Tips, resources, and services for those adapting to remote work environments

1. Using Digital Channels in a Crisis: Community Best Practices for Connecting and Collaborating
Resources
1) Tips to increase engagement
2) Resources and reading
3) Services from The Community
Roundtable

2. Alex Blanton: Tips to Increase Engagement
• Treat the audience as participants before the session starts
• Sound checks, visual checks, chatting them up
• “Seed” the audience with a couple of active participants
• Turn on your camera while you start the session
• Ask the audience to interact right away – use the first 5 minutes to teach the audience how to use the interactive
features of your software
• Examples: Poll, whiteboard
• Use peer pressure by making participation a requirement for moving on
• “We have 35 people in the session, and 16 of you have completed the poll. Once we get to 30 we can continue…”
• Model interactive behavior by being present in the session and intervening when necessary
• Sometimes I ask a question about 10-15 minutes in, just to show people that it’s okay to do so
• Make the IM something to pay attention to
• Ask questions, answer questions, provide context, provide content, @mention people, like messages
• Vary your interaction requests
• Voice, chat, checkmarks, polls, whiteboarding, screen annotation, etc.
• Complete your slides in the moment
• Maybe: Have a controversial statement on the slide, and say “Now I’m going to type True and False on the screen, and I want you to
put a check-mark under one word or the other to show what you think, then we’ll discuss.”

3. Further Reading and Resources
1. Managing Teams that are Suddenly Remote – The Community Roundtable Blog
2. Working in a coronavirus world: Strategies and tools for staying productive –
Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet
3. 20 Tips for Working from Home – PCMag
4. How to Manage Remote Direct Reports – Rebecca Night, HBR
5. How to Manage Remote Teams Effectively – Society for Human Resource
Managers (SHRM)
6. Creating an Online Classroom – Stanford Online Highschool
7. Five Can’t Miss Community Programming Ideas – The Community Roundtable
eBook

4. Services from The Community Roundtable
https://the.cr/SOCM2019
Research On-Demand Training
TheCR Network
Membership
Social Learning with Peers;
including hundreds of
reports, training, and
weekly roundtable calls
Online community and
engagement training and
exercises
(available for licensing)