Insights for Working Virtually

At our company, evoke, we moved to be a strictly virtual team in 2010. As a result, our mission is to help companies move toward a virtual environment in both training and collaboration. Just a few days ago, I returned from our most recent face-to-face team meeting. We recommend that you do these twice a year. However, for a number of "excuses" that I won't give, it had been 18 months since our last face-to-face ... and it showed. Sometimes "the cobblers' children go without shoes" and that's a lessoned learned for us!

It's Monday morning and you know what that means? Your virtual platforms service provider did a system update, your phone bridge software installed a bug fix, and none of your workshop participants checked their computer system before the program. Sound familiar? It's what we call gremlins in the system!

Recently I asked a group I was working with whether they had a lot of virtual meetings. The answers I got were mixed. Some said they were using screen-sharing tools, a few used more elaborate collaboration platforms, and others said no they weren't leading virtual meetings. Then I asked a different question. How many of you are on conference calls regularly? After a group groan, everyone's hand shot up.

The first rule in presenting or speaking is to be clear. If you are not clear, I need you to put a sock in it. I don't mean to give you a taste of your own medicine and I don't have an axe to grind, but it's the last straw. We use far too many idioms (figures of speech), acronyms (abbreviations using initials) and jargon (vocabulary specific to a group) in our presentations and meetings. As our teams become more regional, national, global and virtual, speaking this way won't cut the mustard ... sorry ... won't provide enough clarity to be clearly understood.

Humans forget up to 70% of what they've learned in 24 hours. If you ask my wife, she will tell you that, at least with me, this is true. According to the research behind "the Forgetting Curve"¹, the loss levels off at just below 80% and remains static over the next 30 days. Think about what this means to "event" learning where they come to an in-person class for a day or two and then return to their jobs. The participants will only actually remember 20% of what was presented to them.