Karin M. Reed - Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work

KARIN M. REED

JOSEPH A. ALLEN

Copyright 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data is Available:

ISBN 9781119793670 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781119793687 (ePub)

ISBN 9781119793694 (epdf)

COVER DESIGN: PAUL McCARTHY

COVER ART: GETTY IMAGES | RLT_IMAGES

AUTHOR PHOTOS: COURTESY OF THE AUTHORS

For our families who allowed us to disappear into our writing to get this book quickly to our readers who are desperately seeking answers in this Suddenly Virtual world.

Joe: For Joy, Karen, Rachel, Alice, and Julia

Karin: For Shawn, Hayden, and Jackson

In midMarch 2020, the world of work transformed before our eyes. While essential workers continued to valiantly do their jobs in the face of a global pandemic, the vast majority of corporate offices closed their brickandmortar locations and moved to entirely remote operations to protect the lives of their employees and loved ones. Suddenly, socalled knowledge workers were working from home, often in environments that were never designed for this new purpose. Important sales calls were taking place from the back porch. Training was being conducted virtually from dining room tables. Teams were navigating a dispersed workplace through the camera lenses of their home computers, smartphones, and tablets.

It was about a week before the stayathome orders swept across the United States that Dr. Joseph Allen and Karin Reed crossed paths. They were both working as subject matter experts for Logitech, the market leader in video collaboration tools, but they brought very different experiences and insights to the table.

Joe had been studying workplace meetings as an academic for over a decade, publishing more than 100 articles, book chapters, and books on the topic in academic outlets. He edited two volumes related to meeting science, including The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science and Research on Managing Groups and Teams: Managing Meetings in Organizations. As a recognized thought leader in this area, his work highlights the sciencebased best practices for workplace meetings. He provides consulting services for a variety of leaders and organizations toward the optimization of their workplace meetings.

Karin had been teaching oncamera communication skills for almost a decade through her communication training firm, Speaker Dynamics. After an Emmyaward winning career as a broadcast journalist and professional spokesperson, she developed a methodology to help business professionals be effective communicators when speaking to a camera, be it in the studio or in front of a laptop. Her first book, OnCamera Coach: Tools and Techniques for Business Professionals in a VideoDriven World, debuted as a #1 Hot New Release in Business Communications in 2017.

On March 11, 2020, Joe and Karin were asked to bring their expertise to bear as featured panelists for a Logitech webinar titled Rethinking the Modern Meeting. Little did they know how much the modern meeting would change within weeks, even within days of that early March webinar. The seismic shift would have broad implications for both of them a veritable playground of new meeting science hypotheses to explore for Joe and an overnight explosion of business for Karin and her team from clients who were clamoring to get comfortable communicating by webcam alone.

The shift to virtual meetings was sudden and often traumatic for businesses across all industries. At first, rather than focusing on what would work best, businesses simply focused on what worked now. And what worked now was closing up the office and being suddenly virtual in nearly every meeting, often without the tools, the training, or the expertise to optimize the new kitchen table office. As weeks turned into months, though, businesses started to be more purposeful in the tools they used and the approach they took but still relied mostly upon gut feeling and perhaps trial and error.

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 facetoface 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.