Designing Engagement in an Isolated World
Creating Interactive Online Conferences
Here we are over 11 months into a global pandemic. While front-line workers risk their personal health and safety, many are tasked with carrying on working from the safety of our dining room tables, guest bedrooms and make-shift home offices. Certain professions are better suited to this than others, and certain elements of our work pivot more effectively than others. The elements of work that rely on human connection are suffering. Those road warriors who once had long commutes are enjoying having that time back, but are seeing less separation between “home” and “work.” They no longer have time to listen to their favorite audiobooks and podcasts and confess to just working during the time they would have spent driving. Those who travel for work have been grounded. While no one misses taking off their shoes to go through airport security, the joy of exploring a new city and seeing colleagues at a conference has been replaced by hours on video conferences often watching pre-recorded content while multitasking because you aren’t really “out of the office.”
The reality is — that while the vaccine is rolling out — we likely still have many months to come of our virtual remote world. Months of social distancing are taking their toll and we are feeling more socially distant than ever. As Executive Director of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), I lead a community of professionals who depend on us to enable and support collaboration. After hosting two virtual conferences and dozens of webinars and video conference calls each month, I want to share a few lessons learned about virtual collaboration. As leaders, it is our responsibility to enable and empower our communities and organizations with meaningful, effective experiences in person or online. In a virtual world, this starts with intentional meeting design.
Length and time
When we travel to in-person conferences it is possible to be fully present. You set your out-of-office reply, you leave the family behind and everyone is in the same place. You can start your day with an 8 am networking breakfast, attend engaging sessions and breakout sessions all day, grab a beer with a colleague you haven’t seen in a while and wrap up the evening with a dinner with clients or sponsors. Both the energy we get from being in a busy room and the uninterrupted focus of an out-of-town meeting allow us to pack a lot of work into a short time span.
Virtual meetings of 2020/2021 do not have the luxury of this focused intensity. “Zoom fatigue” is real. I have days whereby the time my head hits the pillow I have spent over 10 hours on video calls between work, volunteer commitments and kid activities. Meeting participants are often juggling home responsibilities with work and are monitoring 2 or more screens in addition to a cell phone, Slack channel, emails and social media. On top of this, participants are not physically in the same place but can be stretched out over multiple time zones. Attendees seem to book individual conference sessions on their work calendar but generally do not view the time commitment as a block of time dedicated to the conference in its entirety. Recognizing these competing needs, when ESIP planned our first online conference we limited core content to 11 am — 5 pm (eastern) most days with an occasional evening plenary or social event to accommodate audiences in other time zones. To make up for the shorter day we stretched what would have been a 4–5 day in-person conference out to 10 days. Feedback told us this was too long. As much as people value the content there was too much other competition for their time and attention. For our second online conference, six months later, we compressed the timeline to 4 days and provided longer breaks spread throughout each day. In our messaging, we asked people to “block the dates” on their calendars. With the shorter duration, we saw much more consistent participation over the four days. While it is tempting to pack everything in, the fatigue is real and you need to plan for that.
Finding the Right Technology
Today — finding the right tech tools is like choosing the right city and hotel for your meeting. It drives the participant experience. The ESIP community regularly uses Google docs for collaborative note-taking so a video platform alone isn’t enough. For our two large conferences (360+ and 550+ attendees) we used a meeting shell, Qiqochat, that provided a paywall as well as a space where participants could move freely from one session to another, from a plenary room to any number of concurrent smaller sessions. Each room had a video link along with collaborative documents for attendance/contacts and notes as well as a link to a live polling tool. The key is a space that allows attendees to move freely on their own. Giving participants control seems to decrease anxiety and increase participation. We also used this model and venue for our poster sessions. Being a research-oriented community, posters are an important component of our meetings. What used to be an evening session with food and drinks where people could mingle and talk with researchers about their work now had to happen over computer screens. We created a separate poster space with each poster having its own room with a video chat link, a Google doc for leaving comments or questions if the researcher wasn’t present, and the ability to share a poster image, presentation or short video. We heard from attendees that this format allowed for multiple small in-depth conversations. Attendees appreciated the flexibility to move between posters as opposed to a series of back-to-back lightning talks. We heard that attendees found the quiet small discussions actually an improvement on a typically loud and boisterous in-person poster hall, this was especially noted for those with accessibility challenges, especially hearing impairment.
Enable small group conversations
Choosing your video conferencing platform is a complicated decision with many options. Look for a platform that will enable you to take a large group and break them into smaller groups. These are called “Breakout rooms” in most cases. Whenever your group is 10 or larger there will naturally be voices that dominate a conversation. By using facilitation and breakout rooms you can allow for more introductions and meaningful conversations with greater participation. While many platforms have added this functionality, Zoom still appears to lead the way and has even added a feature where participants can select the room of their choice. You can name the breakout rooms by topic and participants can choose where to go. If you want more control you can assign participants to specific rooms or have them randomly assigned.
