Meetings

8 Tips to Successful Virtual Team Facilitation

Remote Teams Require Virtual Team Facilitation

There is an overall positive impact of going remote for companies.

Data shows that remote work can lead to astonishing productivity, increases employee retention, decreases sick days, and increases workforce diversity, just to name a few benefits.

While remote teams have an overall positive impact on companies, remote teaming does create a few challenges.

Facilitating a virtual team successfully means adjusting what you know about facilitating team meetings and making a few changes in how you structure and facilitate these virtual team meetings.

Virtual Team Facilitation is a Necessity!

In today’s digitally-driven world, mastering the art of virtual team facilitation is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. From online meetings to dynamic online sessions, the way we communicate and collaborate has transformed significantly. With an array of online tools at our disposal, the potential for productive virtual interactions has never been higher.

Yet, the success of these online engagements often hinges on the adeptness of facilitation.

Whether you’re a seasoned virtual team leader or stepping into the realm of online facilitation for the first time, these eight essential tips and best practices will elevate your approach, ensuring that your online meetings are not only efficient but also engaging for all participants.

8 Tips for Remote Teaming Infographic

If you are new to remote teaming, here are 8 ways to start facilitating remote team meetings and achieve success!

When first starting out facilitating remote teams, you might be tempted to copy the exact facilitation formula used for in-person meetings. While that is not a bad place to start, we’ve put together a list of 8 tips of small changes to implement starting with the fist remote meeting you are in charge of!

1) Build Trust Early and Often During Remote Meetings

Make time for frequent, short activities that foster connection in remote meetings. Activities that help people get to know one another as people, not just someone they rely on for information or to help them complete a task, subtly increase the level of trust in your team. While those activities might look a bit different in a remote meeting, the same principles and ideas do apply. Traditional Agile games and learning activities can be adapted to work during a remote team meeting.

2) Create Ways for the Remote Team to Connect Outside of Meetings

Use social and professional channels to keep people in touch with one another as they work.

An example of this would be using an online application like Slack to create a sense of group unity. Slack’s motto is ‘Where work happens’. The tool is designed for intimate and direct group communication.

A second example is using a social media messaging channel or group like a LinkedIn Group, Facebook Group, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or another messaging service.

3) Design Virtual Group Meetings With Care

Think about what things really call for a team meeting, and intentionally design those meetings so people can participate actively and collaboratively.

Creating an agenda and sticking to it is important!

4) Plan The Right Amount of Time for Remote Meetings Tasks

Don’t try to cram too much into a remote meeting. Take your time, chunk it up and remember everything takes a little bit longer to do well when it’s remote.

While technology is an amazing tool, not every team member will initially be as comfortable as the facilitator using this technology. Allow ample time for the sign-on process and be aware of potential glitches and time restraints.

5) Make Time to Hear Opposition

Plan for a rich discussion with opposing views rather than trying to rush the group into agreement because of time restraints.

You might find that you need to schedule more remote meetings than what you’d expect if the meeting were in-person. Go with it, don’t force the issue trying to fit everything in.

6) Level the Playing Field

Set it up so that if some people are remote, everyone is.

No one should be ‘left out’ or made to feel they are a burden or a nuisance for having to dial into a meeting. Instead, if one or two team members need to be remote, require everyone to dial in and access the meeting remotely.

7) Let Go of The Belief That Virtual Is Never as Good as Face-To-Face

In truth, remote teams can be cohesive, thriving powerhouses, and virtual meetings can be productive and engaging. If you’ve never tried to facilitate a virtual meeting or a remote team, just know it can be done by adjusting and tweaking a few things.

8) Never Ask ‘Does Everyone Agree?’ in a Virtual Meeting

That question is hard for people to answer because asking a group for agreement is a tall order and often it’s either rhetorical, meaning the facilitator is moving on regardless of agreement or the facilitator then needs to take time to hear a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from everyone.

Instead, use effective tools and methods for exploring options and making decisions that everyone can commit to. You might say “What are we missing?” “Is there anyone who is not ready to move on?” By phrasing it this way you’re inviting people to offer a different point of view and if no one speaks then you can move forward.

