Almost all forms of meeting and interaction can be moved to a virtual format with no loss of effectiveness, if trust and good relationships are established and sustained.
Joe Nandhakumar and Richard Baskerville (Trusting Online: Nurturing Trust in Virtual Teams)
Virtual collaboration is our term for describing online meetings: highlighting their remote (virtual) nature, but also the importance of them being interactive and collaborative. Too often the case, virtual meetings are a broadcast where a select few people talk at the rest of the group.
We’ve seen the value of collaborating virtually for a number of years, so we were well prepared for the recent move to virtual working because of COVID-19. We hope our experience of working in this space can inspire others to develop more collaborative approaches to working virtually; ensuring more enjoyment by participants and a better quality of outputs.
Benefits of virtual sessions
The benefits of collaborating virtually:
- Building relationships, connections and trust more effectively than via telephone or other communication methods
- Enabling diverse group of people to be involved in activities for quality improvement than might be possible using only physical meetings – leading to a wider range of ideas and higher levels of engagement
- Engaging patients, families and community leaders in ways that will feel less intimidating than going into healthcare building for meetings
- Significantly lowering costs of connecting, slashing time and travel costs and reducing the need to abstract colleagues from their clinical duties for improvement meetings
- Overcoming the negative impact on the environment of bringing people together physically.
Useful resources
We have collated some useful resources that can help you as you move from face-to-face to virtual meetings.
Top tips for virtual meetings and events:
If you’d like to know how we can support you developing your virtual collaboration capability, then please contact us.