Team Building, Virtual Meeting Style

Are you familiar with the 4 phases of team building? They are affectionately known as Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. In order to get your team working like a well-oiled machine, you need to encourage candor, critical thinking and kindness – at the very least civility — among your members.

How well your team meetings go is a good predictor of how fast your team will get to the Performing stage. Let’s say you’re in the Storming stage. You know. That’s where the members don’t quite trust each other, or you, yet. There are turf battles emerging or ongoing. No one feels real comfortable saying what’s really on their mind.

What to do? Try this strategy in your next online meeting. Start with a blank shared document split into quadrants. Assign a relevant question to each quadrant. It’s good here to have a mix between subjective and objective questions like:

1. What potential do you see for our team?

2. In a perfect world, what would you have our team accomplish this year?

3. Name one thing you enjoy about your work.

4. Share your biggest concern about this team.

5. What one thing about this team is working really well?

Like all brainstorming sessions, let people pass if they can’t think of an answer. Give everyone about 30-60 seconds. This isn’t the time to analyze responses. Write everyone’s thoughts down so the group can see them.

You have a couple of options now. Take 10 minutes and let the members discuss the document and ask clarification from each other. Then, maybe, go back to your mission statement and see if it needs revision. Or, maybe you need clarification from the higher-ups on what the team’s goals ought to be. Here’s where your leadership/facilitation skills kick in.

This process doesn’t take long and yields good results. The most significant is that you and your teammates will gain a better understanding of each other. These insights will help your team quickly move into the all-important Performing stage.

How’s Your Travel Budget?

How’s your travel budget these days?  An Orbitz survey of more than 600 business managers revealed that 79% were pressured to slash their travel budgets.

So if your travel budget is bleeding red ink all over your bottom line, you’re not alone.  You’re scrambling for cheaper flights, a smaller car, cheaper hotel rooms – anything that will help save on travel costs.  And the competition for those commodities in increasing!

Want to slash your travel budget while providing the same level of service to your clients?  Just take a meeting — an online meeting, that is!

Online meetings let you interact with clients, business associates and even vendors in real time.  With no additional costs for travel, food or lodging.  And no time lost in traveling.

Three of the top online meeting providers offer you access to their services for as little as $39/mo.  For that ridiculously low price, you can meet with up to 15 people — as often as you need to.  There’s no extra charge to you or your client(s) for the telephone connection.

Check out our online meeting provider reviews – you’ll find a solution that works for you.