Become empowered for the brave new digital world

The BBC’s David Meade, invited speaker at the IAPCO webinar on PlanetIMEX, attracted over 400 registrants. More than 175 attended from all sectors of the meetings industry around the globe for an engaging and thoughtprovoking 45 minutes of bite-size learning, moderated by IAPCO’s CEO, Martin Boyle.

Today we are facing new challenges and the odds are stacked against us, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. So, how can we help our clients and ourselves to transform from the physical to the virtual space? There are no rule books nor trainers. We are faced with blank pages and we just have to “go for it” and meet the challenge, making the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary. How do we inspire people to do this, and keep them motivated?

David identified closing the gap between leadership and the workforce as a key motivator. In closing that gap, you can build a rapport outside of work topics that will transform the relationship and thus increase productivity. In this virtual world, he advised appointing one member of the team each week to be responsible for engaging the group in a fun and informative way, thereby creating connectivity. Social and human motivation drives performance.

When asked what techniques HR professionals would use to increase motivation/productivity, 71% answered that they would use an incentive/performance-related pay/reward. However, given a choice of four motivators – a financial incentive, token financial gesture, a personal token gift, or thanks – a recent study showed that in all cases the thanks were the highest incentive. Interestingly, as time progressed (over a 6-week period) the financial reward preference decreased by 18% whilst the thanks preference increased by the same percentage.

Such thanks, David advised, should not be just conveyed by a quick email or text message, but should be a gift of personal time, either a telephone call or meeting, to show that that person really matters. Give them a little of your time.

Summing up with a word of warning: if the only incentive/ reward you have for your staff to work well in a crisis is salary, you are missing out on increased productivity, loyalty and engagement.

Moving to the second element of his presentation, David focussed on the neuroscience of virtual meeting and learning: microlearning and chunking.

We all know that brain retention is limited – 14 minutes to be exact – and that retention diminishes over a period of hours and days. Ergo, chunking is a necessity when creating presentations and especially on virtual platforms. Neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections, allows us to build new pathways, retaining information we can use once we return to “the new norm”. Whilst content should, naturally, be of high quality and bite-size, creating the ever-important gap between learning moments is paramount. These gaps are not necessarily of a few minutes within a session, but can be days or even weeks, allowing time for the material to simmer.

But most importantly a virtual meeting should be a show! Be sure of Zoom success not Zoom doom.

Make it easy, be more engaging, make it useful – electrify your learners.

David provided some useful links to make Zoom presentations do just that!

ECAMM for Mac users: www.bit.ly/betterzoom OBS Studio for Windows users: www.bit.ly/ObsFreeTrial

BECOME EMPOWERED FOR THE BRAVE NEW DIGITAL WORLD