Unprecedented Times: Conducting Committee Meetings using Digital Engagement

Darrell A. Dromgoole, Associate Professor and Extension Specialist, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.

Scott Cummings, Associate Department Head and Program Leader; Professor and Extension Specialist, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.

We are living in unprecedented times, is spoken on a daily basis by the media, our clientele and ourselves. In the midst of a pandemic, Extension educators in Texas have refocused priorities to provide relevant information, answer questions, address needs, and ease concerned minds. Extension has a unique responsibility to push forward and continue to serve our clientele. Additionally, roles played by Extension educators in normal times— creating pathways toward improved public health, enabling the effectiveness of food systems, building economic strength and community resilience, fostering sustainable use of natural resources, and instilling in young people confidence, compassion, and the desire to contribute to society—are no less important during a crisis.

In order to realize these goals Extension must mobilize and develop human resources in a manner that enables programs to be implemented most effectively (Boyle, 1981). Boyle (1981) described three major reasons to involve clientele in program development:

1. To attain more accurate decisions regarding the relevancy of an issue and opportunities for programming.
2. To accelerate the change process through diffusion and legitimization of programs.
3. To involve clientele in learning experiences that prepares them towards active management of the change process.

To effectively utilize clientele in identifying issues and developing educational interventions to address these issue committee meeting are an effective venue for such planning. However, with the Covid 19 restrictions and the abundance of caution being exercised for our clientele’s and Extension educators safety it may be necessary to utilize online web conferencing platforms such as Zoom to conduct Program Area Committee, Task Force, Coalition, and Leadership Advisory Committee meetings. However, there is some considerations related to conducting committee meetings online that should be made. If online meetings fail to meet expectations it is most likely due to a lack of planning and adherence to best practices.

Pre-Meeting Best Practices

Some of the best practices prior to the committee meeting include the following (Zoom, 2020);

• Create a brief but thorough registration form. There is a risk of losing a small percentage of your prospective attendees for each question you ask on your registration form. With that in mind, draft a registration form that gathers all of the information that you need to collect and be sure to remove any questions that are not completely necessary for your meeting analysis. Always ask for questions and comments and make that field optional. Some examples of questions might include:
  • What is the most critical issues facing the agriculture industry in the county?
  • What is the most critical practices for individuals with a chronic disease such as diabetes?
  • What leadership skills should youth possess in order to become productive adults?
• Promote the event early and up to the start time. Meeting promotion should start one month to two weeks prior to the meeting date. Increase promotion frequency and tactics to include all viable means as the date approaches. Some examples to promote committee meetings include email, social media, text messages etc. One approach is to personally call (voice call) to remind committee members regarding the meeting. While phone calls may be seen as a dinosaur in the age of social media and texting, there is still some special about receiving a personal call and essentially compelling committee members to verbally commit.
• Utilize all viable promotion channels. How do you plan to promote your meeting with invitees? Take advantage of the power of social media like Facebook and Twitter. Always take advantage of message boards and forums as well as internal and private communications as it suits your needs. There is no such thing as over promotion, but be careful to not promote through outdated channels.
• Establish a time cap for meeting. A typical online meeting is one hour in duration. Longer events should be managed consciously of attendees’ schedules and attention. Keep in mind that they are in front of their computers – one of the most distracting environments ever. Recommendation in the industry is to never exceed two hours if it can be avoided. Even with a one-hour event, we recommend at least 10 minutes be set aside for interactive activity such as Q&A. If you need to deliver more content than two hours will allow, please consider breaking the session up into multiple, bite-sized sections.
• Plan a rehearsal. Have you ever seen a play or concert that did not involve rehearsals? We hope not. Schedule at least 30 minutes with your committee chairperson and a few days prior to your meeting to review the technology, discuss roles and tasks, and finalize your agenda to make sure that your day is as stress free as possible. We suggest scheduling your rehearsal or dry run as a separate meeting or webinar from the live meetings. Be sure to invite only your key players to keep the discussion on track.
• Review the attendee report. If you’re not going to review and use the report, why ask the registration questions? Download and analyze the attendee report to see who may be joining you. Review their questions and comments to gear the discussion to trends that you may discover. This is your chance to provide a unique and engaging attendee experience.

