Konektis Meeting Improvement Tools

Overall Approach
We suggest following a six-phase approach to making video and hybrid meetings more
productive, engaging, inclusive and better for wellbeing:

Key Stages
1. Learn Video Meeting Signals (VMS) - to enable meeting participants to communicate and
engage more effectively – breaks the viscous cycle of non-reaction (see later)
2. Master team chairing and passing to ensure a free flow of conversation and more inclusivity
3. Agree some Video Meeting Values (VMV) to help break common bad habits which include
too much multitasking and turning your video off (see suggested habits later)
4. Improve meeting facilitation skills - building team leader confidence and skills at preparing
for and facilitating online meetings and learning to use our online meeting facilitation
toolkit
5. Understand different meeting types and how best to run different meetings.
6. Built your meeting toolkit; improve the use of other video meeting tools and build team
member meeting skills; experiment, try out new ideas.

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 TM
Video Meeting Signals (VMS )
Here are the core 12 video meeting signals:

I agree/I like that/good news I want to speak I feel for you/send you
kindness

I disagree/I don’t like that I have a question Me too/I share that with you

I’m not sure about that I have a different view Handshake/hug/well done

Time’s up I want to build on last point You are on mute/too quiet

Top Tips for using video meeting signals

• Use the signs boldly • Make sure your body/arms can be seen
• Hold each sign long enough to be noticed • Smile

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Suggested Meeting Habits

Once your team have learnt the core signals and practised team chairing and passing, we
recommend using them for at least 5 meetings to help then become a new way of working.
This is most likely to be successful if the team also discuss and adopt a set of meeting habits.

Client Examples, data and testimonies

Mark Smith, Market Development Director:

‘Paul worked with a leadership team at LexisNexis to introduce the video signals approach to enhancing engagement
and participation in virtual meetings. He took a high-performing team and improved meeting efficiency and
communication while at the same time providing the opportunity to deepen relationships. Paul's open and honest style
and research-based methodology worked really well for us and I would recommend anyone considering the approach to
give Paul a try.’

Heather Coupland, Programme Delivery Manager, Oxford Innovation Cornwall

‘This has made a massive difference to our team meetings. We're actually able to communicate without
talking over each other. This is a big issue in Zoom meetings - when do you speak, how do you keep
everyone engaged, how do you avoid some people dominating? We use the team chairing and passing
technique, which works really well. Our meetings are much more inclusive. We agreed new behaviours and
now run our meetings in a completely different way, sharing responsibility for chairing. As a team leader
this has been transformative.’

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The vicious circle that underpins poor video meetings
In many meetings participants don’t get enough of a reaction from others, so they contribute
less and become uninterested. They think others aren’t listening to them or are doing
something else. They begin to multitask as well, magnifying the problem. We feel the need to
multitask because we are often in back-to-back meetings. Often the team have not agreed
effective meeting habits or rules for video meetings. To make things worse, many meetings
are not well chaired, have poor agendas and overrun. All of this is exhausting, feels
unsatisfactory and is not good for wellbeing. Then we take our stress to the next meeting.
Video meeting signals and team chairing and passing can help break this cycle.

Who are Konektis?

Konektis are experts in online meetings; visit www.konektis.org.

Paul Hills: Founder of Konektis, experienced consultant and meetings expert. Honorary
Research Fellow UCL, Fellow RSA/Good Work Guild:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-hills-277b97/