The challenge: ensuring an engaging, productive and collaborative virtual meeting.
The answer: digital facilitation.
How Digital Facilitation Can Improve Virtual Meetings
There’s no denying the popularity of virtual meetings. With team members working from home or spread around the world, virtual meetings are more practical and convenient than in-person meetings, and the technology used for virtual meetings is improving all the time.
On the downside, virtual meetings can be challenging for participants. There’s much room for improvement in terms of focus, collaboration, productivity and creativity during virtual meetings. Participants can easily be distracted if not actively engaged. The fact that no one can see what other participants are doing means there’s a temptation to multi-task (we’ve all been guilty of this!).
People can become distracted and disengaged during online meetings when they don’t feel their time is being put to good use. The problem lies in trying to match “old school” facilitation styles with digital meetings.
The good news is that virtual meetings can be just as good (or even better) than an in-person meeting, even for large groups. And with virtual meetings, you save the costs associated with bringing people together from across distances, such as travel, meeting space, food and accommodations.
How can you ensure a productive and collaborative virtual meeting?
Through digital facilitation and the services of a digital facilitator.
What Is a Digital Facilitator?
A digital facilitator combines facilitation skills and technology expertise to expertly lead your team through an engaging and productive process. Digital facilitators are essential for engaging people in online meetings where creative problem solving, analysis and decision-making are required. A digital facilitator can also help you obtain constructive feedback from the most people in the shortest amount of time.
What should you look for in a digital facilitator? Look for a facilitator who brings process, meeting design and group management skills. The facilitator should know how to combine virtual video conference technology such as Zoom–which lends itself well to collaborative meetings–and Stormz, an essential collective decision-making application managed by a facilitator. A facilitator with a combination of these skills and expertise will ensure an engaging and productive meeting.
NeOlé provides digital facilitation services. We design and facilitate virtual meetings, where people, technology and creative problem-solving come together to make collaboration easy, effective and empowering. If you require the services of a digital facilitator, contact us.
