How To Ensure Your Company Has A Great Meeting Culture

Meetings can be the bane of an office worker’s existence. Anyone who’s ever seen The Office has likely experienced a little PTSD watching those Michael Scott-led meetings. You know, the ones with no real agenda, that go horribly off-topic, and drag on for an interminable amount of time. 

Whether intentional or not, meeting practices create a meeting culture that shapes a team’s behavior, expectations, and attitudes. To get the most out of your meetings, you’ll want to take control of your organization’s meeting culture.

Treat your meetings like a product

What’s meeting culture, you ask? It’s basically the result of every meeting your company has had. It’s best to think of it as an early release of a smartphone app: it may function, but there are likely bugs. A great way to uncover them is to gather a peer group and use Triz, a brainstorming-like exercise developed by the Liberating Structures community. Here’s how to apply it:

1. What would you have to do to have the worst meeting possible? Make a list of everything you can think of. 

2. Review this list and ask yourself, “Is there anything that we’re currently doing that in any way, shape or form resembles anything on the list?” Be brutally honest here and create a second list of all of your counterproductive activities/programs/procedures.

3. Take a hard look at your second list and decide what steps will help prevent the undesirable results. 

People are generally too nervous to bring up the bugs of a company’s meeting culture, but Triz creates an opportunity to collectively discuss what isn’t working. And once you know what’s wrong, you can begin to address it. 

Lessons identified vs. lessons learned

Using Triz or a similar method, you can build a list of lessons identified. Lessons identified are the observations, insights, and feedback you’ve recorded about how to improve the way you run meetings. While merely documenting all of this can feel like a huge achievement, you can’t stop there. Lessons must be accompanied by actions if they are to be considered lessons learned.

You must put in place a new procedure, policy or framework, then widely communicate this update to your meeting culture so working practices can be changed. If nothing changes, nothing was learned.

For example, a lesson identified could be that people feel some of the meetings they’re invited to are not relevant for them. In response, you could declare that “all meetings are optional.” While this could be scandalous at some companies, I’ve seen it have great impact.

If a team member doesn’t feel a meeting is appropriate for them, they’re free to decline it. It’s a small gesture, but a reflection of the belief that many meetings don’t need to happen. This policy can lead to an increase in quick and direct conversations as well as fewer meetings. It can also create more space and time for the things people want (and need) to do. 

Meeting debt, or how to build a repository of meetings

Meeting debt is what contributes to a meeting culture. It’s all the unchecked meetings and habits that don’t work, and may even be toxic.

The harm of bad meetings can really metastasize. Initially they may just frustrate some team members, but then could instill a sense of dread in a larger group of people. Eventually, it could create a sense of apathy and pessimism across your entire company.

Meeting debt, however, is not insurmountable. If you do the work to fix your meeting system, you can begin to pay off your meeting debt. To do this, you’ll need to develop a repository of meetings.

A repository of meetings is a record of meetings you’ve held in the past — the objectives, the outcomes, etc. Capturing these should be easy, as meetings shouldn’t be called without a purpose. 

If you find that you’ve held a lot of meetings without a clear objective — and defined next steps — that’s a critical bit of information to take note of. When considering how well (or how  badly) your meetings have gone, here are a handful of questions to ask:

• What percentage of attendees took an active role in participating?

• How effectively were participants able to communicate?

• What did you and the participants learn/discover? What did you want to learn/discover, but did not?

• Were the right people invited to the meeting? Who didn’t need to be there? Who should have been there, but wasn’t invited?

• What kind of feedback did you receive after the meeting?

• Did the meeting fulfill your objective?

Using human-centered design to improve your meetings

A meeting should meet the needs of its participants. Your meeting culture will be more positive when team members feel the meetings they’re asked to attend are beneficial to them and their work. 

A human-centered design process puts the user — whoever will be engaging with the end product — at the very core of the design process. When using this process to design better meetings, your attendees will be your user/consumer. 

PHASE 1: ENGAGE AND OBSERVE

Observe the way your team members behave in meetings to better understand them; this will help you design meetings suited for them. Look for patterns of behavior. Find challenges that team members seem to be facing — perhaps distractions, self-consciousness, communication issues, or something else entirely.

PHASE 2: IDEATION

Generate ideas about how you can play to your team’s strengths and support their weaknesses. Don’t get caught in the nitty-gritty of whether each idea will work or how it will work. This is a brainstorming exercise so just let your creativity drive you. Be sure to keep your team’s needs and desires at the forefront of your mind during this phase.

