Most online meetings start with those awkward first five minutes when everybody drops in, but no one is really present. These frustrating meetings are filled with confusion, tech problems and misunderstandings. This is what we aim to fix now!
In this Realising Talk, three experienced facilitators come up with ideas for starting different types of online meetings with a natural flow right from the beginning.
How to start online meetings right? – Summary
- The meeting starts, before the meeting starts. Send out a care package before the meeting that will hep people to connect smoothly to the call.
- Be clear when the meeting starts and when the content starts in the meeting. You calculate with the social chit-chat like this (that would normally happen next to a coffee) before the main content starts.
- Start the meeting by sharing a whiteboard in the call showing a warm up question. People can already start to think and share ideas about this until everybody arrives.
- Expect that people will have tech problems in the beginning and calculate time in the agenda to solve these.
- Have a tech facilitator assistant who can help participants with their tech problems.
- Have people keep their camera going during the meeting to stay more connected as a group.
What is a Realising Talk podcast?
Facilitation is the art of enabling great conversations. Whether it is to nurture creativity in an innovation workshop, focus on the solution in a crisis meeting, or enable learning in higher education.
In the Realising Talk podcast series, experienced facilitators explore playful and effective means to create results through great conversations and group work.
Experts in this podcast
Viktor Beregszaszi
MSc in Innovation Management and certified business facilitator. He enjoys sparking creativity and building superb teams through playful trainings, joyful shared experiences and “get stuff done” kind of project management tools.
Olav Immanuel
He studied Societal Entrepreneurship and has a passion for participatory gatherings. He has experience with new ways of participant driven organizing that have arisen in later years and works with projects from interactive teaching to authentic communication.
Verena Stingl, Phd
She is an organizational researcher and experienced risk manager. She is a passionate teacher, using facilitation to enable university and professional learning. Moreover, she enjoys using workshop facilitation to help teams and organizations navigate ambiguity and uncertainty in their projects.
I hope that you got some new ideas out from our talk on how to start online meetings right.
Feel free to write in the comments what worked for you to ease the start of online meetings, and stay tuned for the next episode.
Innovatively yours,
Viktor Beregszászi
“Music from https://www.zapsplat.com“
