Remote

by Phil Waknell — Friday 24 April 2020

A virtual meeting without a facilitator is like an orchestra without a conductor: the result is usually an unpleasant cacophony. Before, during and after the meeting, the facilitator’s role is key to ensure harmony, allow each participant to contribute, and achieve the meeting’s objectives. The role will depend on the type of meeting. For a webinar, the facilitator will need to focus on sound quality, ensuring those not speaking have muted their microphones (or doing it for them), and handling the text chat.

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by Phil Waknell — Friday 10 April 2020

It’s no secret that most slide presentations are boring, ineffective wastes of time. PowerPoint isn’t the problem - it’s how people (mis)use it. In fact most business meetings would do well to avoid slides - and presentations - altogether. Meetings should be for discussion, connection, decisions… not for information-sharing. Using a wonderfully-crafted PowerPoint deck to share information is like using an iPad Pro as a frisbee: sure, it’s well-designed and better than most other tablets, but it’s still the wrong tool for the job.

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by Michael Rickwood — Monday 6 April 2020

As many of us are learning, it’s easy to arrange a virtual meeting, but not so easy to run one successfully. There is quite a steep learning curve. One vital area to work on is speaking in virtual meetings. People often complain of video issues, microphone issues, poor vocal expression, monotonous speakers, and poor interactivity. Step 5 of our Virtual Meeting Revolution process is called Connection for a good reason: when speaking in an online meeting, you need to connect with the other participants, and you can’t connect if they are so bored they are not paying attention, or if they gave up trying to understand what you are saying.

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by Phil Waknell — Wednesday 1 April 2020

What are you going to do today? For many typical office workers, the answer is: too many meetings, and not enough time to work. It’s rare that meetings and productivity coincide. At the time of writing, many of us are required to work from home, so physical meetings have become virtual meetings, and they’re not always an improvement. Online meetings present their own set of challenges, principally because unless everyone has their camera switched on, one participant won’t know whether another is paying attention, or is checking Instagram, or has gone to walk his dog, aiming to return at the end of the meeting in time to say goodbye and pick up as few actions as possible.

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by Pierre Morsa — Tuesday 3 March 2020

With the current health crisis looming, remote work may no longer be a choice, but a precautionary measure. How do we do it at Ideas on Stage? From day one, Ideas on Stage was created as a digital company. In fact, for many years, we didn’t have a physical office. Even today, we strongly encourage our employees to work remotely and limit their travel to what’s necessary. We can deliver 90% of our services at distance to our clients, whether it’s the creation of a presentation, coaching or training.

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