PHASE 3: PROTOTYPING

In this phase, you’ll be prototyping methods and activities. Perhaps you’ll come up with a fun new way to start your meetings that makes everyone feel more relaxed or rethink the time of day you’re meeting. Keep in mind, this stage is not about being perfect. There will be time to refine your prototype, so don’t feel pressured to get it right the first time.

PHASE 4: FEEDBACK

Test your meeting prototype on the teammates who attend your meetings. Let them know exactly what need or desire you’re aiming to fulfill, and ask them how the prototype either succeeds or fails. Be sure to collect as many details as possible; the more information you have, the better prepared you’ll be for the next phase.

PHASE 5: INTEGRATION

Review the feedback you’ve received and use it to make your prototype better. Perhaps you moved meetings to the beginning of the workday because your team was easily distracted by obligations later in the afternoon, but found they weren’t ready to get deep early in the morning. This phase is all about testing and repeating, so it’s OK to experiment with other times until you’ve found the best one [I recommend 1 - 3 on Tuesdays - Thursdays]. 

PHASE 6: APPLICATION

Apply your new human-centered meeting tactic. Whatever your solution, bring it into your meetings. Keep in mind that teams change, people change, the world changes, and therefore needs change. There may be a day when your solution is no longer serving your team; if this happens, return to phase one and repeat the process. 

Rebooting your meeting culture isn’t hard, it merely requires a focused effort. Involve your peers in workshopping what your optimal meeting culture looks like, find ways to address your shortcomings, and continually reassess what you’re doing. Oscar, Stanley, and the rest of the office will appreciate it.

The Difference Between Mundane And Magical Meetings? Preparation.

Recently I was asked why people hate meetings. I responded that people don't hate meetings, they hate bad meetings. 

Most ineffective meetings are a form of therapy

Let’s be honest, there's a lot of collaborative dysfunction in the working world, and most of it happens in meetings. And that’s a major pain point for a lot of people. When they look at their calendars, they're just inundated with meetings. And, shockingly, the goal of most of these meetings is to be cathartic rather than productive. 

I remember seeing this headline on BBC.com not too long ago: "Pointless work meetings really a form of therapy." It's a hilarious headline, but if you dig deeper into it, it’s actually fascinating. 

In my experience, as the pandemic has rolled on, I’ve seen people have this thirst for connection, and because they don't have it, they're self-medicating with a meeting. They're self-medicating in a way that creates another burdensome meeting — and more disgust, if you will, for meetings and the whole Zeitgeist of work and collaboration.

In the BBC linked article above, Professor Patrik Hall of the University of Malmo also stated that meetings are becoming a vehicle for individuals to express their frustrations. He says that with fewer people making or doing things, those in strategic, consultative and managerial roles don’t know what they should do. Because they’re unsure about their role, they call meetings to try and find a purpose

Both of these instances create a vicious cycle of negativity. If everyone became more intentional about team health and points of connection, people would stop scheduling these random meetings for “therapy” time. We wouldn't self-medicate, we wouldn't overmedicate and we'd get just the right amount of meetings. 

So how do we get to this place of optimal meeting balance? I believe it starts by clarifying the purpose of a meeting. Doing so will put an end to the post-meeting refrain of “Why did I just spend my time doing that?” 

Giving your meetings a sense of clarity

A big part of the book Magical Meetings is ensuring teams come together for the right reasons, accomplish meaningful goals and leave with clear next steps. In fact, the first of the ten meeting mantras I share is “no purpose, no meeting.” And while I’d love for you to read Magical Meetings cover-to-cover, you may not have time before your next meeting. To that end, I’m going to encapsulate the first couple of chapters and present a number of questions you should ask yourself before initiating any meeting request.

Is the meeting necessary? Could it be replaced by an email?

If the answer to the latter is yes, send an email not an invite.

Will this meeting be generative, explorative or decisive? 

An generative meeting generates ideas or artifacts, an explorative meeting considers options and reviews artifacts, and a decisive meeting makes decisions on options and artifacts. If your meeting isn’t one of the three — where there’s a clear purpose and work to be done — it may not be worth having at all.  

How will the team know it’s been successful?

Consider the possible outcomes of your meeting and what you hope to achieve. These are benchmarks your team can utilize to gauge success. 

Who needs to be involved and what are their perspectives?

