Best Practices for Virtual Communication

“You were on mute.” “Is there an echo?” “Wait, what platform are we on?”

Virtual meeting and workshops seem never ending these days! The team at the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center have a few tips and tricks to make a virtual engagement more collaborative, inclusive, and fun.

Elmer’s Questions:

  • List 10+ assumptions related to how folks engage my offer? If any/all of those assumptions are wrong, what would need to change to make the offer better
  • Am I making choices to benefit me or the audience?
  • Am I designing this to talk/teach/present/entertain or for others to speak/learn/engage/enjoy?

Brian’s Tips:

  • If you’re in a team facilitating, designate people for various roles. If you’re facilitating solo, put in some programmed pauses (perhaps with a slide prompt if you’re using a presentation) to check the chat and poll for comments/questions.
  • Have a fall back plan. If you’ve someone in a designated role, be ready if they lose their connection
  • Have tech help. Let people know right up front – if you have problems, email/text this person.
  • The feedback teaching/communicating online is different … accept that and adapt; you won’t get to see all the faces or expressions.

Ilya’s Suggestion:

One important rule for helping people learn is to help the learner feel she is in control” -James Zull

This has been one of the most important guiding principles for me when we could meet face-to-face with the learners. With the switch to remote learning, this idea has become even more important. The internal learning journey is different for everyone. Sense of control is fundamental to human thinking and learning is no exception. Practically, it means opting out of lecturing or creating passive learning environments for students; adding more flexibility to the roadmaps/syllabi and the choice of learning tools; and favoring small group activities over large class consumption of content.

Loren’s Thought:

  • Turn your video camera on so others can see your face, expressions, and your smile! It’s nearly impossible interacting with someone you can’t see.

Grace’s Idea:

  • Breaking long stretches of time up a little with breakout rooms.
  • Keep things light and try to have a fun attitude. Long video calls can feel monotonous, so start off with a fun stoke.

Sarah’s Tricks:

  • Virtual icebreaker/check in with the team before beginning.
  • Use a shared file like a google doc or a Mural to track ideas and progression (collaboration tools)

MJ’s Hints:

  • Get out of your comfort zone.
  • Participate – you get out of life what you put into it. The same goes for workshops/meetings/etc. even if it’s online.

Nathaniel’s Write Up:

  • Rethink, redesign, and re-frame based on objectives. You can’t just keep doing what you’ve done before.
  • read his full article here.

Gillian’s Reminder:

  • Have an agenda with just three items (if possible) and try to end the meeting 5 – 10 minutes early so people have a moment to stretch and think before engaging in another Zoom/Teams call or other activity.

Nicole’s Suggestion:

  • The experience is everything: People don’t always focus on what you say, but how you make them feel.
    • This is so true for students. Some are really struggling with online learning and offering dedicated time to share how everyone genuinely is doing can be time well spent.
    • At the LEC we like to do stokes, an in person ritual we do which is like an ice breaker but with more intention behind it. It get’s people to shift their focus from their last meeting and into the one they are in now. Sometimes we like to do two stokes, an empathy stoke and an energy stoke.
    • Large group discussions are hard to have online because participants don’t know when to jump in. Small group discussions with someone taking notes with report out items might be more productive.
    • A facilitator has to amp up the enthusiasm volume. But you still need to be authentic. – If you aren’t into the activity, students can sniff it out and won’t play along.
  • It’s an experiment.
    • Don’t shy away from something new. Share the same sentiment with participants as they will resonate with your honesty.
    • And if it really failed… well… oh well, you will get it next time. It’s an experiment and consider yourself successful for just trying it in the first place!

Paige’s Fun:

  • Have regular moments where people are engaged as individuals (intros, regular input, something about their day, where they would rather be (i.e. vacation!)) so people don’t start snoozing.
  • Oh! This is something we’ve done with our friends, but doing a scavenger hunt mid-way through for something in the home? Whoever comes back with it first gets…something? Out of the next individual report-out?

What do you think? Did we miss anything? Send us an email at nicole@uwmrf.org and we might share it via social media!

Thank you to all the contributors of this article: Nicole Powley (Program Manager, LEC), Brian Thompson (Director, LEC), Ilya Avdeev (Director of Innovation, LEC), Elmer Moore (Inclusive Excellence Fellow, UWM), Loren Peterson (Entrepreneur-In-Residence, LEC), Sarah Gribble (Digital Media Coordinator &Administrative Assistant, UWM), Grace Rogers (Innovation Intern, LEC), MJ (Innovation Intern, LEC), Nathaniel Stern (Director of the Startup Challenge, LEC), Gillian Chamberlin (Senior Director of Advancement, UWM), and Paige Peters (Founder and CEO
Rapid Radicals Technology, LLC).