Live Meeting Best Practices

The following is some best practices to employ during the committee meeting (Zoom, 2020);

• Tired of your committee members joining you five minutes late or more? Start a new precedence with your committee! While you should always have your session open at least 15 minutes prior to the start time to get yourself, try adding some interaction early to motivate them to join early. Turn on your audio and video and start asking them questions or request that they ask you questions. If they receive some rather exclusive interaction with you, word will get out that there is valuable time being shared before the meeting even starts.
• Use dual monitors if available. It may prove somewhat difficult to manage all aspects of an online meeting on a single monitor. Add screen sharing to that and you may find windows are always in your way while you present. With a second monitor, you can host the screen sharing on your primary display and move windows like your participants list, chat, Q&A, and polling to a secondary monitor which will give you a greater ability to track everything. If you don’t have dual monitors? Bring a second laptop, make sure it is made a co-host and you can monitor additional features there.
• Provide housekeeping. If you want your meeting to be engaging and interactive, you have to use the tools to your advantage. Provide a brief housekeeping at the start of your meeting to show your attendees what tools you will use and establish expectations.
• Waste no time getting into your agenda. Many online committee meetings will conclude with action items. There should be a call-to-action and there should be some form of promotion of action during the meeting. Consider saving that item for the end of your meeting. Providing a lengthy pitch at the beginning of your event encourages a lack of engagement and simply encourages your attendees to tune out. Provide a brief, five-minute (at most) introduction to your action item and dive right into the content of the agenda. Agenda content is what they are there to discuss. If your discussion is compelling, they will stay with you to hear that call-to-action at the end.
• Avoid “death by PowerPoint” – visualize your content. We have all experienced “death by PowerPoint” and we have all been guilty of it. Those text-heavy slides may seem meaningful and informative, but what they actually do is draw attention from the presenter’s verbal content. Replace those wall-of-text slides with images, single key terms or brief phrases that help to drive the content home without distracting from the presentation. You may need more slides to do this successfully and you may need to push through them more quickly than before. Visualize your content to create a more lasting impression. If you need help finding some great images for your presentations check out Pixabay for high-quality, royalty-free images.
• Encourage a discussion. Having training for committee members is encouraged and an effective means of conveying trends and other information, but never discount the engaging power of discussion. Your moderator should be skilled enough to bring in questions that lead to discussion of topics of interest. If you’re hosting multiple presenters, ask them to co-present on a topic when possible. Hearing multiple voices and their questions and comments brought into the presentation will discourage attendees from tuning out.
• Pose thought provoking questions. A common response by committee members is “what we did last year worked fine, let’s do that again.” There is no silver bullet to resolve this situation, but there is a method of inquiry where probing questions are posed to committee members in an effort to elicit innovative thinking. This method is not a new method, in fact, it’s been around since ancient Greece. This method of inquiry is called the Socratic method of inquiry. The Socratic method of inquiry, is a form of “thought provoking” dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to elicit ideas. It is named after the Greek philosopher Socrates. The Socratic Method of inquiry is a method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions. The program development process is a dynamic effort evolving around problems and necessitating decisions and actions to achieve goals. As a social practice, it implies a negotiation of interests and the construction of some type of working platform involving advisory board members. Others involved in this negation include researchers, Health Department representatives, agriculture commodity group representatives, subject-matter specialists etc.  This dialogue regarding issues include probing questions such as the following:

• • How can a given situation be described and analyzed?
  • What are the major problems, needs, and expectations?
  • What are the alternatives to solve the problems?
  • What kinds of resources, information, and technologies are required?
  • What projects and activities should be implemented? When? How? Where? By whom?
  • How should evaluation be seen? Who should do it and when?
  • How and by whom will the program be managed and controlled.

