How to include everyone in online meetings

Online meetings can attract much more diverse groups than in-the-room ones. But it’s one thing to attract a diverse audience, and quite another to include everyone in the conversation.

Here at Rees McCann we’ve specialised in creating inclusive, highly-participative online meetings, events and training since well before the pandemic, and many of our clients are international humanitarian organisations. So we’ve plenty of relevant experience!

Here are our three top tips for making sure that everyone’s included in your online meetings.

Tip 1: Design for active participation

From the ground up, we create events with inclusive participation in mind, using our Web Events That Connect model, Liberating Structures, and other approaches that create space for multiple voices. Normally, that means reducing the time to be used by ‘expert’ speakers.

Tip 2: Use multiple communication modes

Within our events, we’ll mix things up so that people have choices about how they can contribute to the conversation. There’ll usually be lots of small-group discussions, because most people feel comfortable speaking out loud in those. But we always make them optional: paradoxically, that makes people more likely to join in. In big-group discussions, we’ll structure things to include both spoken and written contributions (though we try not to have a chat stream running in parallel to a whole-group discussion – it’s hard for many people to follow both). Music, movement and drawing will often appear, too.

Tip 3: Build in time to think

Free-form big-group discussion favours those who like to think on their feet, and can express themselves clearly in the language of the meeting. That’s not most people. So, we’ll be as clear as possible about the meeting’s topic; we’ll send out reading material in advance; we might set up an asynchronous discussion space to get the conversation started before the meeting, itself, and continue it afterwards.

And is there anything else?

Of course, there are many more things you should to do to make your online meetings diverse and inclusive. For example:

• Invite the right people, so that those who attend can be heard. That means making active choices and excluding others
• Ask about specific needs (such as language translation) and meet them where possible
• Do your best to overcome digital disadvantage and ensure that everyone joins your meeting from a quiet place, with a decent internet connection, a webcam and a headset
• Actively encourage everyone to keep their camera on as much as possible. Camera-shy participants are often forgotten
• Have a facilitator (or two!) who’ll encourage the quieter people to speak up, the louder ones to step back. Inclusion doesn’t happen by magic, especially when your group is very diverse
• Be willing to learn from your groups. Gather feedback and seek to improve from meeting to meeting, from event to event.

And, here’s one more tip. If at all possible, avoid ‘hybrid’ meetings, where some people are in a room together (sharing an internet connection) and others are fully-remote, one-person-one-device. Hybrid meetings are always challenging to design and run because they always favour some kinds of participants over others. In-the-room-together people often forget remote participants. On the other hand if two or three people are huddled round one laptop, whilst everyone else is a solo participant, the huddlers will miss out on their ‘fair share’ of airtime. For more about this, see our ebook Successful Hybrid Gatherings

• What have I missed? What else is works to support diversity and inclusion in your online meetings and events? What questions do you have? Please comment below.