Your Kitchen Table: The New Conference Room

Photo by Crew on Unsplash, Illustration by Selena Persiani-Shell

Authentic, collaborative, informative communication isn’t limited to face-to-face. It can be virtual.

The last few weeks have had an hour-by-hour impact on how we operate. The rules of engagement have changed. What was sometimes a work-from-home option became a recommendation that became — in some instances — a proclamation.

Your workspace is where you are. Your point of view and voice are where you are. Your meeting is where you are. With technology and talent distributing our workforce, leaders have the challenge of fostering communication, collaboration, and engagement…online. The solution: manage your meetings like a broadcast: informative, conversational, and perhaps even a bit entertaining. Below are how to ensure the basics, the content, the roles, the facilitation, and the platform support your communications.

The Basics

• Prepare an agenda. Send it out.
• Start on time. End on time.
• Invite the right people.
• Log-in from a quiet place. Face the window. Check your video and sound.
• Silence notifications. Close your browsers, windows, and tabs. Deny multi-tasking.
• Designate a notetaker. Calendar-action-publish (CAP) your meeting.

The Content

• Create a show flow, or a facilitator’s guide. Different than an agenda, a show flow includes the minute-by-minute run of the meeting, including the opens, closes, and transitions for each section. Who is speaking? What are their main points? What slides are being displayed? Who is introducing the next speaker? Where are the polling questions going out? What questions are you going to ask?
• Write for the spoken word. Provide prompts for your host. Instead of the agenda item “welcome”, actually write what’s in that welcome, and write it for the spoken word. Use an active voice (versus passive). Include contractions; that’s how we speak. Stick with short sentences. Then read it out loud. Listen for redundant words or phrases, or anything that’s hard to say.
• Avoid monologues, go for dialogues. Your team will tune out if they hear anyone speaking for more than 90 seconds. Each time a new person speaks, it re-engages the audience. Plan for multiple speakers for each section.
• Plan for smart chats. Use the chat feature strategically and get beyond the yes/no answers. Pose open questions, ask participants for their ‘top three’, or offer fill-in-the-blank statements. The gold standard: prepare for the chat before the meeting by pre-interviewing some of your speakers and participants. Their content will help you create your questions, and perhaps even seed responses.
• Simplify your slides. Visuals are there to support you, not the other way around. You don’t want your audience reading, and you certainly don’t want to read to them. Display the most important statistic, rather than all of them. Show one powerful graphic. Put paragraphs in the speaker notes. Try for four bullets, four words per bullet.
• Consider your demo. Even though a live demo doesn’t start and stop, you can show a slide of the “table of contents.” Let the participants know what they’ll see. For any length of time — a marathon or a sprint — audiences like mile markers.

The Roles

• Host/Facilitator. The emcee of the meeting, and potentially the team leader. This is the person doing the opens, closes, and transitions — not necessarily sharing all of the content (remember: dialogue versus monologue).
• Producer. This person creates the content, agenda and show flow, and ensures the conversation comes to life on the platform. The responsibility may range from pre-interviewing for content to ensuring everyone is on — or off — mute when needed.
• Chat Manager. This team member follows the show flow, submits the chat questions, and threads comments into the conversation.

The Facilitation

• Remember your physical skills. Executive presence is the same in-person as it is online: eye contact and energy. Look at the camera when speaking. That is your eye contact, and your eye contact is your confidence and credibility. Get your volume up, and stand up if you can. It will help you speak clearly, and keep the energy of the meeting up.
• Engage participants from the beginning… We recommend a Dialogue Opener. 1) Share the agenda you’ve prepared “I’m prepared to discuss…A, B, and C”. 2) Ensure you want to use their time appropriately “In order to make the best use of your time…” 3) Invite them to speak/add/question “…what would you like to discuss today?”
• …and keep them engaged throughout. Facilitate an activity every 10 minutes. Examples include role-plays and polling questions. Rather than explain an example, designate two people to demonstrate. Use polling or chat questions after each section (and add those to your show flow so you don’t forget!).
• Thread participants into the conversation. Say the person’s name, do a short playback of the content, and ask a question. You won’t put anyone on the spot, and you’ll shorten the amount of “Sorry, was getting off of mute…” time by getting them prepared.
• Summarize the main points. Use your transitions to provide a summary of the discussion, and wrap up the conversation at the end.

The Platform

• Use the tools and run a dress rehearsal. Chat functions, polling questions, reactions, breakout rooms, virtual-raised-hands all ask your audience to do something physical to stay engaged. Know the capabilities of your platform, and practice. Run a dress rehearsal before publishing that final show flow. Remember, every activity, chat question, open, close, and transition goes in that show flow.

Finding it challenging to WFH? We’re here to help. Shoot us an email: info@snpnet.com