Take Our Next Online Workshop Virtual Team Facilitation

We invite you to check out our next online Virtual Facilitation Masterclass to learn more.

Reading the Virtual Room

This is a question I get asked a lot: How do you ‘read the room’ when you’re meeting virtually?

In other words, how can you tell whether people are tracking or checked out, where the group energy is, and when it’s time for a break or some other shift?

My answer: it’s not actually all that different from reading the room in face-to-face settings, although we tend to think it is.

Running A Virtual Meeting

It’s stressful for a skilled in-room facilitator to imagine working without the body language cues that are so familiar and so revealing, I know. But I think we make this harder than it is.

There’s an expectation that because we lose body language, a virtual meeting won’t be as good as being in the room together and that it’s going to be an inferior experience.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Use An Agenda For Your Virtual Meeting

Start with an engaging agenda, where people have things to do that will achieve outcomes they care about.

Let them create, write, draw, discuss, decide.

Give them tools to support doing that work at a distance.

Ask good, thought-provoking questions.

Then get out of the way.

How To Read The Virtual Room

To read the room, look for the same things that you look for in a face-to-face gathering.

The only difference is that instead of ‘body language,’ you’re tuning in more to the tone of voice, evidence of activity, and the clues that you can get from the collaborative tools you’ve selected.

Are people working? Are they digging into the things they need to talk about or build?

Keep tabs on how many different people are participating — just a few, or most, or pretty much everyone? If there’s silence, is it paired with intense creation (generating sticky notes, writing in a document, whatever) or is it paired with a lack of activity?

If it’s the former, there’s no problem; let them work.

Ask Questions To Engage Virtual Participants

On the other hand, if there’s a lot of silence and nothing seems to be happening, that’s a cue that something maybe wrong. If that’s what I notice, I will usually make a neutral observation about it and then simply ask what’s up. That might look like this:

“I’m noticing that it’s been quiet for a couple of minutes and I’m not seeing anything show up on the shared tool we’re using. Is something not working well for you that we can maybe change?”

I have no way of knowing why people aren’t participating unless I ask them.

If I’ve created the right container, there’s enough safety that people can speak up and tell me what’s going on for them. I can then make adjustments as needed to re-engage the group, take a break, or help them tease out whatever issue is causing the block.

Example Responses To Your Question

Here’s a sampling of responses I’ve gotten to that question in the past, to give you an idea of what you might hear:

What are we supposed to be doing, again? (My instructions weren’t clear)
We can’t open/find the collaborative tool (Again, this is on me to get them where they need to be)
We can’t answer this question because we don’t have enough information (Time to reframe the question)
This isn’t the right thing for us to be talking about right now (Let’s find out what the right thing is, and talk about that)
We don’t see how this activity will get us to our outcome (I can briefly explain how I think it will and ask for suggestions that would make it work better for them)
All of us have just gotten an emergency text and we’re looking at our email because there’s a crisis that just came up for our team (Okay, let’s give you space to work through that)

There’s usually a very good reason people aren’t participating, and it’s almost always resolvable. But you won’t know until you ask — which is just as true in a face-to-face meeting as it is in a virtual one. We’re simply used to leaning more on what we see than on what we hear to make that determination.

Let Silence Be Your Friend In A Virtual Meeting

Just remember, silence can be your friend in a virtual setting. It can feel really uncomfortable because you can’t see what people are doing, but it can be a strong signal for change in a group that doesn’t like to speak up or criticize. Be open and inviting so that the group feels they can trust you to fix whatever needs to be fixed, and you’ll find that reading the virtual room isn’t difficult, it’s just different.

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This article originally appeared on Rachel Smith’s blog, Digital Visual Facilitation, on June 12, 2019.

Designing Your Meetings With Purpose

Responsibilities of a Facilitator

Your role as facilitator no longer depends on your opinion or even on your expertise about the content.

A facilitator has the responsibility to assess the situation, the people and plan productive meetings, all while remaining neutral and staying out of the content.

