With FacilitatePro teams collaborate, contribute ideas and evaluate issues at a time and place convenient for them. Team members can work from home, from a hotel, or in offices thousands of miles apart. All they need is a computer, modem, and access to the Internet or their internal intranet. Project teams secure an electronic meeting room in Facilitate.com's virtual conference center, where the project leader sets up an agenda of topics for discussion. The team leader solicits input from participants, organizes the input, distributes a voting ballot, publishes the results and requests input for the next steps. Action plans keep everyone on track. FacilitatePro provides:

• A survey tool for easy data gathering
• An electronic meeting room with customizable agenda with topic links
• A brainstorming tool for rapid attributed or anonymous idea generation
• A categorizing tool for organizing and synthesizing ideas
• A sophisticated voting tool for prioritizing, decision making and consensus building
• An action planning tool for documenting next steps and responsibilities
• Manage the group dynamic with options for both anonymity and attribution.
• Report and export tools for documentation, communication and further collaboration

Supplement face to face meetings Imagine arriving at an on-site meeting ready to take action and make decisions. Prior to meeting face to face, the team leader sets up a web meeting to solicit input from participants, identify the high priority items and construct a focused agenda with much of the initial information exchange completed. During the on-site meeting time is spent making critical decisions and cementing agreement on appropriate actions.

In the words of the Team Leader…

“I am responsible for a project with a work team dispersed across the globe. I’ve got to build trust, communication and focus across time, distance and cultural barriers. To supplement our weekly status meeting, I use FacilitatePro to set up an ongoing web meeting to share daily updates. At their schedules permit, each member of my team logs onto the meeting over the web and enters his or her contribution to this week’s critical topics. Team members build on information already there, attach supporting files and request information from their colleagues. I’ve got the information I need to manage my project, and my team can focus on delivering results without overload from meetings, conference calls or emails.”

View an example of an online meeting agenda.

Want to know more about how to how to make your virtual teams more effective? Contact us to try a different kind of online meeting — it's on us.!

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