Remotely Brilliant Weekly: Three Things to Improve Remote Meetings

Our monthly newsletter is back and packed full of practical tips and insights to help you be brilliant at remote collaboration.

Three Things You Can Do to Improve Your Remote Meetings?

Whatever your remote collaboration workshop is for, there are some rules that always apply in order to maintain energy and focus, and get interaction from all present.

Maintain energy and focus

The biggest single thing you can do to maintain energy in remote collaboration meetings and workshops is to keep them short (max 2.5 hours) and have regular breaks – take a short break every 60-75 mins. Scheduling also plays a part – don’t plan your remote ideation workshop for 4pm on a Friday (in anybody’s time zone!). Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the optimal days for focus and energy, and mornings are far better than afternoons on any day so try to schedule remote collaboration workshops during these times.?

Encourage positive interaction

Interactivity is key to keeping focus and attention in a remote workshop. If you’re a remote workshop facilitator, think about creating interactive moments as often as possible in order to keep everyone involved and engaged.

When collaborating remotely, energy comes from dialogue. Keep group numbers for remote collaboration small – follow the Two Sofa Rule – and if in doubt split the group out into smaller workshops or separate breakout groups to ensure everyone can participate in conversations.?

Use the right tools for remote collaboration

?There are a huge selection of tools available to support remote collaboration, workshops and projects and the whole field is moving very fast so new developments change the picture frequently. Having said that, if you’re a facilitator of remote collaboration, we’d highly recommend using zoom and miro as your go-to tools. Zoom is simply the best option when it comes to the human interaction needed for remote collaboration. The zoom desktop client is the version to use (encourage participants to download it as it has much greater functionality than the web version). There are a range of free whiteboard tools which can be handy for remote collaboration. If you need more than a basic whiteboard tool, we recommend Miro. When it comes to strategic remote collaboration projects Miro really comes into its own, allowing the creation of journey maps to record project work, and well-designed spaces to be used during future workshop sessions.? Miro can be used on a free plan which allows creation of 3 separate whiteboards.

Read the full blog here

Two Great Questions of the Week?

We use QOTW as ice breakers and an interactive way to bring energy and attention into the room. Here are our two favourites from the last month;

-? ? ? ? ? Where are you normally to be found at a party?

-? ? ? ? ? Do you fill up your tank when it hits a quarter or do you head to the filling station on fumes?

One From the Team On LinkedIn

The lighter side…

You’ll need your sound on for this one!

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