Just because you can invite someone to your meeting doesn’t mean you should. Everyone’s calendar is littered with meetings, so be strategic about who you invite. Is someone a stakeholder, have relevant expertise or possess an outsider’s perspective that could be valuable? Include them. But don’t invite someone who won’t have much to contribute solely to be inclusive. They’ll appreciate being able to be more productive by instead having the time to tackle the tasks that are of greater importance to them.

What concerns are likely to arise? What challenges might get in your way?

The more forethought that goes into planning your meeting, the more you (and your participants) will get out of it. You really don’t want to eat up valuable time by doing this kind of triage in the middle of your meeting. It’s counterproductive — and an annoyance. 

Letting everyone know what to expect

Of course, it’s not enough to know what you want out of your meeting. It’s also important to let others know as well. Preparedness on the part of the organizer — and the participants — is what helps make a meeting magical. 

Key to this is drafting an agenda you can share in advance of your meetings. This should include an outline of the activities that will take place, the allotted time for each activity or topic, and when break periods will occur. Additionally, you’ll want to explicitly state what you need from each participant. To ensure a successful meeting, I recommend circulating all of this a few days in advance and sending a reminder about your needs the day before the meeting is scheduled to happen. 

I also suggest you record a short video of yourself going through the agenda, especially for “high stakes” meetings where you’ll be making important decisions. Creating and sharing this will make your requests seem more human. You’ll also want to provide a link to a shared folder where everyone can place their pre-work artifacts (if applicable).

When people know what’s required of them and what their involvement will lead to, there’s a lower likelihood of them loathing a meeting. By clearly communicating — and setting up systems — people will feel confident that their involvement will lead to something positive vs. just getting caught up in false checkpoints or busywork. 

To that end, Voltage Control can set you up for success with our robust resource library. You can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, The Facilitator's Guide To Questions and other coaching materials. We also have blog posts, workshops, templates and our Control Room app, which is loaded with meeting activities that keep teams engaged. With our help, you’ll never have another bad meeting again.

How Innovations In VR Can Improve Hybrid Meetings

A February 2021 poll by management consulting company Robert Half showed that 89% of businesses expect the hybrid work model – where employees split their time between home and the office — to be here for good. Moreover, an October 2021 joint study from Google Workspace and The Economist uncovered that 75% of employees believe their companies will fully adopt hybrid work within three years. 

This, of course, will require investment in new technology if the business of work (a.k.a. meetings) is going to continue. While many have tried to make do in 2020 and 2021 via an ad hoc solution of video chat solutions and online collaboration platforms, Zoom fatigue is real. Everyone from National Geographic to researchers at Stanford have explored the concept.

Connecting from wherever & meeting anywhere

One global operation, PricewaterhouseCoopers, has recognized it must help its employees escape the feeling they’re trapped in a tiny box on screen. While it piloted a program in 2017 where it shipped VR headsets to staff, the events of the past couple of years have accelerated this effort. Now PwC is holding meetings in exotic virtual locales like luxury ski chalets, swanky penthouses, and, surprisingly, atop notable skyscrapers. There’s also an initiative underway to outfit physical environments with higher-grade microphones, video meeting screens, and their own supply of VR headsets (so everyone can join meetings at the Empire State Building’s observation deck).

We’ve done something similar here at Voltage Control. This past holiday, we shipped a headset to every team member so we could hold our annual party virtually within a space we created using AltspaceVR. While it wasn’t perfect — I built the room myself with very little training — it allowed us to explore the technology ahead of our upcoming Control The Room Summit, which will be incorporating VR as part of its hybrid component (more on that later).

Zooming in the Metaverse

Even Zoom realizes it will have to do something to make video conferencing more engaging. During its September Zoomtopia event, it announced a partnership with the Meta-owned Oculus. This took place only a few weeks after the company formerly known as Facebook rolled out its Horizon Workrooms.

This team-up will allow Oculus Quest headset users to join Zoom Meetings and use the Zoom Whiteboard directly within VR. Workers at home and the office can then brainstorm together, collaborate on a document, have more visually interesting conversations, or just socialize. You can learn more in the video below. 

The Zoom-Oculus-Horizon partnership isn’t the only option out there, though. Around the same time, Cisco revealed its Webex platform was getting a VR/AR upgrade called Webex Hologram. Alluding to the specter of “Zoom fatigue,” Cisco said it wants to support employers in reducing the friction between virtual and in-person collaboration. Not to be outdone, Microsoft soon offered its Teams users a product called Mesh, which is its take on a VR/AR meeting mash-up. In what has to be a nod to that old Xzibit Facebook meme, Slack is even allowing its users to read messages in virtual reality.

