Structure, pace and variety are particularly important to create dynamism and energy in digital meetings. This makes the role of meeting leader even more important to get and keep the participants’ focus during the meeting. From having been fully booked as a speaker on stage, everyday life now consists of training companies and organizations in the digital transition.
The pace and quality of the conversation has to be different for you to be engaged online. As a meeting leader, you need to work with the voice mode and think like a children’s program leader who needs to go through the box. Most meetings are about getting conversations going and not a presentation. And then you have to create an agenda that contains a lot of variety.
The meeting leader’s task becomes more like being a moderator in front of a large audience, even if only a small working group participates. This means more planning before the meeting, a clearer driving schedule with tempo changes and clearer control of who gets to speak and how long someone gets to speak.
Leading a small physical meeting and a large physical meeting are different things. But leading a digital meeting is much more difficult and requires much more. It’s more like leading a large physical meeting, he says. The entire meeting industry was greatly affected by the corona pandemic, but the need for help in adapting to the new models for meetings when it is possible to meet physically again is great. There is a huge demand for what will become the new normal – the physical, or the paradoxical that i am talking about.
After the pandemic, we will of course see more physical meetings again, but also more hybrid meetings, which are both physical and digital at the same time. It is an additional challenge for the meeting leader to have participants physically on site – and digitally. If we want to become good at this form of meeting, we have to practice again, just like with all other communication. The digital meeting reality is here to stay.