Your role as facilitator no longer depends on your opinion or even on your expertise about the content.

Realizing that content is no longer the facilitator responsibility but perhaps more of an outcome, an effective facilitator will focus on planning each meeting to assist in improved team efficiency and productivity.

The Facilitator and The Meeting

Some think that the facilitator is the “person in charge.” Rather than “charging your way” through a process, a meeting, or a team, there are three things that will help you bring focus to this role:

What: Only focus on those topics that are important and useful to all or most of the people in the meeting
Who: Only invite those people who need to understand, buy into, or act on the topics being discussed
Why: Give people the information they need in order to understand why they’re at the meeting.

The Result: Good Collaboration

Good collaboration doesn’t just happen. It takes forethought, intention and a keen sense of human nature. Human nature? Yep! Understanding how people get triggered and how people feel respected is part of the role as facilitator. Plan a process for a group of people that minimizes conflict and maximizes productivity. That takes skill, logic, intuition and a lot of practice.

If, for example, you need the group to arrive at decisions, then you’ll need to structure the process to get them there. Chances are good they cannot go straight to a decision and instead, will need to explore possibilities, then evaluate the alternatives, then make decisions.

These essential three steps are frequently rushed, so practice allowing the time to nurture what the process needs. To facilitate a group through large decisions it is likely you won’t have time (or the necessary requirements) within a single meeting. Consider three separate meetings, one for each purpose and design your meetings to encourage that outcome:

In the first meeting, meant to explore possibilities, imagination, innovation and creativity are welcome.
In the second meeting, meant to evaluate the alternatives, critical thinking, analysis and budget knowledge are welcome.
In the third meeting, meant to make decisions, negotiation and compromise are welcome.

Take Time To Design Your Meetings!

As you can see, how you design your meeting sets the stage for how it will go. When you design your meeting with clear purpose and intention, it’s likely to evoke less conflict and promote more efficiency and productivity during the meeting and for the team.

Rich Understanding & Communication for Rich Results

Heineken’s new viral video has an important message about the role that container building and conversation plays in overcoming barriers and conflicts. Check it out…

Politics in the United States is providing us with a heightened sense of awareness about our differences. But these kinds of exchanges are not new, we’re just lately watching them on bigger screens.

Rich Conversations In The Workplace

How do we adapt and use these kinds of conversations in our workplace, day-to-day? Or for the teams that we serve? With a little proactive work, these are rich and valuable conversations that we can be fostering in our teams as well.

As team leaders or facilitators we’re helping teams daily to navigate conflict by finding the balance between inquiry and advocacy. Heineken’s video demonstrates some useful tools that we’ll break down for you further on in the post.

Let us just say this:

Laying the Groundwork and Engaging in Different Kinds of Conversations Does Take More Time!

The results for the team are richer understanding between team members, higher quality outcomes, and improved velocity.

What would that look like?

The same conversation that keeps happening at each meeting due to the same unresolved conflicts would be eliminated. The habit of not listening and talking past one another? Gone.

How about by talking with and listening to each other, team members will actually achieve the results you know you and your team are capable of producing? It is that satisfaction and achievement that builds momentum inside a group.

If you haven’t seen the video by now, definitely watch it before you move on to help identify how you might prepare your team for these kinds of conversations.

Lay the Groundwork for Rich Communication

Step one:

In order to work with conflict, teams can’t just dive into the deep end of the pool. They need to spend time laying the groundwork. And, to be clear, laying the groundwork is not a one time task; it’s ongoing.

Here are some principles to keep in mind:

Get to know one another as people. We each have dreams, hopes, fears and challenges. When we put labels on people we start to view them as a concept or idea to be debated or defeated. When we take the time to know others as people first, rather than the label we’ve placed on them, it shifts our perspective.

Find Common Ground

When we start by acknowledging the things that we are aligned with, then we can build from there.
When we start from disagreement, it’s harder to find alignment and we become stuck in the back and forth nature of conflict: where one person “must be” right and the other “must be” wrong.
When we can find common ground, even if is just a shared value, there is an energy created from alignment. The alignment can move the conversation forward with more depth and meaning.