• Always record. There are numerous benefits to recording your sessions: reach parties that could not attend, provide a chance for attendees to review the content, and more. Consider whether you want to record from beginning to end or if you only wish to record certain portions of the meeting. Zoom will provide a separate file for each portion of the event that you record if you elect to start and stop recording, be aware that you may need to stitch those files together with a basic video editing software. Typically, we recommend that you start recording just after delivering your quick event housekeeping as that live interaction instruction is not useful to those watching a recording. View this complete resource for recording from Zoom’s support site if you have any questions.
• Interact within the first few minutes. The beauty of an online event is that it is a synchronous experience for you and your audience. Treat it as you would an in person presentation. Drive engagement and interest in your topic by getting your attendees to interact with you early and often. Set the stage for a highly interactive and engaging session right away by immediately using features such as Q&A and polling.
• Use frequent and varied interaction. Interaction with your audience promotes engagement with and interest during a meeting. Consider interacting at regular intervals without making it too methodical. Five-minute intervals (give or take) is a good marker. Use all of the tools at your disposal so that the interaction avoids becoming mundane. Polling is an obvious option, but also consider asking them to type in a response to a question or comment using Q&A or chat. Hand raising is also a quick and easy way to interact with your attendees. In Zoom meetings, you may find a benefit to interacting with the annotation tools as well (your viewers will need to have the Zoom interface in full screen mode to access the options menu and enable their annotation tools – not applicable to Zoom Webinar).
• Use annotation to grab and direct attention. Zoom’s annotation tools are state of the art. You have a lot of options for drawing, highlighting, making lines and arrows, and even blocking out areas on your screen under the “draw” menu. Use the spotlight menu to access the arrow pointer, and (our personal favorite) the red spotlight tool tip that will even let you use your mouse as normal while it’s active.
• Make eye contact. Want to really pull your attendees in? Look at your webcam instead of your screen. This will give the effect of eye contact and visual engagement. Use the gestures and mannerisms that you would typically use in person. If you are viewing the video feed of others, try moving that feed to a monitor position just below your webcam to make this easier.
• Provide presenters with a final comment. Sometimes that final question is really dynamic. Other times it may be a bit lackluster. After you wrap up your Q&A portion of the event, turn it back over to any specialist attending for a final comment. Let them know ahead of time that you will be doing this to give them a chance to draft some compelling final remarks to help you end your session smoothly and concisely. They are the subject matter experts after all. If you are presenting solo, give yourself this opportunity.
• Leave attendees with a call-to-action. What’s the purpose of your meeting? Whether you are developing a program plan or planning an educational event, you have a great opportunity with online meetings to ask your participants to take action. We recommend saving this call-to-action for the end of your meeting to avoid appearing too “pushy.” Don’t miss this opportunity to promote any upcoming educational events that Extension will be hosting. Make your call-to-action clear and concise, and be sure to provide your committee member with everything that they need to succeed.

 Post- Meeting Best Practices

The following is some best practices to employ following the committee meeting (Zoom, 2020);

• Download the Q&A report and respond to unanswered questions. Zoom provides the opportunity to respond to questions while in session either verbally by selecting “answer live” or via text by selecting “answer by text.” Using these options accurately during meetings will help you review your Q&A report to find questions that were not addressed in session. Take some time after your event to review the report and respond to any unanswered questions via email. All questions including name and email of the asker will be represented in the report. Be sure to review the document completely as some attendees may have more than one unanswered question.
• Provide complete follow-up communication. Zoom provides two follow-up email options: an email for registrants who attended live, and an email for absentees. Both emails default to sending one day after the event. This is an excellent venue to provide committee member with minutes and reminders related to action items. Edit these emails as needed and add custom text. This is a good opportunity to provide a link to the recording of the meeting, next steps to keep the conversation going, links to resources, and a brief FAQ based on questions received during the meeting. You may turn these features off to have follow-up emails sent from Outlook if you prefer.

The following are some tips in executing the a Zoom committee meeting;

• Set down conversational guidelines:
  • Know advisory board members names.
  • Explain that participation requires listening and active engagement and that it is not enough to just insert a single comment during the meeting and then be silent for the rest of the day. Convey to advisory board members that they are the experts, the visionaries and innovators and Extension really need their expertise.
• Ask questions and be comfortable with silence. Silence is productive. Be willing to wait for participants to respond. There is no need to fill a conversational void; silence creates a kind of helpful tension. Use the “ten-second wait” rule before you attempt to re-phrase your questions!
• Find ways to produce “productive discomfort.” Cold-calling works, but temper it with small group work so participants can talk to their neighbor.
• Above all else, use follow-up questions.
• Always be open to learning something new. Be willing to say, “I don’t know the answer to that question.”
• Welcome the “crazy idea” that offers a new perspective on the topic, but discourage those ideas which are not serious.
• Short interventions from the Extension educator are welcomed.

An Example of a meeting agenda is below;

Sample meeting guidelines below:

References

Boyle, P. (1981). Planning better programs. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Zoom. (2020). Zoom Online Event Best Practices Guide. January 2020.