Once breakout rooms are assigned and opened, participants find themselves moved into smaller groups. For the extroverts in the crowd, this may be the highlight of their day. For the introverts, you may see a mass exodus from the meeting. Do what you can to give people a heads-up that you will be going into smaller groups. This can be done in the agenda or session description. You can also consider providing discussion questions ahead of time enabling those who like to process more slowly to have that time. We found that breakout room time should be a minimum of 7 minutes to allow people to settle in. This allows time for basic introductions and discussion before time is up and the participants are moved back to the larger group. To use the time well, especially if you have less time, provide specific instructions of what participants should discuss or do in their breakout. More vague and open topics will require more time, as much as 20 minutes. Session hosts can float between rooms to check on progress and answer questions. Like an in-person meeting, when the large group reconvenes you can have individuals from each breakout report back to the larger group or use a collaborative document to capture the highlights from each group for all to see. Using breakout rooms can enable participants to have deeper discussions and allows first-time attendees and new community members a much better chance to make meaningful connections and contacts.
Prompts and facilitation
In a virtual setting, many of the social and visual cues usually present at a physical meeting are lost. Meeting organizers must take deliberate actions to get the interaction you are seeking. In large sessions with a panel of speakers, it can increase the focus if you tell other participants to turn off their cameras so you can spotlight the videos of your speakers. It is equally appropriate to ask everyone to turn their cameras back on for Q&A to enable the feeling of community that results when you can see faces. At our award presentation we specifically asked people to unmute to clap and cheer for the awardees. It was noted that the raucous applause was a nice change from the quiet we often hear in virtual meetings. For our poster sessions, we had a timer and a reminder every 6 minutes for people to move to the next poster room. This allowed for a more graceful exit and kept people moving. We used prompts such as “Go to a poster that is on a topic completely new to you, or Go to an odd-numbered poster” to mix up the behavior of people only seeking out people they already knew or topics that were safe and familiar to them.
To keep attendees’ attention in a remote meeting you must be more intentional and more engaging. The days of watching one PowerPoint after another are over. Your audience will be checking email and checking out. Use tools like chat waterfalls, annotation in Zoom, audience polling, word clouds, breakout rooms, collaborative note docs and other tools to grab your audience’s attention and get their input from the start. If you demonstrate upfront that active participation is needed, they will be more likely to stay engaged and resist the temptation to multitask. We contracted with outside facilitation experts who use Liberating Structures and offered training for our session convenors on a variety of virtual facilitation techniques and tools. For larger plenary sessions we found Slido, a Question and Answer and live polling tool, helpful for moderating Q&A. Participants can type in their questions during the session and all attendees can view submitted questions and “vote up” questions they like. This allows the moderator to quickly get a read on the audience and present the most relevant questions to the speaker.
Social events
We know that the hardest elements of in-person meetings to re-create in a virtual setting are the social events. The benefits of networking, casual conversation, sharing a cup of coffee or a glass of wine is very challenging to recreate from the isolation of one’s home. The days of the Zoom happy hour are so Spring 2020. The challenge with traditional video conferencing platforms is you can only have one or two active speakers while the rest of the participants quickly become passive spectators. Another element of social events is the physical movement around a space. It is hard to “work a room” when you can’t physically move about the space. To address these challenges we experimented with a platform called Wonder. For our community Wonder was a game-changer for networking. In Wonder participants arrive as a circle in a webpage/room. You can put any photo in the background — a park, a coffee shop, or a conference ballroom with theme-labeled tables. Participants’ individual circles show their photo and mousing over them reveals their name. Once in the room using your mouse, you drag your circle close to other circles in the space. When you are close to another circle a video chat opens containing you and only the people who are nearby. We had over 50 people in a happy hour with 8–10 separate conversations happening at the same time. New people can join a conversation by dragging themself over and you can leave a conversation anytime and move yourself to join another conversation. There is also a broadcast feature where the organizer can interrupt all conversations and make an announcement, give instructions or thank a sponsor. It was the closest I have seen to real-life networking in nearly a year.
Virtual meetings designed with intention and using the right tools can have advantages. We are seeing increased participation as people do not have to take the time to travel. We are seeing increased participation from attendees from countries where physical travel would be cost or time prohibitive. And attendees with physical disabilities or home responsibilities are finding that virtual platforms level the playing field. While we long for the days of an in-person meeting, the benefits of virtual will increase the demand for this option even when we can safely get on a plane and gather around a conference room table or in a hotel ballroom. Social connections, networking, and collaboration are key to much of our work. As leaders, our teams and our communities are craving these interactions. Design your next meeting whether for 10 or 500 with intention and maximize interaction.
Susan Shingledecker is Executive Director of ESIP — Earth Science Information Partners a community of the world’s leading Earth Science data professionals who collaborate across government, research and private sectors and multiple technical and scientific domains to put data at the center of solving our planet’s greatest challenges. ESIP works to push the frontier of data management and stewardship to make Earth science data findable, accessible, interoperable and findable for all. Susan started with ESIP in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in July 2020 and has still yet to meet most of the ESIP staff or community in a forum other than a video call!
Originally published at https://medium.com on February 24, 2021.
