Virtual vs. Face to Face; What’s More Effective?

Fun Cooking Team Building

With the advent of virtual meetings via Skype, Cisco conferencing, etc…, some meeting planners proclaimed the day of Face to Face (F2F) meetings has gone the way of the Dodo bird! In other words extinct!  And for a while, lots of evidence was out their supporting that theory. But like most things that have to do with any change, especially when it’s connected to new technology, there has been a swing back to what has been traditionally most effective for business communication, face to face meetings.

Relationship building has been the #1 outcome requested from our team building clients lately. These team building experiences have become the glue that emotionally bond work teams together and help them create a solid foundation of relationship and trust. Most of the organizations that work with us say the same thing, our people work virtually on almost all projects and they need face to face time to re-establish a connection with each other. And because that face to face time is limited by busy schedules, they are always looking for more organized and effective team experiences that go way beyond the old time cocktail mingling or brief meal conversation “catch-up”.

Below is a great article that I found in SpeakerNet News by a colleague, Ian Percy who also speaks on team building in the workplace. Here are some of his thoughts on the subject of virtual meetings vs. Face to Face meetings:

Creativity research finds F2F trumps virtual meetings — Ian Percy

The idea of working virtually and not having to actually meet people is quite popular, if controversial, these days prompted by Yahoo’s banning of virtual work. MeetingsNet had an interesting article suggesting that F2F generates significantly more creativity than virtual connections. Maybe Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer is right since the company’s future depends on innovation. In the experiment people were given various creative tasks but some worked together over the phone, some by video and some face-to-face. The two virtual groups were the same when it came to the number of creative ideas generated. However the F2F pairings had 30% more ideas. When it came to the quality of the creativity the F2F groups again scored better but just below a level of significance.

Here’s what’s interesting—all participants reported about the same level of “feeling” and “enthusiasm.” In other words the researchers don’t know why F2F works better. That would make for an interesting discussion—a F2F one, of course. Personally I think it’s due to the influence of subtle energy that most people have yet to accommodate in their thinking. All of the trials happened in the same physical location which means the energy was pervasive and co-mingled. I predict much greater differences if the virtual trial partners were actually spread out across the country instead of in the next room. The lesson is to not be so quick to go the virtual route, especially if the outcome is mission-critical.

“Y Do You Care?”

“Y Do You Care?”

Your first quarter goals are wrapping up quickly. How are you fairing?

Here is the thing about goal setting, for both you and your team, its all good! What I mean by that is that whether you have already hit your marks, or coming close to your objectives, or way-off on achieving your outcomes, its up to you to determine your next move.

First determine if your goal is sound to begin with (read on to the next story), then if it is, choose the next direction you’d like to go. So if you’re underproducing according to your 1st Q plan, check out what needs to be done to get on track. Many times its just a “tweaking” of your action plan to assist in getting what you want. According to John Locke, the author of “How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months”, when he was younger and in insurance sales, he always hit his policy sales numbers. Unlike most of his colleagues who set very high, arbitrary numbers that were never reached; his numbers reflected the amount of action that he took to generate those sales. In other works, if his weeks numbers where lower than expected, rather than change the sales goal numbers, he’d look at how many presentations he needed to do. It got to the point that he could accurately predict how many sales of insurance policies he would do weekly just by the amount of presentations he scheduled. So paying attention to your actions can be just as important as setting the goal.

But the fuel that propels your goals forward is a powerful component called the “why” or finding your purpose. At CEO Chef, we find that this component can easily be assumed because obviously you wrote these goals because they were important to you or your business or career. But the action of taking the time to write them down is huge in determining your “why”. In fact this can be the number one determination to whether you achieve your goal or not!

Start by rereading your goals and immediately begin writing why this goal is important to achieve, or as I said in the title, “Y Do You Care?”. Take the time to dig deep, below the surface to get to the core of your “why”. It’s the reason behind the reason that is the real motivator, the thing that gets you up early to start and to stay up late to complete. Its the rocket fuel that propels you forward and gives you that rock solid focus to never give up. The “why” is your personal purpose and is connected to your core identity of who you really are. Make this the real reason to why you are achieving the goal that you set forth. Some people call it the goal of the goal and because of that, I believe that your purpose must be stated before your even set your goals.

So once you got that “what” clear, make sure the “why” is just as clear, but not just in your mind, but also in your heart!

How Do You Communicate?

In my latest book, “Teamwork: Recipe to Your Business Success”,  I reference NLP (neuro-linquistic programming) as it shares communication tendencies that vary between people. They talk about the acronym VAK as the different tendency breakdowns that mean:
V for Visual,
A is for Auditory and
K is for Kinesthetic.

The idea is that if we understand how a person tends to communicate, we can best predict their behavior and give us critical information that heightens our awareness of what this person is trying to say.

Now with saying all of that, I have observed that we all have these VAK tendencies within us all but in varying degrees. It’s when we’re stressed or pressured is when we tend to focus on our “go to” tendency.

For instance, my wife,  whose tendency is what we call “high visual”, when her communication center’s focus is almost all visual, and when an emergency hits (aka “stressed situation”), she goes into what we call “visual deafness”. I’m sure you know someone in your life like that, the more you raise your voice, the more they can’t hear what you’re saying. In fact, the more you increase your volume, the more the stress levels go up and, well, you got it, it’s even harder to help this person.

So what’s the solution? Well for a visual or high visual tendency person, go visual! With my wife, I’ll use signage, waving hands, bright red stop sign, anything that gets her attention. Then once I have her attention, I’ll calm her down enough to be able to speak with her in a calm and relaxed manner.

