If the above scene feels at all familiar, we can relate. When remote meetings go badly, they go really badly. Few things feel as lonely and intimidating as speaking to a screen, with unreadable faces staring back in silence. We wrote this book to help you improve the quality of your remote meetings. With a little awareness, some planning, and some practice, you can make your remote meetings effective, engaging, and a powerful mechanism for collaboration within your organization.

We hope this book enables you to think differently about your remote meetings and find new inspiration. We hope that you feel a little braver in remote meetings. That when you finish reading you have something practical that makes your meetings more productive. That your teams enjoy remote meetings a little bit more. That your meetings achieve more powerful outcomes. That your organization begins to reap the fruit of meaningful meetings. We hope that the growing trend of remote working is made healthier by the work of this book.

Organizations are built on tons of interactions and decisions, both big and small. From a few people compiling a report, to a big group deciding the budgeting strategy for a high-risk project, these moments of people thinking together combine and compound to create the complex ecosystem that is a company. If we explore this a bit further, meetings are possibly one of the smallest and most discrete units of collaboration within organizations. Meetings are also one of the most impacted spaces in distributed environments.

While 10 years ago, remote working and distributed teams might have been considered “cutting edge,” current trends indicate that this style of working is becoming the norm for many organizations. Multiple-location offices, a shift in work-life balance, regional skills scarcity, and city congestion are but a few drivers of this global trend.¹ However, many teams and organizations are battling to reach the same degree of effectiveness and satisfaction in their remote spaces.² We believe it is possible to drastically improve an organization’s outcomes by focusing on the quality of its remote meetings.

We wrote this book for anyone seeking to get more value from remote meetings, whether you’re a seasoned facilitator, a new facilitator, or someone hoping to improve team meetings. As we detangle the complexity of remote collaboration, the actions of the facilitator will be the primary focus. By zooming in on this role and specifically the opportunity that skillful remote facilitation brings, facilitators/leaders/team members will be empowered with principles and actionable methods to enhance their organization’s effectiveness.

For those who have never encountered facilitation as a craft before or used it as a mechanism to improve meeting outcomes and effectiveness, this book introduces the topic and includes a lightweight introduction to the basics. We’ll make facilitation accessible and take you on a journey of going deeper in your understanding. We will connect facilitation, organizational effectiveness, and remote working.

At times this may look a lot like a general facilitation book, and if it helps you to improve in-person facilitation, then we are really happy. We know that some of the content is equally relevant to in-person meetings, but we chose to include it when we felt it was especially relevant in remote meetings. So, bear with us if at times you think that what we are saying relates to in-person meetings.

To move beyond a theoretical understanding, we have added a set of questions at the end of each chapter; we hope that you allow yourself some time with them. Facilitation is both an art and a science and so we encourage you to seek opportunities to practice and receive feedback. If you are new to facilitation, you may find the chapter on “What is the Role of a (Remote) Facilitator?” particularly useful. We encourage you to also do a little self-exploration into the world of facilitation to supplement what you learn here.

A few disciplines have been combined in this book, particularly social psychology, neuroscience, and facilitation. Despite the theoretical background, we want this book to be practical and actionable. Each chapter has distinct sections that you can flip to for reference or skip if you want to get to the practical stuff. Chapters follow a similar structure.

Each chapter begins with a metaphor to make abstract concepts relatable. We then deep-dive into theory around the principle, often guided by illustrative stories from our experience. We believe a basic understanding of how the brain works is incredibly helpful in navigating social spaces and so each chapter has a section titled “Under the Hood.” These sections discuss neuroscientific research and its relevance to remote meetings. Finally, each chapter concludes with some practical ideas on mechanics and methods for you to begin experimenting with as well as questions to help you integrate what you have learned. As you work through this book, we invite you to invest some time reflecting on the questions we pose, to challenge some of your thinking and to arrive at deeper understandings of these spaces.

Although this book is intended to be a practical tool, we take a principles-based approach to remote facilitation. All tools and methods are only as impactful as the skill with which they are wielded. We believe that in exploring the principles behind the methods, you will gain a deeper understanding of remote facilitation and become a wiser stew- ard of these spaces. Tools in and of themselves have no power—the power and outcome (positive or negative) depends entirely on their application.

Finally, we’d like to note that no two meetings are the same; all have differing audiences and purposes. A meeting of senior executives requires something different from a facilitator than a team meeting that happens regularly. While different meetings require different strategies, it is difficult to draw clear distinctions between them. Just because there is a senior audience does not mean the meeting will necessarily be a certain way. As such, this book covers a broad range of strategies and will encourage you to use your intuition to decide what is applicable to your specific context. We encourage you to experiment with one technique at a time, seek feedback often, and be transparent when you are experimenting.

We first approached remote facilitation with an experimental mindset due to the changing needs of our organization at the time. Global expansion had led to multiple office locations and industry trends were putting increasing pressure on “remote working” being offered as a benefit to staff. Working as organizational facilitators and team coaches, we were tasked with guiding the company through this transition. One of our main goals was to make remote meetings as human and effective as our in-person ones, maintaining productive collaboration through this transition. We’re grateful that we were given the space to explore and experiment from the start.

We have since spent years studying what makes remote interactions different, looking for answers in neuroscience (What’s happening in our brains when we look at someone through a screen?), social psychology (How do group dynamics play out in the absence of co-location?), Agile (How do we prioritize people and interactions when we cannot see people?), and facilitation (What can facilitation teach us about navigating complexity?). We now specialize in enabling distributed teams to reach high performance by using a combination of adapted facilitation techniques, team coaching methods, and Agile frameworks. We speak at conferences, host workshops, consult with teams and organizations, and have founded an online learning community of international remote facilitators. We are passionate about advancing the craft of remote facilitation and enabling organizations to thrive in the absence of co-location.