Work Together on a Task

When teams come together they need a purpose. Simply put, a common task provides that common ground and creates a feeling of forward progress and achievement that they can attain, and feel together. Resulting in a very positive foundation for a high performing team.

Engage in a conversation

Step 2:

When you lay the groundwork you create an enabling environment that supports more difficult conversations. Here are some principles to think about:

Aim For Dialogue

Dialogue is a specific kind of conversation. It’s ‘in the flow of meaning’ participants actively seek to deepen understanding beyond what they already know. In dialogue there is balance between inquiry and advocacy.

Voice Your Authentic View

In order to be in dialogue, we need to know what’s really true for others. Holding back or filtering what we say does not help to further the conversation. It only gets the group lost in trying to decipher what you’re saying, from what you really intend.

Inquire: Ask Powerful Questions

Powerful questions are short, often start with “What” or “How” and inquire about the other. When we come from a place of ‘knowing’ versus the place of inquiry we miss out on the opportunities to learn and find places of alignment and empathy.

Questions like “What’s it like to be you?” “What’s important about this?” or “What are three things we have in common?” are powerful inquiries!

By focusing on similarities and common tasks to be achieved, it’s easier for team members to remember they are actually on the same team. When the communication is strong and the inquiry level is high, more challenging conversations can be held without dissension and without defensiveness.

Next, Take a Look at Your Team

In order to help you activate these two powerful steps, take a few minutes and identify:

Where do you encounter similar types of conversations, as the video illustrated, at work?
Where do you need a different kind of conversation?
What’s one thing you could do today that might lay the groundwork?
Where does conflict exist in your team?
When conflicts or differences emerge in your team think about how you might apply some lessons from either the Heineken video, or the steps above.

You and your team can build strength and trust when you lay the groundwork and then engage in conversation in an ongoing manner. Breakthroughs and solutions come from better understanding. So do better team results.

Agile Team Facilitation: Maintaining Neutrality

ROI Is in Improved Trust and Collective Intelligence Within the Team

This post is the 2nd in a series that dives into the Cornerstones of the Agile Team Facilitation Stance.

This element, Maintaining Neutrality, being the toughest to embrace and employ, is where we’ll begin. Ready?

The Maintaining Neutrality Concept

In its simplest terms, the role of a facilitator in a collaborative meeting is to bring an objective and unbiased view to a group process – so that all voices can be heard and that the team can access its collective intelligence.

One of the best ways to achieve this is for a facilitator to maintain neutrality by owning the process, of the meeting and let the participants own the content or topic.

That sounds easy, doesn’t it?

In theory, it is easy. It’s dead simple.

In practice? No. Not easy.

Most agile teams have someone who steps into the role of facilitator to help guide the group through practices like team start-up, retrospectives, release planning, iteration planning, etc.

Because this person is often part of the team, in some way, they likely have an opinion about what the team is doing. This can make it difficult, but not impossible, to actively achieve and maintain neutrality during the course of a meeting where the person acting as the facilitator has an opinion on the topic or content being discussed.

The cornerstones in the facilitation stance. See the first post in the series.

**Why You’d Want To Maintain Neutrality**

True neutrality builds trust within the group.

It’s the subtle reflection to a team that they have the wisdom needed to find the right solution or path.

Neutrality is free from judgment about good or bad, right or wrong. And there is an openness in neutrality that makes room for more than one truth and more than one solution.

So, with more trust within a team, comes more effectiveness, better solutions…and more options.

With more trust, comes more confidence for each member in the group as a whole. With more trust comes improved solutions, velocity, and an ease and eagerness to continue the momentum.

Facilitators: a Part of The Team, Yet Apart From The Team

Team leaders or agile coaches are often part of the team, in some way.

On occasion, they may even have a stake in the outcome of the meeting.

This is at the heart of what makes maintaining neutrality difficult.

Neutrality offers the gift of “not knowing” and being able to take a different perspective, to see another way, to dance in the space of not knowing.

As a Facilitator’s Work Is Different

Presence and awareness for the way the group is proceeding through the agenda or problem at hand is the facilitator’s domain.

