Encourage Participation

Common pet peeves among frequent online meeting participants reflect the tendency for people to become distracted from the matter at hand. It's easy for participants to pay attention to e-mail, chat or other things on their desktop and to lose focus on the meeting. Multitasking sounds good, but often it's not conducive to an effective meeting.

Sometimes, people in the same building dial into a meeting so they can multitask, points out Kevin Mackie, director of software development at Oracle. But, he says, there's a false economy with multitasking. "To be sure, when people insist on having those 'around the room status meetings,' being able to get other work done is a boon; but for meetings where engagement and interaction is critical, it's important to ensure those who are participating remotely are as engaged as those who are in the room."

For example, says Molay, meeting leaders should change the way they ask for feedback. Watch out for questions like, "Does everyone agree?" Remote attendees can't answer easily without stepping over each other's responses, points out Molay. Web conferencing software that includes polling features can help you solicit audience feedback.

Construct an agenda that encourages participant input, says Settle-Murphy. Assume that participants will start to get distracted after 10 or 15 minutes, or after three presentation slides. She says, "Design into your agenda ways to engage participants (with questions, online idea generation, visualization exercises, etc.) more frequently than you might in a face-to-face session." Vary the way you pose questions, she suggests, such as alternating a fill-in-the-blank statement, an open-ended question, asking for participants' "top three" of something.

One trick Mittleman uses is to engage in dialogue with an individual at a distant end. He says that person asks the questions others are thinking of asking; he can read nonverbal responses from the individual to know if he is following the message; it is less boring to listen to dialogue than to a monologue; and that person can fill him in on how he's being received.

Smith suggests that meeting leaders sequence the discussion, because teleconference participants don't know when it's their turn to talk. "Without a traffic cop, they run over each other," he says. Smith goes around the virtual table; each participant is invited to speak for 30 seconds and no one can interrupt. "Make it clear to everyone that they can 'pass' when their name is called," Smith advises. But, he cautions, silence doesn't necessarily mean someone is finished. "Ask them explicitly, 'Anything else?'" Smith prefers to go around the "table" twice so participants who passed during the first round have an opportunity to speak. The result is that, with six teleconference participants, everyone says something at least every three minutes.

Smith, too, assumes that participants will become distracted after the third presentation slide, and recommends interactive behavior such as asking questions, polls and pausing the presentation for a quick brainstorming activity. "If you're using a meeting tool that allows the presenter to control the slide set, it's harder for others to multitask without getting lost later on," he adds.

Mittleman also advises that it's important to get people to focus during transitions from one meeting part to another, or you'll lose them. "If you have a video channel, this (counterintuitively) is the most important time to be using it," he says. "Create a scoreboard or dashboard so everyone can see where you are in the agenda, who is up, what is coming next. Also, they should be able to see who is at the meeting."

It is much easier to brainstorm than to make a decision virtually. "When you are brainstorming everyone gets to contribute ideas," Mittleman explains. "When you are consolidating ideas, some ideas get swept off the table. People don't like to give up their favorite ideas. They like it even less virtually." That's because people have no sense that everyone else understands their pet idea, and no perception that their own interests were accommodated. Mittleman advises. "This is why many virtual decision making meetings fail. It is not enough to lead a group through a vote; it is vital to lead them through buy-in to the results of that vote. Buy-in requires a sense of being heard and a sense that one's interests have been accommodated-or at least understood."