Karin M. Reed - Suddenly Virtual

All the while, Joe was researching and watching the evolution in real time and gathering the data that could inform decisions in the days, months, and years ahead. The move to remote work was having a profound and potent effect on our meetings and even our home life, and the findings were fascinating. In the meantime, Karin was delivering effective virtual communication training to thousands of people struggling to speak through that little lens embedded in their laptop or phone, when they wanted desperately to speak face‐to‐face but could not.

Months after that initial webinar on the modern meeting, Joe and Karin reconnected and realized their areas of expertise were powerfully colliding at a common pain point: making remote meetings work. Both Karin and Joe had been inundated with requests to help. While they felt truly fortunate to be able to answer many of those requests through training and consulting work, they knew they needed a way to amplify the message.

What if they brought together Joe's data‐driven insights and Karin's real‐world experiences to address a very pressing need the world over? The Meeting Scientist and the On‐Camera Coach join forces again…ergo, Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work .

With so many relatively new virtual workers engaging in remote work and holding virtual meetings, science‐based help to optimize the virtual meeting is not only needed but has also been fervently requested by those who are struggling to find a way to make these meetings work. Because there is so much uncertainty across the business landscape today, Joe and Karin hope this book can be a resource for as many people as possible in navigating virtual meetings where video is at their core.

With two very different but complementary skill sets, there are certain sections where Joe will take the lead and other sections where Karin will, as they each delve deeply into their respective areas of expertise. That's why in Sections 1–3, we will identify each chapter by labeling them “The Meeting Scientist Perspective” and “The On‐Camera Coach Perspective” accordingly as they highlight new research insights springing from the rapid and exponential adoption of virtual meeting technology. However, their expertise fully converges for Sections 4–5 where they will speak in a unified voice as they discuss the problems, challenges, and pitfalls of meeting in this new modality with a look ahead at what the future of meetings may hold. Most important, throughout the book, they provide practical and actionable best practices that are backed by meeting research – practices that lead to more productive and effective virtual meetings that impact the bottom line.

This book is called a practical guide for a reason. It is designed to be a workbook that you can use to adopt and adapt your own ways of conducting business virtually. For that reason, they have included several tools for you to leverage that will help you build the capabilities of your own organization.

Checklists: Growth requires self‐reflection. That's why they have provided checklists within and at the end of several chapters that you can use as an assessment tool of where you are now or a reminder of where you would like to be.

Try This: We often learn by doing, so in order to allow key takeaways to stick, they have included a few exercises for applying the techniques in your own environment and flexing your new skills.

Case Studies : This book is designed to provide you best practices steeped in solid science, but in order to see science come to life, it can be helpful to take a look at real‐world examples. Starting with Section four, you will find case studies to illustrate how organizations across a variety of industries have adapted to the world of remote work. They share what worked, what did not, and how they are charting their path to success in our suddenly virtual work environment.

Chapter Takeaways: Each chapter ends with a list of key takeaways to help you distill the content into digestible nuggets. Hopefully, you won't just read the book and place it on a shelf to gather dust. Rather, the hope is it becomes a frequent source of inspiration for many remote meetings to come. The bulleted lists, highlighting the essential points, are provided to serve as a quick reference.

Reflection Activity: In the final chapter, they will introduce the Adaptive Improvement Model (AIM) framework, which encourages you to consider things that you should continue doing, things you should stop doing, and things you should start doing. With your checklists and reflections from the book in hand, you can use the provided worksheet that will allow you to celebrate the things you are doing well while setting goals on things to do in the future. Thus, the book comes alive in your work life as you experiment with the practices and procedures discussed herein.

Ultimately, this book seeks to be a definitive guide for businesses looking to make their meetings as effective as possible in the ever‐evolving “new normal” by leveraging the insights from some of the foremost thought leaders in meeting science and on‐camera communication. Most businesses have settled into virtual meetings for the foreseeable future, and the decisions made in this arena will impact operations both now and in the times to come. The hope is the right decisions will be easier to make after you finish reading this book.

A very special thank‐you goes out to our technical writer, Camie Schaefer, whose edits, thoughts, and input were essential for making our volume consistent and meaningful. We are grateful to Joe's research manager, Emilee Eden, for her assistance with identifying and sourcing references and citations. We express appreciation to both our beta readers, Joy Allen and Kristin Bair, for their insightful comments and ideas for enhancing the manuscript for our eventual readers. Additional thanks to those who so willingly shared their expertise, insight, and anecdotes: Massimo Rapparini, Scott Wharton, Matthieu Beucher, Charles Kergaravat, Kori Christensen, Dan Hawkins, Bridget Fletcher, Michael Shehane, Karen Hills, Christine Vucinich, and Shannon Heath. By sharing your stories, you helped all of us to better understand our suddenly virtual world and what the future may hold.

Think back to October 2019. Now imagine what your work life looked like at that time. Maybe you hated your long commute and tried not to tally up the annual hours spent getting to and from the office. Perhaps you actually enjoyed flying to meet with potential customers in far-flung places and taking in the sights of an unexplored city. Or were you like so many of us who planned to revolt if we had to sit through one more pointless meeting in that cramped conference room, with coworkers who all watched the clock eat up time that could be spent “getting stuff done”? Oh, what a difference just a few months can make.

In this section, we reflect on the new reality introduced to the world of business by the COVID-19 pandemic. We begin with Joe, who describes what happened to work and more specifically, to the work meeting ( Chapter 1). We then hear from Karin, who focuses on the hopeful truth that videoconferencing is a viable substitute for face-to-face meetings. She delves into its rapid adoption across corporate America as well as the value that video communication can bring when the world becomes remote ( Chapter 2).

QUICK WARNING:If you flipped right past the preface, we would suggest you flip back and give it a read. Not only does it explain why a meeting scientist and an on-camera coach are collaborators in the first place, but it also tells you how to get the most out of this book by laying out the structure, the tools, and the opportunity to make it a working document. Don't worry, we'll wait.