This solution is not perfect, especially if you don’t have a sign handy, but at least I understand why she isn’t responding to my voice and don’t take offense which usually means my voice would get louder and racketing up both of our stress levels. So knowing is half the battle to alleviate any hurt feelings later on.

What’s do you think your personal communication tendency is and how does that impact you with the people closest to you?

Can You Hear Me Now…?

I’m just as guilty as the next person in my communication. I walk around totally in my head and when someone asks me a question like, “How are you?”, well I’m off to the races! Next thing I notice is that poor person who was kind enough to ask me how I was, was now a victim of my regurgitation of the mouth.

So I came up with an exercise challenge for myself and for our communication/leadership workshop attendees. Focus on what we call “active listening” for one day and see what you learn from it. Now if one day seems too long for some of you, chunk it down to a time that works for you. A couple of hours, fifteen minutes, just start where ever you feel comfortable and track what happens during your “active listening” exercise.

So this is how it works:

Commit to talking almost always in questions. Like, “What do you think…”
Restrain yourself in over-talking and while the other person is speaking, respond with words like, “I see”, “That makes sense”, “Yes”, or “Go on”. Some people suggest repeating back phrases of what you’ve just heard like “repeating back phrases, I see”.
Focus your eyes on their face, eyes and/or mouth. Don’t let yourself be easily distracted from what’s going on around you, give them the gift of you being present.
Always thank them for sharing and mean it!

Prepare and expect something wonderful to happen. I don’t know what it will be, but something always happens when it becomes about them and not about you.

What “tricks” do you use to stay in the conversation?

Why Build a Highly Effective, High Functioning Team?

You can’t blame us, it’s not our fault!
We’ve been trained from all through our scholastic careers to be the best as an individual. Our motivation is as an individual, our assignments are mostly individual, and our grades are as individuals. It’s no wonder that when we start to work in the real world, they ask us to work together as a team to maximize our results and we scoff at the idea, make a half-hearted attempt or just don’t know how to do this!
I’m not blaming the school systems, they have enough on their minds than have us blame them for one more thing. They on the most part, do a great job preparing us for the business world. So it’s our duty to address the 500 pound gorilla in our work places, our businesses and even in some of our families –
WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO WORK IN TEAMS!

To be prepared to compete in a world economy you must have high performing, effective teams to take your company there! And today, we are all apart of a world economy. Even if all you do is sell product on Ebay, your selling your Aunt May’s tea set to someone half way to Australia. You’re in a world economy whether you planned on it or not.  And the only way you can achieve the visions for your organization is by activating the most powerful asset at your disposal, the people in your teams!

What are you doing to better your team’s effectiveness today?

Top 3 Ways to Employee Change

Change is always a touchy subject with most everyone, especially in the workplace. The three top methods to change are the following:

1. Impact Change
2. Discovery
3. Spaced Repetition

 Impact changes are unforgettable. It’s a time in your  life when something shocked your system, like being fired, a sudden death, a surprise party, winning the lottery, anything of that nature. Lessons learned from an “impact change” can be deep and lasting, but from a training perspective, impact change is hard to plan so therefore, difficult to use in the training arena.

Discovery or “Ah-ha moments” are also challenging to plan, but are very effective in the long-term retention. It’s like the commercial for a famous tomato juice beverage, “I could’da had a V-8!” (smack your hand on your forehead simultaneously for the full effect!)

Than the last method to change, spaced repetition. Also very effective as the other two methods but has the advantage of being plan-able. It’s the way most of us learned our  multiplication times tables (oh, the countless hours writing times tables for Sister Madeleine, punishment for speaking in public. Now I get paid for doing the very same thing )

Which one of these three methods have you experienced in your own life and how effective or how has it served you?

Fun – The Secret Team Ingredient!

Smile'n Salad

Summer time still evokes feelings of fun, exploration and more fun. Even to this day, the closer we get to June, the more I want to hear the final school bell to sound and the beginning of summer vacation (aka fun time!) to begin.

This is the secret ingredient we use when we create our cooking team building for you, a fun experience that anchors you back to the time that brought your team together. Fun rips down the emotional walls that we put up; fun transports us to a whole other place; fun transforms our emotions in a heart beat, allowing us to forget what was just “stick’n in our craw!”

Fun is sometimes associate with being a kid. Well if being a kid helps me in being more relaxed, more productive and more successful in my endeavors, then slip on my Red Ball Jets (whoops, I think I just aged myself  ), dust off my Spider bike’s banana seat and let’s have some kid fun!

What’cha going to do for your kid fun?

Your Big Dance!

We’re right in the middle of what is called “March Madness”, “The Big Dance” or officially, the NCAA Basketball Tournament! Why this is important is not just how well our “brackets” are  doing (I’m afraid, not as well as I’d hoped  ) but rather, it’s one of the great celebrations of the potential of team!

Once the selection committee has put together the first round of play, everyone is speculating who will overcome lack of talent, lack of prestige and buck all the odds makers to become the “cinderella” team that surprises us all!

That contagious energy of hope, encouragement and connection is a wonderful thing. When it’s used in the business place great things can happen. We all want to hire that superstar that’s going to boost our business to the next level. But just like the Big Dance underdogs, winning is not relegated to just the superstars headed to the NBA draft. The winners are the teams that with the proper coach, are supremely focused on the task at hand and with the power of team, show the country what the realization of potential looks like. And at the end of the day, they have transformed themselves with that ultimate connection with each other that will reside within them forever!

What was your Big Dance? What team opportunities did you have that still reside in you right now?

I’ll admit, I can be a basketball nut at times and love the moments when teams lift themselves beyond the level that’s expected of them. But isn’t it those moments when we become inspired ourselves and do the unexpected that transcends what we or others thought was possible?