likely to get no help, the more witnesses are present. If everyone is responsible, then no one feels responsible.
To avoid this situation in your virtual meetings follow defining a problem that can be solved quickly, by assigning people or groups of two or three maximum to work on solution. Give them a medium with which they can communicate with one another, be it video conferences, a slack channel, Microsoft teams, messaging platform such as Whatsapp or Telegram, or audio breakouts. If you are still looking for a platform to use read this: Free remote working tools to help designers and architects stay connected with their team. If you’re on a virtual meeting platform that allows for breakout groups, use them liberally. Give them a very limited time frame to take on a highly structured and brief task.
Use a Minimum Valuable Presentation tactic
Nothing is more boring and disengaging than a long mind-numbing cluster of slides and data. It doesn’t matter how intelligent your group is if you want to engage them you must focus on stories not data. Determine what is the shortest way for you to communicate tasks and do it through emotion and story. Make sure your presentation is as short as it can be and don’t add anything to it, no matter how tempted you might be. The idea is to go through your presentation with ease and not feel obliged to explain each slide just as a process of going through them.
A solution every 5 minutes
Throughout your presentation you need to maintain continual expectation of meaningful involvement. If you fail at it, your team will retreat into that alluring observer role, and you’ll have to work hard to bring them back.
A way to solve this is bringing up a new problem and delegating a task force of solutions every 5 minutes. This mean that in a 15 minute presentation you should be able to solve 3 problems on average. Focusing on 2–3 brief, well defined engagement opportunities. If you want to add some variety to this task you can mention a few problems and ask the group to determine where to start solving them, than follow by delegation of rules and determining communication platform and delivery result.
Summary
The above strategies for running effective and engaging meetings should already be second nature to many leaders. However, in challenging times of forceful isolation mastering those five steps can be crucial in allowing your team members be highly engaged and productive when out of sight, specially when their minds are elsewhere. Following these five rules will dramatically and immediately change the productivity of any virtual gathering.
If you encounter any of those difficulties or would like to talk about your approaches, do not hesitate to reach out to me I am here to serve with support and advice. Join my Facebook group, hit follow on my medium channel and come back to this space for more advice on how to transition into working from home during this time of a lockdown.