The virtual environment of group meetings can be setup well with a few, but deliberate steps, that facilitate accessibility, engagement and connection for all participants. The following list is built on a post by the Stanford Medicine Abilities Coalition (used with permission).
Three steps to setup your meeting for success: Make it accessible, have a plan for running it, and develop good facilitation habits.
1. Make your virtual meetings accessible to all (without being asked to do so):
· Do a quick reminder of protocol before you get into business: Ask everyone to:
mute their microphone when they aren't speaking to limit background noise.
Use a headset if one is available
Look at their name in the participant list and change it to First Last if it defaulted to something else.
· When URLs or other resources are mentioned, designate someone to type them into the chat window - or follow up with participants after the meeting - to help facilitate folks finding those resources.
· Allow participants to ask questions either verbally, with or without using the hand raising function, or by typing in the chat.
· Encourage recording so everyone can access later. Let everyone in the meeting know about that, and how the recording will be shared or used after the meeting.
· Share presentations ahead of time.
· Ask participants if they need any accommodations. Participants might need different accommodations in a virtual meeting than an in-person meeting.
2. Organize how the meeting will run:
· Designate roles: Have someone manage the chat and another person lead the meeting. Depending on the size of the meeting, it can be challenging to do both.
· Keep meetings reasonably short, especially if they are frequent.
· Allow for a slower pace, yet stay on task and on time.
· Allow for short breaks if the meeting will go for more than an hour.
· Use the breakout function to facilitate small group brainstorming and reporting back, especially in large meetings or meetings that aim to produce content
3. Develop good online meeting facilitation habits:
· Spend time in the beginning of the meeting to check-in: A round robin of brief personal updates to share with the group, and transition into the meeting.
· Describe images and graphs verbally. This is helpful as not all graphs show well on screen, and it will be helpful for the visually-impaired and for others who have called into the meeting.
· Keep list of topics fewer and topics less dense (especially if you are using PowerPoint slides) compared to what you would in in-person meetings.
· Follow-up on action items by email shortly after the meeting.
Check out the accessibility page: https://zoom.us/accessibility for more on accessibility for Zoom.
Comentários