🎤The Quest #75 – How to Hear All Voices in the Zoom Room

Greetings from Barcelona☀️where I caught up with one of my favorite facilitators in Barcelona last week. More on that below👇

🙌Many thanks for reading The Quest. A special welcome to new subscribers from last week’s Enact festival who inspired this issue.

If you are joining for the first time, welcome to our deep dive into facilitation, learning, and how to live a creative life.

Let’s jump right in!

🎤 Hands up if you have ever faced one of these situations when leading groups on Zoom👇

• You have a few vocal participants while others sit back
• When you try to get the “quiet” group members to contribute, they quickly agree with what you are saying
• And you never hear from the participants with their cameras off

When you are in the midst of leading your session it can be hard to know how to tackle that.

Getting all voices in the room can be especially challenging online.

Why? Because you don’t have the same social cues and body language that you have in person. Especially when you can’t even see some of your group members.

Without knowing it, you could be contributing to some voices being silenced.

Once participation patterns set in, it can be hard if not impossible to reverse the dynamic. And if people feel excluded, you may not hear from them again.

Here’s the good news.

Online gives us a whole set of new tools that you can use to get the voices of your group members in the Zoom room. Even the “quiet” ones.

But you need to design your sessions to get all voices heard. When you do, you’ll build trust with your group. You’ll increase people’s safety to speak up. And you’ll hear a wider range of views and ideas.

🤔How do you hear all voices in the Zoom room?

That’s our Quest for this week. 🔎

👉Tiny Habits: Hear All Voices in Meetings

👉Hidden Zoom Feature: Tracking Hands and Thumbs Up

Plus

👉Romy Alexandra on psychological safety and experiential learning

🗣️Tiny Habits: Hear All Voices in Meetings

An article from Hive Learning with 5 top tips to hear all voices in meetings. It’s one of the few articles I’ve come across that tackles this question head-on and lays out the best practice.

Here are the tips:

👉1/ Elevate all voices from the start. For example a simple round of intros up front.

👉2/ Challenge constructively. Ask open-ended questions. Hear from the most junior people first. Discuss first in pairs and then in the big group.

👉3/ Steer the conversation. Intervene, reframe, and offer a guiding question.

👉4/Mediate interruptions. Stop the interrupter, and state the value of hearing from everyone.

👉5/ Run remote meetings inclusively. Build flexibility and make it easier for remote colleagues to contribute.

Read the full article 👉 here.​

✋Hidden Zoom Feature: Tracking Hands Up

True confession: I can find it challenging to track who has their hand up in Zoom. Especially when my instructions aren’t clear. And some people raise their Zoom reaction hand, and others raise their physical hand. 🤦

It means that I can pass over people who want to contribute.

Thanks to visual facilitator and agile coach Enrico Teotti for this awesome Zoom tip. It turns out that Zoom tracks physical hands up and thumbs up to an emoji reaction. I had no idea that Zoom could do this.

Check out his post to learn how👇

📸Photo of the week

You may know Romy Alexandra from her insightful LinkedIn posts on all things facilitation. If you don’t I am thrilled to introduce you to her work.

Romy is one of the most seasoned experiential learning facilitators I know. She’s the only person I know who learned directly from experiential learning cycle creator David Kolb.

Lucky me, I got to geek out on all things facilitation with her last week on a sunny terrace in Barcelona.

Check out Romy’s posts on 👉 LinkedIn.

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💌Thanks for reading The Quest

I always love hearing your feedback and suggestions. Just hit reply to share your thoughts and ideas.

🙌Special shout out to Djanira in Barcelona, Romy in Stutgard, Lilian in Nairobi, Andrew in New York, Barry & Michaele in Bracebridge, Brendon in Turin, and Joan in Toronto.

Visit my website for ways we can work together 👉 here.

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Creatively yours,