Seven Tips to Conduct Action Planning Online in the New Normal (Ideation and Action Planning while Working at Home)
Working at Home is the New Normal. Large in-person meetings will be few and far between.
Well, it’s (almost) official. If you hadn’t figured it out yet already, we’re never going back to a world where everyone physically commutes to a common office space everyday. As the Globe and Mail reported this morning (May 22), Shopify is just the latest tech giant to announce that it will allow employees to work from home, even after the pandemic subsides. Facebook and Google will be making announcements soon. Employees are being bombarded with surveys asking if they would prefer to work at home permanently, even in that most conservative of organizations, the Canadian Federal Government.
Fewer and fewer of our staff will actually be attending meetings in person in the ‘new’ normal. We can look forward to a time where: a) an increasing number of meetings, gatherings and presentations are online, and b) meetings will be of a hybrid nature with some participants in-person (with two metres between them) and others will be “conferencing in”.
Online Meetings haven’t been conducive to creativity, innovation, or action planning
Technology allows what, until recently, has been a rudimentary form of meeting and collaboration – just enough to allow us to communicate with each other to get things done. But engaging? Interesting? Fun? Hardly. The problem is, these are the key ingredients to successful creativity, ideation, and action planning. During this pandemic lock-down, we’ve been able to get by and collaborate online for our operational work; but the bigger thinking that is so necessary for organizations to provide strategic direction and solve important longer-term issues has all but disappeared. Online action planning? An oxymoron. Creativity and innovation online? Do-able, but not easy. Online team-building? Fuggedaboudit.
Yes, organizations are getting many people online for a presentation or information download; but for a true, facilitated, collaborative workshop to develop new ideas, solve major issues and action-plan in large groups? Organizations have yet to dip their toes in these waters, anecdotally, because they don’t think they will work.
Online Sessions can be engaging, interesting and fun, when one understands online group dynamics and energy
But NOW is the time! The technology is there. What has been missing until very recently is the knowledge and ability to understand how to use those tools to create the group dynamics and energy that are so necessary to allow us to ideate, to create, to develop solutions, and to establish connections which result in closer, more productive teams.
Embrace the advantages of online sessions
Rather than wait for the pandemic to subside so we can go back to meeting in person, it is time to embrace the online environment. Planned and facilitated right, online gatherings not only provide us the ability to collaborate in an engaging, interesting and fun way, but also allow us to accomplish many things which we can’t do in the in-person environment. For example:
we can discuss sensitive subject matter and issues anonymously while still together as a group, and therefore, resolve thorny issues without fear of reprisal or retribution. This can be done through the polling features provided on the major platforms (e.g. Zoom, Skype, Webex, Adobe Connect). Also, we can change names to pseudonyms for use in chat (Zoom). Think of the possibilities! Managers and subordinates can participate in the same groups and issues can be brought forward and resolved in a safe way. Leaders can get around group-think and sycophants so they get the real story.
Participants can interact in parallel with the main session or discussion. Whereas only one person can talk at a time in in-person meetings, participants can use chat or reaction emoticons to interact in parallel with the main speaker or presenter, which can provide feedback but is also conducive to multiple conversations and ideas being generated simultaneously without disrupting the main discussion.
We can include people regardless of their location (taking time zones into account). Rather than spending precious meeting budgets on jet fuel and forcing participants to be away from family, people can participate from anywhere. Not only does this save on travel costs, but more importantly, it provides the diversity and richness of different geographical perspectives.
We can manage and include discussions over many time zones. Using an asynchronous approach and platform (this just means people participate on their own time, not together at the same time) we can encourage participation from regions which could not otherwise be included unless individuals travelled half-way around the world at great time and expense.
Seven tips to stimulate engagement, creativity and fun
How do we turn the dreaded Skype or Zoom meeting into that engaging, interesting, and fun session that is necessary to stimulate creativity, ideation, and solution development? Here are those seven tips I promised:
1. Plan and design the session differently from the outset, instead of just trying to move the in-person session online. There are things we just can’t do online that we did in person; but, there are also things we couldn’t do in person that now we can do online!
2. Design shorter sessions with fun breaks. Have more than one session if necessary to achieve your objectives, and allow for asynchronous discussion between sessions. The general rule of thumb is that each session last no more than 2.5 hours, with a 10-15 minute break. Provide fun tasks to encourage your participants to get up and move around (instead of just checking e-mail). One example I like is for someone to bring back the most interesting coffee mug to show to the group.
3. Engage your participants immediately. First of all, and most importantly: insist on participants turning on their video, and avoid their mute if possible. People can’t truly engage if they can’t see the others. Also, most participants enter these sessions in a passive way (no video, on mute, multi-tasking). You must bring them in immediately with an interactive activity. I like starting with an ice-breaker exercise using the break-out room feature (available in most good collaboration platforms). Of course, you need to design your ice-breakers for the online environment.
4. Use the break-out feature. If your platform does not have one (e.g. Skype), provide links to different groups to join break-out groups. While we cannot conduct a plenary session in the same way online with a large group (people talking over each other, or not at all), the break-out sessions provide all-important air time to individuals which allows them to engage and connect.
5. Use the chat to promote idea generation along side the main discussion. A facilitator who understands ideation will know that ideas are fleeting, they enter the brain quickly, but are lost if not captured immediately. The chat feature allows for people to capture their ideas immediately when they pop into their head. The chat can be saved and reviewed as a specific session.
6. For ideation, use very specific real-life scenarios around which you describe the task very clearly, in writing. For example, instead of asking: how can we improve career development in our organization? Provide a scenario where an employee has had issues with their career development and give participants a tool to write down as many ideas as they can as to how to address that person’s issue. Since individuals are alone in their environments, allow them time to create their own ideas first, then to share them in small break-out groups, and finally with the larger group.
7. Use a professional facilitator with online facilitation experience. The key to a successful online ideation, solution-building, or team-building activity is not the technology. It is the understanding of group dynamics in the online environment (which are different than in person). The technology is secondary. The successful session must be carefully planned with exercises and activities which will maximize engagement, interest, and fun in the online environment. Also, there should be a second person in charge of “technical support” to assist participants, without interrupting the sessions, even if the facilitator is a power user of the specific platform which will be used.
The ‘new’ normal will see a dispersion of our employees to different locations. We won’t be getting together in the same room to be able to ideate, create, innovate, or team-build. Yet the ability to continue to do this is critical to the well-being of our organizations. We MUST continue to harness employees’ creativity and input into new ideas and solutions as we did before, but in a very different way. We now have the ability to do this in an engaging, interesting and fun way. Let’s embrace it!