How to Use This Book
This book is called a practical guide for a reason. It is designed to be a workbook that you can use to adopt and adapt your own ways of conducting business virtually. For that reason, they have included several tools for you to leverage that will help you build the capabilities of your own organization.
Checklists: Growth requires self‐reflection. That's why they have provided checklists within and at the end of several chapters that you can use as an assessment tool of where you are now or a reminder of where you would like to be.
Try This: We often learn by doing, so in order to allow key takeaways to stick, they have included a few exercises for applying the techniques in your own environment and flexing your new skills.
Case Studies: This book is designed to provide you best practices steeped in solid science, but in order to see science come to life, it can be helpful to take a look at real‐world examples. Starting with Section four, you will find case studies to illustrate how organizations across a variety of industries have adapted to the world of remote work. They share what worked, what did not, and how they are charting their path to success in our suddenly virtual work environment.
Chapter Takeaways: Each chapter ends with a list of key takeaways to help you distill the content into digestible nuggets. Hopefully, you won't just read the book and place it on a shelf to gather dust. Rather, the hope is it becomes a frequent source of inspiration for many remote meetings to come. The bulleted lists, highlighting the essential points, are provided to serve as a quick reference.
Reflection Activity: In the final chapter, they will introduce the Adaptive Improvement Model (AIM) framework, which encourages you to consider things that you should continue doing, things you should stop doing, and things you should start doing. With your checklists and reflections from the book in hand, you can use the provided worksheet that will allow you to celebrate the things you are doing well while setting goals on things to do in the future. Thus, the book comes alive in your work life as you experiment with the practices and procedures discussed herein.
Ultimately, this book seeks to be a definitive guide for businesses looking to make their meetings as effective as possible in the ever‐evolving “new normal” by leveraging the insights from some of the foremost thought leaders in meeting science and on‐camera communication. Most businesses have settled into virtual meetings for the foreseeable future, and the decisions made in this arena will impact operations both now and in the times to come. The hope is the right decisions will be easier to make after you finish reading this book.
Acknowledgments
A very special thank‐you goes out to our technical writer, Camie Schaefer, whose edits, thoughts, and input were essential for making our volume consistent and meaningful. We are grateful to Joe's research manager, Emilee Eden, for her assistance with identifying and sourcing references and citations. We express appreciation to both our beta readers, Joy Allen and Kristin Bair, for their insightful comments and ideas for enhancing the manuscript for our eventual readers. Additional thanks to those who so willingly shared their expertise, insight, and anecdotes: Massimo Rapparini, Scott Wharton, Matthieu Beucher, Charles Kergaravat, Kori Christensen, Dan Hawkins, Bridget Fletcher, Michael Shehane, Karen Hills, Christine Vucinich, and Shannon Heath. By sharing your stories, you helped all of us to better understand our suddenly virtual world and what the future may hold.
PART ONE Our New Virtual Reality – A Suddenly Remote Workforce
Think back to October 2019. Now imagine what your work life looked like at that time. Maybe you hated your long commute and tried not to tally up the annual hours spent getting to and from the office. Perhaps you actually enjoyed flying to meet with potential customers in far-flung places and taking in the sights of an unexplored city. Or were you like so many of us who planned to revolt if we had to sit through one more pointless meeting in that cramped conference room, with coworkers who all watched the clock eat up time that could be spent “getting stuff done”? Oh, what a difference just a few months can make.
In this section, we reflect on the new reality introduced to the world of business by the COVID-19 pandemic. We begin with Joe, who describes what happened to work and more specifically, to the work meeting (Chapter 1). We then hear from Karin, who focuses on the hopeful truth that videoconferencing is a viable substitute for face-to-face meetings. She delves into its rapid adoption across corporate America as well as the value that video communication can bring when the world becomes remote (Chapter 2).
QUICK WARNING: If you flipped right past the preface, we would suggest you flip back and give it a read. Not only does it explain why a meeting scientist and an on-camera coach are collaborators in the first place, but it also tells you how to get the most out of this book by laying out the structure, the tools, and the opportunity to make it a working document. Don't worry, we'll wait.
CHAPTER 1 What Happened to Meetings?: The Meeting Scientist Perspective
Perhaps an important question to ask is “When did the world change?” Certainly, the world changed quickly, and many workers were either without work or found themselves in a dramatically different work environment. While the change was nearly instantaneous for some, others experienced a more gradual progression as the world tried to navigate the uncharted territory of a global pandemic. The facts on the ground shifted – not just day by day, but also hour by hour. A universal sense of uncertainty bled into every aspect of our lives.
The business world sought to adapt to the changes, but in those early days, ever‐changing information meant that plans were scrapped almost as soon as they were written.
In this chapter, we will explore:
The sequence of events that led to much of the world of work going remote.
The rise of the virtual meeting.
How businesses scrambled to adapt to the new virtual reality.
How Did We Get Here?
When did you first really pay attention to what was happening with COVID‐19? From your current vantage point, you may find it hard to believe that most of us did not give it a whole lot of thought when it first reared its ugly head in China. Few of us could have imagined then how it would soon turn our world upside down. However, you probably do remember a watershed moment which signaled a shift in mindset. Maybe it was the cancellation of the NBA season or the closure of your college campuses? That's when we were suddenly glued to the TV and felt like we could not keep up with the news or the changes swiftly overtaking every aspect of our lives. The pandemic was a force to be reckoned with, and no one was going to be left unimpacted.
To put what happened to work and workplace meetings into proper context, here's a quick timeline of events.
| Timeline of Events from the COVID‐19 Pandemic (Kantis, Kiernan, and Bardi 2020) | |
| December 8, 2019 | A patient in the city of Wuhan sought medical help for pneumonia‐like symptoms. |
| January 3, 2020 | China officially notifies the WHO of an outbreak. |
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January 21, 2020
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