In many groups, a leader may, instead, get caught up in offering solutions to the content being presented, rather than staying curious and asking questions of the group.

Why Does This Happen?

There’s a myth, based in fear, about being perceived as not contributing value in the facilitator position. Often unspoken, there’s a belief in many individuals that they can only bring value to a group by contributing verbally or sharing their opinions or suggestions on the topic.

Some individuals equate neutrality with passivity.

Neither of These Fear-Based Beliefs Are True

The work of a facilitator or leader is different. It’s active, but the active attention is on asking questions and trusting the group to provide their answers. You’re also watching for hidden dynamics in the group and you’re more focused on inquiring, staying with curiosity and inviting participants to dig deeper for more and better of themselves.

An Example

A facilitator has just taken the group through an exercise. There are large sheets, scribed with details and feedback from the exercise, hanging on the wall. Everyone takes a breath and reviews all of the content on the sheets.

The Facilitator’s Immediate Instinct?

Perhaps it is to summarize what she sees, which comes from a place of knowing, instead of a place of inquiry.

Helpful?

Perhaps – as a content owner, but the facilitator is the process owner.

A neutral tack would be to ask: “What do you see?”

Subtle? Yes.
Powerful? Definitely.

Shifting your focus from the topic or content, or what the group is working on, to the process, or how the group is working.

The value you bring is in owning the process and in holding the space so the group can do its best work.

Minding The Inherent Power in Leading

Teams can be greatly influenced by a slight comment or over-attention to one idea over another. When you’re trying to pay attention to the content in the process, there’s a danger you’re missing what is happening inside of the process.

Fully standing in the space of neutrality says to a group “I’m your ‘sherpa.’ I’ll guide you up this mountain, there is a specific process we will follow. And in the end, you’ll get to do the work.”

What else? You may not be entirely sure you can maintain neutrality in your group. But given the payoff of improved group trust, that shouldn’t stop you from trying it out.

From The Field

Having taught facilitation to many leaders and coaches, this is the one guiding principle, where I notice the most immediate resistance and push back.

It gets right at the heart of how we traditionally feel we add value in a conversation. It can also be greatly influenced by the culture in the organization and how people are rewarded. This is also the principle that most everyone will say to me at the end of a three-day course ‘I never realized how important or valuable it is to be a neutral facilitator – but I totally get it now’.

Offering advice or jumping too quickly to problem-solving for a team increases their dependence on a facilitator. It sends a subtle and unstated message that says “I don’t think you’re capable of this…”. Over time, it undermines the confidence of the team to access and voice their collective intelligence.

Maintaining neutrality is about putting your own ego aside. We can easily fall into a trap of believing that the only way to provide value to a team is to problem solve for them.

My First Time as a Facilitator

The first time I facilitated a group of 25 people I was scared to death. My fears were about wanting to be prepared, wanting the meeting to go well, wanting to provide value, wanting to show my expertise.

I could probably continue that list of fears, but you might notice the theme of my fears were all about me. So I spent quite a bit of my preparation time mapping out a detailed plan, having a back-up plan for every possible event, and doing my homework on the topic so I was knowledgeable about some of the issues that might come up as questions (so I could have an answer).

I have been practicing facilitation for 22 years. I have strong beliefs in the power of collective intelligence and the benefits of not letting my own opinions get in the way of being able to hear the collective voice of the group and yet there are still times when I want someone else to hold the process so I can fully be in the content.

Favorite Exercise

You can easily provide contrast and share the work of facilitation by rotating other team members into the role of owning the process.

By rotating, each person will notice the need to pay attention to so many different things:

Individual dynamics
System dynamics
Interpersonal communications
Watching for who are stepping forward to participate and who are withdrawing, or stepping back
Group awareness
The difference between what’s being said, and what isn’t.
Looking for signs & indicators that we just bumped into the elephant in the room – are we really ignoring that?

These are the subtle yet critical elements, the work, a facilitator maintains in order to hold the space for their group. So the group can focus deeply on the content and dig for their solutions with more trust.

