Back in April, Phil Green advised us that we can’t go on meeting like this. A winter of travel disruptions from snow, volcanic dust clouds and industrial action made it clearer than ever that there has to be an alternative to the face-to-face meeting. We already knew there were sound economic and environmental reasons for meeting virtually, now we knew that were would be times when there simply wasn’t a choice.
These are early days for online meetings, so we can expect best practice to evolve, ingenious new features to be added to the available systems, and even cleverer applications to be discovered by those who have to put these tools into practice. At Onlignment, we have put a marker in the sand by developing our own set of rules for better online meetings, based on the best practice that we’ve been able to glean from around the world and from our own experiences as a virtual team. The result is our third e-book, Online meetings: A facilitator’s guide. Click on the link to download it – it’s free.
If you take a look, and we obviously hope you will, you may feel that some of what we have discussed is old hat, because it applies equally well to face-to-face meetings. To some extent that is true, but we make no apologies for the fact. The majority of face-to-face meetings are not only inefficient, because they could be more economically conducted online, but ineffective, because they are so poorly facilitated. We can take this switch of media as an opportunity to rethink how and why we meet together in real-time, to make sure we are not condemned to endlessly repeat the mistakes of the past.
Let us know how you get along with the e-book, whether we’ve hit the nail on the head, missed something important or simply got it wrong. Here’s to happy online meetings – not too frequent, not too long, but great fun and highly productive while they last.
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