The Remote Facilitator's Pocket Guide

by Jay-Allen Morris, Kirsten Clacey

Overview

This approach to remote facilitation makes virtual meetings powerful means of collaboration using proven techniques to accommodate a diversity of cultures, locations, and personalities.

Many people struggle with remote meetings: a cocktail of factors, such as technical barriers and invisible group norms, increase the uncertainty and risk of the already vulnerable task of collaborating and sharing ideas. When remote meetings go badly, they go really badly. Few things feel as lonely and intimidating as speaking to a screen with unreadable faces staring back in silence. This book will help you improve the quality of your remote meetings. With a little awareness, some planning, and some practice, you can make your remote meetings an effective, engaging, and powerful mechanism for collaboration within your organization.

This book is for anyone seeking to get more value from remote meetings. Whether you're a seasoned facilitator, a new facilitator, or someone hoping to improve team meetings, you will be empowered with principles and actionable methods to enhance your organization's effectiveness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781523089109
Publisher:	Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Publication date:	06/30/2020
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	675,540
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.37(d)

About the Author

Kirsten Clacey and Jay-Allen Morris live in Cape Town, South Africa, and are passionate about improving the quality of remote collaboration. They specialize in enabling distributed teams to reach high performance by using a combination of adapted facilitation techniques, team coaching methods, and agile frameworks. They speak at conferences, host workshops, consult for teams and organizations, and have founded an online learning group of international remote facilitators.

Table of Contents

Foreword Esther Derby ix

Introduction 1

Why Is Remote Collaboration Difficult? 7

What is the Role of a (Remote) Facilitator? 20

Principle 1 Create Equal Opportunity 28

Principle 2 Enable Flow 48

Principle 3 Guide with Visuals 62

Principle 4 Nurture Connection 77

Principle 5 Enable Playful Learning 90

Principle 6 Master Your Tools 105

After the Call: How to Maintain Connection When the Call Ends 115

Tying It Together 122

Notes 147

Acknowledgments 157

Index 155

About the Authors 161

Editorial Reviews

Collaboration and creativity across distance isn’t out of reach. Remote meetings can be engaging and productive. This book will show you how.”
—Esther Derby, author of 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change
 
“The frequency of remote meetings is increasing, yet there are few guidelines for the people who lead and facilitate them. This book provides the tools for engagement that will lead to more productive remote meetings.”
—Dick and Emily Axelrod, coauthors of Let’s Stop Meeting Like This
 
“A very practical guide that will not only improve your remote facilitation but help with facilitation overall. This book is an asset to any facilitator, remote or otherwise.”
—Joanne Perold, Agile Coach, agile42
 
“We are all woefully unprepared for the evolution of effective spaces into the distributed environment. This book teaches us what to do so that we need not be.”
—Aveshan Govender, Engineering Manager, Spotify
 
“This is inclusive design at its finest: an invitation to go beyond our ordinary context and be involved in the discovery along the way. I have an increasing demand for distributed facilitation, and this approach is the best I’ve ever experienced.”
—Cara Turner, CEO, Project codeX 
 
“This groundbreaking book is for people who want remote connections to be at least as productive, vibrant, and alive as the very best gatherings with everyone in the same room. It’s delightfully refreshing for experts and also offers a fresh, safe, inspiring start point for anyone new to facilitation of any kind.”
—Steve Holyer, Agile Coach and Facilitator, CoachingCocktails.com 
 
“Remote meetings can’t be considered cutting edge anymore—yet we are surprisingly bad at them. Kirsten and Jay understand how people behave in meetings and how you can encourage them to have positive behaviors that lead to vastly more effective meetings. Their art is a mix of psychology, empathy, and practical techniques.”
—Ted Pietrzak, Vice President, Application Modernization, The Charles Schwab Corporation
 
“Jay-Allen and Kirsten provide loads of practical ideas to experiment with to make your meetings more productive, equal, and fun. If you care about your teams, your effectiveness, and your general well-being at remote work, this book is for you!”
—Louise Perold, Quality Manager

From the Publisher