	Internal Assumptions and Beliefs	Practices
Maintain Neutrality	I am active and engaged (not passive) I own the process, they own the content I add value by reflecting back to the group what’s actually happening I am open minded and see value in all voices Polarities in opinions offer opportunities to find common ground I am vested in helping the group achieve their desired outcomes Critique about the group process is not a critique about who I am	Say what you see, in a factual, non-judgmental way Take a systems perspective Bridge competing ideas Listen for the 2% common ground Offer ideas with no attachment to the outcome Inquire by asking powerful questions Seek to understand and deepen the group’s understanding
Not Neutral – Driving your Content	I am valuable because of my superior capability, experience, or insight The group will make the wrong decision if I don’t add my experience I can’t facilitate because I am too biased and have too much at stake My value is determined by my ability to add value to these discussions Neutrality means to be passive, so if I can’t offer my opinion, I won’t say anything	Using your positional authority of leading the meeting to contribute your idea Commenting positively on contributions made by some and not by others Disregarding input from those who don’t align with your thinking Allowing your design to reinforce biases (i.e., only hearing from those who like to talk) Over contributing content

Starting the Practice:

In a collaborative meeting, try on 100% content-neutral facilitation.

No matter what’s being said or presented, you step into your own leadership of the process, not the content. You are clear about the outcomes for the meeting and your focus remains on HOW the group is working.

It’s the participants who own the content, the suggestions, solutions and decisions.

Another strategy is to partner with another facilitator, not on your team, to co-design and co-lead the session. It’s a great way to learn facilitation and have someone who can see places where you might have slipped out of neutrality.

After the meeting, get feedback from your team on the impact the meeting had on them individually and their overall objectives. You can ask them to write the answers to these on a card as they are leaving the room or create a quick web-based survey after the session.

You might ask questions like:

Overall, how did the meeting go?
Did the team accomplish the outcomes it needed?
What was effective about the meeting process? (not content)
What was not being discussed in the meeting, but maybe needed to be?

Developing the Practice:

There’s a natural progression, an unfolding, in developing your own version of neutrality. The key to developing neutrality is building your self-awareness and self-management about how you show up in leading a meeting.

Consider using the same tools you utilize in leading a group and ask questions of yourself. And have patience; developing this practice is like building a muscle. You will grow and improve over time.

In a collaborative meeting, when a desire to jump in arises, ask yourself

Why do I want to offer content?
Am I trying to elevate my position in the group?
Do I have a different perspective? If so, can you inquire from the group if anyone has a different perspective?
What could be a consequence of jumping out of the process and into the content?

Another great practice is journaling and self-reflection after a meeting. Make notes of where you wanted to jump out of the process and over to content. What was behind that desire? When do you get triggered by topics or patterns in how the group works? What biases do you bring to the team you are working with?

Mastering the Practice:

Again, more questions than answers in mastering the practice. Consider documenting the following answers for your organization:

How would you define your stance on neutrality?
What are the circumstances where you might provide content?
How do you provide the content so it’s clear to both you and the team that you are stepping out of neutrality?
When might you hand a process over to someone else in the meeting?

Can You Ever Get “Good Enough” To Hold Both Roles?

It depends on the complexity and the importance of the meeting, overall. There are times & places where you can do both, hold both roles.

One group I work with, over time, they’ve gone to full neutrality and are now moving closer to center – each team member is finding their own version of what neutrality means and when they offer their opinion or perspective. As you grow the practice, you’ll find a natural cadence and volume for how much content you may bring in vs. owning the process & maintaining 100% neutrality.

No matter what balance you find, always be clear about boundaries of the hats you are wearing and be sure to make it transparent for both you and the team.

No matter what, going forward, it’s the organic development of what works best for the group/organization at hand is what will bring each participant to a deeper level of trust in the group.

That deeper level of trust is where traction & buy-in lives with all participants in a team.

And we’re rooting for you to get there.

In the next post we’ll cover the cornerstone of Standing in the Storm. Be sure to stay tuned here or on LinkedIn so you won’t miss it.