Your team is struggling to feel included in virtual meetings. How can you ensure their value is recognized?
Virtual meetings can feel impersonal, but with the right approach, every team member's value can shine through. To ensure inclusivity:
- Assign roles for each meeting, such as note-taker or timekeeper, to promote active participation.
- Rotate meeting leadership to give everyone a chance to guide the discussion and agenda.
- Encourage use of features like 'raise hand' and chat for questions to ensure all voices are heard.
How do you foster an inclusive environment in your virtual meetings? Share your strategies.
Your team is struggling to feel included in virtual meetings. How can you ensure their value is recognized?
Virtual meetings can feel impersonal, but with the right approach, every team member's value can shine through. To ensure inclusivity:
- Assign roles for each meeting, such as note-taker or timekeeper, to promote active participation.
- Rotate meeting leadership to give everyone a chance to guide the discussion and agenda.
- Encourage use of features like 'raise hand' and chat for questions to ensure all voices are heard.
How do you foster an inclusive environment in your virtual meetings? Share your strategies.
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To ensure everyone feels valued in virtual meetings, regularly check in with team members individually to understand their feelings, address concerns, and show that you value their well-being.
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Some pointers that have helped me ensure everyone feels included in virtual meetings: 1. Ensure you've had one-on-one virtual meetings with each individual to listen and to understand them, identify their strengths, what motivates them, and most importantly, what really matters to them. 2. During team meetings ensure that you give opportunities to each individual to voice their opinions 3. Recognize and call out people for the effort they put in. Not everyone is a star performer but everyone contributes or at least attempts to give their best, so do acknowledge that. 4. Lastly and most importantly, have meetings where team members can present or talk about the work they have been doing and ask for help from the group.
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There are many articles nowadays on how to ensure good communication and inclusivity in virtual meetings. Some key tips: -Ask people to keep their cameras open. This facilitates the quality of communication and people can also use their body language to show that they are present and attentive -Ask all participants to provide their viewpoint on the specific topic of discussion, in turn. Don't start with the most outspoken/loud person in the room. Leave this person at the end. -Encourage more shy people to express their ideas, challenges, thoughts and insights. -Express your own ideas with honesty, in a transparent and friendly manner. This helps people to feel more comfortable and at ease. -Conclude the meeting in a positive note.
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Listening structures help people feel valued. For example, to get input from everyone, it can be helpful to have the groups write their thoughts on their own for a few minutes. Then put them into pairs to share their thoughts with each other. Have them notice their freshest thinking from listening to each other. After, depending on the size, put them into groups of four or one group and do listening circles. Once thoughts are shared in this structure, then go into discussion. When everyone is on the same page and they help each other think further than before, they will feel valued and the outcome will be better.
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It takes effort to make virtual meetings very inclusive. There are various things the meeting organiser could do for a start - 1) Keep video on, and encourage every participant to do so. 2) Start the meetings with a few mins of informal chat - events, holidays, festivals, whatever is in that day. 3) Invite silent participants to ask, share or contribute to the topic. For this, a good understanding of the participants and their strengths would help. Ask questions to named participants, not with the intent to corner, but with the intent to seek out their expertise and knowledge. 4) Acknowledge the presence through simple comments 5) Ask participants to share questions in chat, and pick questions of less visible participants to address.
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