Like many of you, we work in an organization that spans wide geographical areas; some cross Canada and others across the world. We introduce complexities, such as time zone and language, into our interaction with our team members or clients.
We deliver GE WorkOut style facilitated workshops frequently. These workshops work best in face-to-face environments where team members can work with each other and move about organically. Team members constantly break into small working teams and move been groups while leveraging flipcharts and sticky notes. With downward pressure to reduce OPEX cost, we continue to explore ways to facilitate these sessions in virtual environments to which these mechanisms are not particularly well suited. How do you ensure that outcomes can be delivered to the same level of quality and efficiently at the same time?
Technology available to us today has helped. We have technologies such as audio conferencing, webcams, video conferencing, TelePresence, WebEx and LiveMeeting. While they are great enablers to virtual collaboration, they add time and complexity as well. There is no perfect way to manage this but there are options and strategies that can be employed to reduce the risk.
- Don’t be a hero. In face-to-face sessions you could be the only person in the room. In virtual, ensure you have additional facilitator support in each of the remote rooms if you are managing a large group yourself. You can’t corral those individuals or read them if they’re pixelated characters on a video conference screen.
- Instant messaging is your friend. Leverage instant messaging to stay in touch with your facilitators. We create conferences in BBM. Can you do that in WhatsApp?
- Reduce the number of virtual meeting rooms. Ensure that team members congregate in common rooms. At least they can experience some face-to-face interaction. Don’t distribute the conference bridge number if they’re expected to attend in person.
- Sync breaks with the time needed to manage logistics. Often if you’re managing multiple small groups, data needs to be merged and transitioned from medium to medium. If team members are waiting while you do this, it will kill the flow and your participants will check-out. Ensure that you’ve built a very clear facilitation plan integrating the tools that you plan to use and give participants a break.
- Leverage tools like Google Docs, willyou.typewith.me or iEtherPad. If your organization does not have a policy preventing you from hosting content on external servers, you can leverage tools like Google Docs when small groups breakout. Google Docs will allow you to edit a Document or Spreadsheet real-time. Team-members will have the opportunity to watch as others are typing and contribute concurrently. Typically the participant with the keyboard owns the room or can influence the group more. This ensures that no one person has that control.
- Leverage tools in LiveMeeting. Peel back the onion to discover annotation tools, Pools and concurrent user whiteboards and notepads.
- Pre-build your templates. Building forms on the fly adds complexity and confusion when you’re in the moment. This is a variable that you have control over so pre-build the Visio, PowerPoint, Word documents in advance so they’re handy in a bind. If the documents need to be shared with participants, store them on a publicly available LAN drive so they can be loaded when needed.
- Dry run your tools. Technology doesn’t always work and it always fails when you need it most. Work with your team to familiarize yourselves with the tools in advance. Ensure the transitions flow. Build in additional time – you’ll need more than you think.
- Use adjacent rooms for breakouts. If your participants need to breakout into subgroups, ensure that the rooms they move into are adjacent and on the same floor. The further the distance the more of a distraction it is. If you can, have a laptop and conference bridge setup in advance so participants can get to work immediately.
While industry has helped us to see and talk to one another quite well, there remains a key challenge with how team members collaborate and share data concurrently and in real-time. In the coming months, I expect to be conducting further research and testing on Etherpad since it has been Open Sourced. Years back a team of individuals that left Google created the hosted web application which was subsequently shut down when the company was bought out and Google Wave was released. Due to the nature of our organization and policies surrounding hosting internal data on external servers, we have not been able to explore this option until now.
What tips do you have when running virtual working sessions? How do you share data real-time with team members?
