Great New Book To Help Make Your Virtual Meetings More Effective and Efficient

We are all looking for ways to make our #virtualmeetings more productive. The most helpful resource I have found is the book Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work.

Here is the back story. As a result of publishing my book Organization Design Made Easy: Structure, Process and People, I met Dr. Joseph Allen who just published this very timely book along with Karin Reed. Dr. Allen is a professor at the University of Utah and the Director of the Center for Meeting Effectiveness. Dr. Allen’s website.

Rather than ‘teaching’ people tips and tricks that are hardly ever applied, Dr. Allen reviews real meetings and provides specific, relevant, and actionable feedback on how they can be improved. True learning in action:) [And BTW: He has written 100s of articles on meeting effectiveness after reading through 1,000s of articles. So you can check that task off your to do list!]

One of Dr. Allen’s findings that I have found most useful is the importance of providing voice opportunities in meetings. He discovered that team members need to feel that they can speak up, be heard and have their opinions acknowledged in online meetings. Participants want to be accepted, validated and have their thinking included in the decision making processes. Creating this open, safe environment is easier said that done online. Dr. Allen’s research offers suggestions for drawing out participants including turning cameras on, as well as active facilitation.

And in case you are interested Dr. Allen is conducting a meeting effectiveness study for organizations. The other connection here is Keith Leust, who I worked with at Accelare, who is part of Dr. Allen’s research team. For more information, give Keith a shout at KeithLeust@MyCareerTransformation.com

Note: This blog does not reflect the views of my employer

Published by Kevin Anderson, Dr. Organizational Design (OD)

Kevin Anderson is a leading expert in organizational design and performance, leadership, large scale change projects, business process engineering and talent and culture initiatives. Kevin has over twenty five years of experience in designing and delivering high impact, global organizational solutions. He is a Senior Organizational Development Consultant at Cargill where he leads efforts around team effectiveness, organizational design, culture and change management. Kevin diagnoses, proposes and delivers solutions in the Talent Performance domain. He has also created and rolled out Leadership Development and Organizational Development for the City of Minneapolis. Before that Kevin successfully worked with Accelare consulting health care, retail and university clients to create actionable strategic plans. In addition, he has served as an organizational development leader at Thomson Reuters working with legal, financial and scientific products. Kevin has a Doctorate in Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development and a Masters of Arts in Public Policy and Management from the University of Minnesota. His Bachelors Degree in Speech Communications and Political Science is from Macalester College. View more posts