that you cannot run your meetings the same way as we you used to run them when you were in person
hi my name is daria welcome to scrum mastered video series where i give you practical tips
on how to build awesome teams in my last video i got a great question that i decided to turn into a
video because it actually is a great continuation to the topic that i have discussed last week and
if you haven't watched that video i'm gonna put the link in the description so that you can go and
watch that other video first before coming back here and watching this one so this the question
that i got is from nick and nick is asking how do you generate engagement on remote calls this is a
great question and i gave already some examples in my comments but i wanted to go kind of deeper
into some of those ideas and some of those ways of how you can create a bit more engagement
number one i would always say that the most important thing is to try to recreate
a more connection and i'd say the first thing to do is to have everyone on camera and i remember
when i was working with one of the teams recently we were all remote and no one had their camera on
i think it was just me the product owner who had their camera on and that's it right um but as soon
as everybody actually turned on their cameras it changed drastically we were able to have much more
engagement from people and the calls were really more dynamic more focused and you kind of felt
like you are actually speaking with each other and not just kind of talking to the void so i'd
say the first thing to do is to have everyone on camera so what can you do to help you with
that i'd say it always starts with someone so if you are encouraging encouraging the camera
on the calls then be sure that you are always on camera also make others feel more comfortable that
you don't always have to be all prepared all makeup and hair and everything but just be there
and that's what's more important then you can also think about how you can involve the management
because it does come from the culture of the organization if your managers are never on camera
then of course it will be much harder to actually help the team also feel that the camera is needed
number two is informal communication so this is something that we lost when we started
working remotely that opportunity to talk to our colleagues colleagues informally when we are at a
coffee machine or just in the hallways in between meetings talk about other things that other than
work and with the pandemic now that we are working remotely that opportunity is gone we always just
need for work only work and we never have an opportunity to really understand people kind of
get to know them and things like turning on the camera and basically inviting people into your
living room becomes much more difficult because you don't know these people so you don't want them
to know how you live so that is why actually turning back to that informal communication
is super important think about what are some of those team building activities that you can do
that can bring people together just have fun learn a little bit about each other and become more of a
team rather than just a collection of individuals that are working from all over the world now
some of the activities that you can do or simple icebreakers you can do a game night or some drinks
online or coffee meeting with everyone where you don't talk about work you can also actually create
some time in front of the meeting basically the first 10 or 5 or 10 minutes of the meeting that
are dedicated to that informal communication where you just chat about the weather or about what is
happening people showing their pets or their kids or something else that they are very proud of
so those are some of the things that you can do those are some of the things that can help you
create that informal communication and obviously there are lots of different icebreakers that
you can also run in remotely to help people feel much more connected with each other number three
structure this is something that i talked about in my previous video where i talked about clear
agenda participants that are not actually know what they need to do in the meeting as well as
facilitation so that is that facilitation piece and in order to have facilitation you need to have
some structure in your meetings basically what it means is that you cannot run your meetings
the same way as we you used to run them when you were in person in person everybody's sitting at
the same table it is easy to read visual cues see if someone has questions if someone is happy and
happy agrees disagrees all of those things are important but right now you can't really see that
even if everybody is on camera so instead you need to make sure that you give people an opportunity
to share their opinions in a more structured way if you ask a question into the void basically
into a call of say 10 people and no one replies this is because you're trying to run it
as a in-person meeting and it doesn't work that way so instead i definitely encourage everyone to
have some kind of structure in their meetings basically have some exercises collected some
things that can actually drive the conversation um and some of the important rules would be
don't have an open conversation with a group of six or more people because at this
at this number of people it becomes kind of more difficult to engage everyone and instead
have smaller groups pairs or groups of three or if you are working on a specific problem then you can
have kind of bigger groups four or five but always break people up if there needs to be a discussion
and allow everyone to think as well sometimes um actually just asking a question when you're in
person it kind of is easier sometimes to come up with the response because we can see each other
but when we are online because we're just kind of staring into our screen the whole day it becomes
a bit more difficult to concentrate and i think having given people that extra time to think about
a question um actually helps right so if you're asking a question kind of give everyone a minute
to collect their thoughts and then launch the discussion so this is something that i definitely
encourage everyone to do is to have a structure and if you are looking for ways of how you can
run some of those meetings discussions workshops then i have lots of great guides on in my store
and if there's some a particular topic that you're interested in facilitating then you can actually
find a guide for it or you can reuse some of the exercises from the guides for other topics in what
you're doing so there are lots of things that you can find right now and if you don't see a
topic that you think should be there definitely reach out share comment down below to kind of
tell me what are some of the other guides that can be helpful and that can give you structure
and make facilitation of meetings much easier on you but also help you increase engagement number
four appropriate tools so right now everybody is using some kind of a tool to connect to each other
whether it's a zoom or microsoft teams and we have that at least understanding that we need to talk
to each other it's not just a chat so those are some of the appropriate tools for conversations
but when it comes to discussions you also need appropriate tools you know
when you wear in in person we often we would have an opportunity to share our screen on the board
or to have a whiteboard and write things down so that everybody can see this was really helpful and
right now if you don't have the tools that can support the conversation it might be difficult
for people to really focus on the topics so i would say look at what tools are available to you
to make the conversation more engaging to just kind of writing down what people think
already so that everybody can see is very valuable i am obviously a huge fan fan of myro i absolutely
love this tool but there are other tools that you can use there is zen board there is mural there
is jamboard by google i think so there are free and paid options that you can use and if you're
have kind of restrictions in your company of what kind of tools you can use you know what
you can use just a powerpoint presentation that is shared with everyone whether it is
on google docs or in microsoft teams where everybody is looking at the same maybe screen
or is looking on the same page in a presentation and can actually input their own opinions their
answers to your questions right there for everyone to see and that definitely helps
support the conversation and make it much more engaging so those are the four things that i
wanted to highlight in this video i think there are absolutely great for creating more engagement
in your remote meetings but i would love to hear from you what are some of the techniques that you
have used already in your meetings to be make them more focused and more productive share your ideas
in the comments below and i hope that this can help others to also learn something new add it to
their toolbox and make the next meeting much more engaging and valuable so this is everything that
i wanted to cover here i hope that you learned something new today and if you did give this
video a thumbs up and subscribe to this youtube channel as i continue to create more content that
can help you build awesome working environments i hope to see you next time cheers and scrum on
you