More ways to mix it up

Mixed reality is another technology that can bring excitement, engagement, and interactivity to hybrid meetings. Not to be confused with virtual reality, mixed reality incorporates digital elements into a real environment. Headsets like the Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 1 utilize sensing and imaging technologies to merge physical and virtual worlds.

Mixed reality can empower facilitators to enhance meetings in really innovative ways, such as allowing you to explore 3D visual aids that you couldn’t bring into an actual meeting room due to size or weight. Not just confined to headsets, you can present mixed reality elements on screens in a meeting space when a speaker is captured on a video camera (you’ll just need someone in an edit suite to add the layers).

How we’re experimenting with VR at Voltage Control

After running our third annual Control The Room facilitator summit as a remote event in 2021, we’re back at Austin’s Capital Factory on February 2nd for a hybrid event. For those that can’t join us there, or simply prefer virtual, we’ll be utilizing Zoom, MURAL, and AltspaceVR to bring everyone together despite the physical distance.

Ultimately we decided to virtually present the conference in a space built within AltspaceVR. We won’t, however, be forcing people into the VR environment, those joining remotely can participate via Zoom if they don’t have a VR headset, or download the desktop version of AltspaceVR! We will be raffling off several pairs ahead of the event because we want to encourage everyone to experience how VR can be deployed in the facilitation space. 

Regardless of how people are joining us digitally, we’ll have hosts monitoring the VR and remote platforms to ensure a feedback loop between the in-person and distanced attendees. VR and Zoom attendees will be able to interact and ask the keynote speakers questions, live, via the platform hosts. As you can see, we’re attempting to create as much connective tissue amongst the disparate environments as possible. 

Steve Schofield of MURAL Labs is additionally hosting a week-long VR build event with world builders and facilitators to explore facilitation in VR. Participants from MURAL, Meta, the Horizon Worlds Community, Voltage Control, and Control The Room will gather in Horizon Worlds to think, explore, and build prior to the Summit. The overarching theme of exploration will be on facilitating retrospectives. The outputs will be shared during the Control the Room conference!

If you’re worried about single-handedly integrating VR into your hybrid meetings, know that our effort isn’t the work of one person — it’s the work of many. We’ll have lots of facilitators available across Zoom, MURAL, and AltspaceVR, as well as an experienced contractor to run our A/V for us. Porting the event in Zoom alone requires him to set up three cameras and switch between them and an HDMI of the slides.

Control The Room will be our first time holding a hybrid meeting with this much technical complexity, and I look forward to sharing our post-event experiences with you. 

Why Conflict Is An Important Part Of Collaboration

I often talk about the importance of achieving consensus. But make no mistake, I don’t mean that everyone should acquiesce to leadership or the loudest person in the room. Conflict is an important part of collaboration, and tension is a vital part of the decision-making process.

With that in mind, I love this old quote:

“I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here? Then, I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what this decision is about.”

Alfred Sloan, the former CEO of General Motors

Sloan knew — and appreciated — the role friction could play. In a study on conflict and decision-making cited by the Harvard Business Review, participants were divided into three groups based on different work styles. Those assigned to “debate” yielded 25% more ideas than the two other groups. 

So how can your organization respectfully disagree and arrive at better outcomes? 

Give everyone a voice

As I’ve said on this blog many times over, no one person is smarter than the collective intellect of an entire room of people. This is the basic concept of room intelligence. If you’re going to go to the trouble of assembling a group of people, you might as well hear what they have to say. 

Of course, if you want their honest opinions, you’ll first have to instill in them a sense of psychological safety. This means fostering a culture that doesn’t punish team members for taking risks, asking questions, challenging authority, etc. When you connect as peers — versus through a power-based dynamic — people will explore the problem(s) at hand without letting a fear of reprisal limit what they might say. 

Once you’ve achieved this level of trust, I recommend a few exercises that can help you unlock room intelligence: 

Fist To Five

This technique is an amazingly quick gut check of where your team is consensus-wise. In Fist To Five exercises, the team leader — or meeting facilitator — makes a statement and asks the group to show their level of agreement by holding up a number of fingers.

• Five fingers: I couldn’t agree more. I will champion this.

• Four fingers: I’m fine with this.

• Three fingers: I have minor issues we can resolve later.

• Two fingers: I have minor issues we need to resolve now.

• One finger: I have major issues we need to resolve now.

