How many hours of your life have been lost to badly run on-line meetings? I’m sure most of you have plenty of examples where, like me, your attention has wandered and you’ve taken a sneaky peak at your e mails. The catchphrase “you’re on mute!” has persisted well beyond lockdown and connectivity continues to be a bug bear for many.
But I’m talking seriously bad practice here- so bad that I felt compelled to share a recent experience of a Teams meeting I attended. I’ve outlined some very basic good practice tips below as a result of my experience. If you know of any serial offenders, do feel free to share my tips with them.
Last month, staff were invited to attend one of two online webinars. I should prefix this by explaining that those leading the webinars were external consultants and not internal staff.
We duly signed up to one of two 90- minute webinars. There were a lot of us – probably around 80 staff had signed up to attend each event. We were all keen to contribute our thoughts and ideas.
Tip 1: Make sure you only have one Teams invitation.
From the start, things began to go wrong. The consultants couldn’t understand why half the attendees weren’t in the room. It turns out they had inadvertently sent out two different meeting invites so attendees were split across two virtual spaces. Figuring this out wasted the first 10-15 minutes. The consultants then had to ask participants to leave and re-join so we all were in the same place.
Tip 2: Keep to time
There then followed a painfully slow ‘death by power point’ presentation where a series of slides were read aloud by one of the consultants. This took up almost all of the webinar.
Tip 3: Make sure your presentation is accessible and inclusive
The presentation was delivered in monotone. Power point slides were densely packed with small type on a white background so not easy to read. Certainly not accessible for those with specific visual needs. It was full of buzzwords and it began to feel as though we were in an episode of the BBC2 series ‘W1A.’
David Boudreau’s book has some great advice on creating and delivering inclusive presentations.
Tip 4: Check your slides.
If you’re presenting information to staff -especially at a University- make sure your slides are grammatically accurate and that there are no typos.
Tip 5: Engage your audience
Most participants had lost the will to live by the time the presenter had finished. This left 15 minutes for staff to contribute their thoughts to one of three Padlets. All I could think was “how much is all this costing?!” Both to the organisation and the cost of staff time in attending. Also perhaps more cynically: “Do these people frankly have any interest in what we think?”
Tip 6: Check your tech
A discussion then ensued between the presenters who realised that having more than three Padlets would have been useful. However the free Padlet license apparently only permits the use of three… a discovery made rather late in the day.
Tip 7: Fail to prepare, prepare to fail
If you genuinely want your audience to engage and contribute, consider how you’ll capture their thoughts and suggestions beforehand. Sharing the information you plan to cover ahead of the meeting would have enabled participants to reflect before the session and would have allowed longer for discussion. It would also have been more inclusive for participants who need longer to process detailed information.
In the remaining 15 minutes of the webinar, most of us were at a loss to know how or what we could usefully contribute, having been pummelled with information for the best part of 50 minutes.
On this occasion it was just as well that participants’ mics remained on mute until the presentation concluded. There were certainly a few choice comments in the chat.
I’ll leave you to guess what my 8th tip would be….
The fact is, this is about establishing what we do most of best and finding fewer ways of doing more of it less. (W1A, BBC 2).
I’d love to know whether anyone can top my example…feel free to share your experiences.
