Although holding virtual meetings is not a novelty, the global pandemic has made it a regularity. Before the pandemic, virtual meetings were usually held by people who could not meet in person because of distance constraints. Today, workers who are not constrained by distance have had to make do with virtual meetings in adherence to Covid-19 safety measures.
Employees often give several reasons such as video call fatigue, reducing actual eye-contact/gaze awareness, and distractions from kids or their surroundings to defend why virtual conferences make them feel disadvantaged. This article will touch on very simple yet highly powerful behavioural causes and steps to correct them to enable highly effective virtual meetings. For this, we will use the borrowed acronym BEANs.
What is BEANs?
BEANs is a borrowed acronym from the Behavioral Change Literature, which stands for Behavior Enablers, Artifacts, and Nudges (BEANs). Harvard Business Review coined the term to help effect behavioural changes—essentially to break down barriers to innovation and build the habits and routines that lead to growth.
Behaviour Enablers are processes or tools that help us do things differently or follow desired behaviours. Artifacts are the physical things you can see and touch that support the new action or Behavior, while Nudges encourage change through indirect suggestion and reinforcement. Artifacts and Nudges act as strong reinforcement of behaviours.
The idea here is that if everyone in a virtual meeting were to follow specific or expected behaviours, these meetings would become more effective and have results close to those of in-person meetings. Despite the limitations of virtual meetings, implementing BEAN would help your organization enjoy more productive virtual meetings.
Three steps for conducting better virtual meetings using BEANs
Business owners can follow these steps to improve their employees’ work skills or company values.
Step 1 – Encourage specific behaviours.
BEAN begins by stating an ideal or desired situation starting with the prompt “It would be great if we…….”.
For instance, during a virtual meeting, one of such statements your team can ask in this step is, “It would be great if all team members actively participated in our virtual meetings, so we have more fruitful and vibrant discussions.” Such statements emphasize collective rather than individual goals. Therefore, decisions are taken accounting to the views of all stakeholders. These are what we term Desired Behaviors. You can brainstorm with your team on statements that would encourage your organization’s desired behaviours.
Step 2 – Identify behaviour blockers.
Encouraging the Desired Behavior is not as simple as it sounds. Often, there are behaviours exhibited by employees that stand in the way of desired behaviours. These are what we term Behavioral Blockers. In step 2, you would have to identify your team’s actions that block each Desired Behavior. Here use the prompt “Instead we……..”
In finding Behavior Blockers, be as specific as possible and consider actions, not feelings. Brainstorm and identify not-easily-obvious behaviours and actions that workers take that stand in the way of having successful virtual meetings. Finally, answer the question “Why do we exhibit these actions? “or “How do we spot these actions?“
Step 3 – Arm your team with BEANs.
At the final stage, you must teach your team to put in place interventions to overcome Behavior Blockers and encourage Desired Behaviors that will eventually become habits. You can create a table with three columns labelled Desired Behavior, Behavioral Blocker at the top of each column. The last column will discuss things that encourage the Desired Behavior and something that, when done, would help your team overcome the associated Behavioral Blockers. Label this section BEAN (So we should…)
Like other new initiatives, implementing BEANs to help steer better virtual meetings would probably take some time to perfect. The most important thing is brainstorming the process effectively to identify areas you need to improve. With time, you would become masters of holding effective virtual meetings to achieve your organization’s goals. Effective communication is key to every organization’s success, and hence we strongly recommend that you take time to go through this process diligently.
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