• Fist: I couldn’t disagree more. I will block this.

When conducting Fist To Five, it’s important to realize that an abundance of people showing two fingers or less means you have a way to go to achieve consensus. 

25:10

When there are many divergent ideas on how to move forward, 25/10 is a great sorting exercise developed by the Liberating Structures team. It’s relatively simple to conduct, too. Just invite a large group to a room where the tables and chairs have been pushed aside. When everyone’s arrived, hand each person a single index card and begin the idea sorting process.

• Ask attendees to write a bold idea and a first step on their index card.

• Set a timer for a few minutes and ask everyone to mill about and pass their cards around.

• Ask attendees to rate the idea in their hands by writing a score of 1 – 5 on the back of the card.

• Repeat the “Mill and Pass” and “Discuss and Score” steps four more times.

• Ask participants to add up the scores on the back of the cards they’re holding [if someone has a card with more or less than five scores, they can calculate the score average and multiply that by five]. Then countdown from 25 and ask those with that number to come forward and read the idea on their card. Stop when the top ten ideas have been identified.

Before dismissing everyone, take a few moments to ask the group what caught their attention with those ideas. This can provide useful context around their scoring. Note & Vote

This can be a great way to cull the top ten of a 25/10 session. Note & Vote, pioneered by Google Ventures, can also work as a standalone exercise that evaluates possible solutions discussed in a previous meeting. 

• Give meeting attendees a sticky note and ask them to write down their favorite idea.

• Ask everyone to place their sticky note on a whiteboard.

• Organize the sticky notes so the same ideas are organized together.

• Collectively discuss the pros and cons of the three ideas that have the most support.

While Fist To Five demonstrates how far apart your group is — and 25:10 helps you arrive at a slimmed-down consideration set — Note & Vote can quickly show you what’s resonating. As a result, you effectively get a heat map of what people gravitate towards.

Embrace different perspectives

What GM’s Alfred Sloan advocated for is essentially the root of a philosophy called Integrative Thinking, introduced by the University of Toronto’s Roger L. Martin in 2007. If Martin’s name sounds familiar to you, it’s because he’s also the originator of Design Thinking.

Similar to how Design Thinking balances analytical and intuitive thinking, Integrative Thinking helps its practitioners balance two opposing ideas instead of choosing one at the expense of the other. According to Martin, and his colleague Jennifer Riel, opposing ideas are only a problem when treated as such. 

Here, in a nutshell, is the thinking behind Integrative Thinking:

Stage 1: Articulate opposing models

• Identify two extreme and opposing answers to a problem [a third distinct answer is permissible].

• Explain, in a few sentences, what each model would look like in practice so an observer can understand the essence.

• Explore each side in greater detail by asking who the key players are (those people most affected by the issue).

• Determine the benefits that the potential solution offers the key players.

• Work in order and find reasons to love each model, identifying what makes it work and what’s valuable about it [as you consider each model, forget the others exist].

Stage 2: Examine the models

Use these questions to evaluate your well-defined opposing models:

• How are they similar? Consider how the benefit is produced differently and how it might be produced in a new model. Then consider the tension between the models.

• What assumptions underlie each model and what are the crucial causal relationships?

• Has the problem you are trying to solve shifted during the analysis? Which elements of each model do you want to keep in the new model?

Stage 3: Generate possibilities

Reflect on your thinking by asking yourself these questions:

• Under what conditions could one model actually create one core benefit of the other?

• How could a new model be created using a small building block from each model?

• How might the problem be looked at in a new way, so that each model could be applied to a different part of the problem?

Stage 4: Assess prototypes

• Test out your ideas and create the data you need by sharing the new models with customers.

• Ask for feedback and suggestions, co-creating better prototypes together.

Obviously, what’s above is the briefest of introductions to the concept of Integrative Thinking. For a much deeper dive, I encourage you to read Martin’s book on the topic and the follow-up he co-authored with Jennifer Riel. 

I wholeheartedly believe capturing and discussing differing viewpoints is what makes meetings valuable. To gather, and simply nod in agreement isn’t just a waste of time, it’s a squandering of room intelligence. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with another quote — this one from WWII great General George Patton. He said, “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

Don’t just ask anyone for ideas. Ask everyone for them.

Have you ever asked for input in a meeting and only gotten the sound of crickets as a response? We’ve all been there, and 1-2-4-All can quickly turn this silence into rapid insights.

Engage everyone without putting anyone on the spot

1-2-4-All is one of 34 Liberating Structures developed to add structure and meaning to everyday conversations. It’s a great way to sift and sort ideas to allow the best — and most novel  — concept to bubble up to the surface. It triggers spontaneous conversations at a time when many meeting attendees typically zip their lips and avoid eye contact. 

The activity is great for groups that are “stuck” having endless conversations without making discernible headway or decisions. It’s also really handy to combat the phenomenon of “follow the leader,” where everyone just nods and goes along with what the leader is saying and writing down. 1-2-4-All prevents a vocal minority from dictating how an organization operates. It seeks to solicit input from everyone involved, no matter how contrary or left-field their ideas are because it’s those ideas that contribute to the diversity of thought so many companies lack.

So how does 1-2-4-All work? It’s pretty simple, actually. Ask each participant to quietly reflect on the opportunity or challenge the group is seeking to explore. For example, “What ideas or actions would you recommend to move forward?” Give them one minute to think about the ideas or actions they’d recommend.

Next, pair two individuals together and allocate a couple of minutes to review their individual ideas. Where are they aligned? Are there a few ideas that both people feel strongly about? 

After the groups of two have had enough time to discuss and align on ideas or solutions, typically about two or so minutes, merge the pairs of two into foursomes and task them to spend four minutes noticing the similarities and differences in their respective ideas. Instruct them to identify the best of the best.

Finally, over a five-minute period, invite everyone into the dialog or simply ask each foursome to present the one idea they feel stood out most in their discussions. In roughly 12 minutes, you’ll get a variety of thinking and lots of lively conversations instead of a bunch of blank stares.

Shifting to virtual

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, conducting a 1-2-4-All exercise was as easy as asking participants to push chairs together and talk. In this new era of video conferencing, facilitating 1-2-4-All is a little trickier, but it’s not impossible.

The idea for the Concentric Consensus templates stemmed from a need we identified when we designed and facilitated an annual kick-off for the Global Partner Solutions group in Australia. 

One of the first activities of the day was called “Empowering You,” an event-wide conversation around the principles by which they wanted to all hold each other accountable. The objective was to define a “team code” that was co-created with all 105 attendees, giving everyone a voice regardless of hierarchy. 

The 1-2-4-All model was an excellent method for arriving at consensus, but with such a large (virtual) group we needed to tweak the interaction model. We designed the 48-node Concentric Conversations template to host a 1-2-4-8-All conversation which utilized MURAL’s voting feature to facilitate our “all” step of the process and select the five top principles. It was a huge success, so we decided to release it to the world for all facilitators to use! 

Because the number of participants ranges per meeting, we also developed templates for smaller groups so you can use them no matter the group size:

8-node Concentric Consensus template

12-node Concentric Consensus template

16-node Concentric Consensus template

24-node Concentric Consensus template

48-node Concentric Consensus template

96-node Concentric Consensus template

From too quiet to total consensus

You’ll find using these templates will get everyone generating ideas without it devolving into a free-for-all. The shy in your group will also appreciate an opportunity to express their thoughts without having to do so in the spotlight. In short, our Concentric Consensus templates can create unified virtual teams by allowing them to get a sense of what the collective group thinks. Another advantage of the templates is anyone can go back later and trace through the steps to see how the ideas evolved (just zoom in on the Microsoft graphic to see what we’re talking about). 

The next time you need your team to quickly arrive at a shared understanding, try the Concentric Consensus template to make your meetings more effective. But why stop there? If you’re looking for additional ways to boost productivity in your meetings, you can browse our resource library for advice on how to improve remote collaboration and even download additional MURAL templates.

——————————————————————————————————————————-

5 tips to ensure you succeED using OUR templates in virtual meetings

1. Utilize breakout rooms

Using Zoom or some other service, create smaller workgroups vs. having everyone in the same chat room throughout the entire exercise. Once everybody has had the chance to think independently, create rooms for pairs, then foursomes and finally the group at large. Randomly assign participants to respected groups.  

2. Mute/unmute participants

To provide emphasis — and reduce distracting background noise — we recommend muting everyone but the person sharing his or her ideas.

3. Turn video on/off

Similarly, we suggest you only allow the individuals/teams who are speaking to appear on camera. This will keep the focus where it needs to be.

4. Set up a chat channel

This can be a good way to facilitate conversation and avoid people from talking over each other when others are presenting. 

5. Capture feedback in a shared workspace

We’re partial to MURAL, so much so we created the Concentric Consensus templates exclusively for the platform.