NetHui 2020: The Power of Play in Virtual Meetings (Caelan Huntress)

• Hello, this is Caelan Huntress and today I’m gonna tell you about the power of play in virtual meeting. If you’d like to play a game with me on Twitter, you can find me @caelanhuntress. Or since my name’s kinda hard to spell, you can go to the hashtag for Twitter game and go to latest or just use the hashtag for the conference #NETHUI2020 and I’ve just started a game over there and you can come play with me. Or you can stay here for the next few minutes and I’ll tell you about why play is the antidote to Zoom fatigue. You know about Zoom fatigue, right? It’s that state that psychologists call, continuous partial attention where you’re not paying attention to any one thing because your attention is split over so many different things.

00:43 - I can always tell when everybody’s tuning out because their eyes glaze over and their glasses have this white screen show up as they’re surfing something else. And to get everybody’s attention back, I just say hey, does anyone wanna play a game? Let’s take two minute, who wants to play a game? Everybody say yes because we’re craving authentic connection. There was a study done by Pellegrini in homes in 2006 and they analysed the attention spans of elementary school age children. After 20 minutes of recess, their attention spans were longer and they were able to comprehend more complicated pieces of information. They tried to repeat this experiment after a physical education class and they didn’t get the same results. Movement isn’t what helps.

01:32 - Play, self-directed, creative play can increase our cognitive load. As Melissa Dinwiddie says, when it’s used strategically, play is how we make work more effective. This is the whole underlying premise of the Pomodoro Technique. Pomodoro is the Italian word for Tomato and the inventor of this technique sent his tomato timer to 25 minutes and he worked diligently for 25 minutes and then he took a five minute break. And there’s some different ways that you can break down the alternating between work and play, but the science is clear, if you want superior results, you need to alternate your state.

02:15 - That’s why I try to incorporate play into every meeting and I like to start my meetings with a game because meetings continue how they begin. If you start your meeting fumbling with the tech and trying to remember the agenda, your meeting will continue in confusion. But if you start your game with play, with interactivity and with fun, your meeting will continue that way. As the leader of a meeting, your energy leaves the group energy. Everyone brings their own energy to the meeting and then they look for the dominant energy in the room for how they should model their own energy.

02:53 - It’s the difference between being a thermometer and a thermostat. A thermometer can measure the temperate, but a thermostat sets the temperature. Now when you play a game, you increase the energy in the meeting. There was a study done by Forrester and they found that users will watch videos for 10 to 20 times longer if they’re live as opposed to pre-recorded. And the reason why is that there’s something special about the present moment.

03:24 - When you share synchronous time, if you’re providing a synchronous communication, your competitors are YouTube and Netflix and let’s be honest, it’s really hard to compete against them for attention. But if you leverage, the unique advantage of synchronous time of sharing the present moment, then instead of communicating to everybody one-on-one, getting maybe six connections. If everybody’s paying attention, with that same small group, you can foster 21 levels of connection. This is why Mad Libs are so interesting when you’re playing them, but they’re boring later. Have you ever looked at an old Mad Lib from a year ago? The story’s not funny, it’s kinda bizarre, but it’s not as enjoyable as when you picked the words with a group and then you read it aloud.

04:13 - By collecting contributions to your meeting and incorporating them in the content, your contributors are invested in the outcome. I like to play Mad Libs during my meetings, I like to do scavenger hunts where I say everybody get something with a price tag on it and show it to the camera, everybody find something borrowed and show it to the camera, because it creates contribution. I’ve got a whole lot of games listed in my Zoom Host Checklist, which I’ve got the link over on Twitter, it’s at get.caelanhuntress.com/zoom and I’ve got a couple dozen games in there with step by step instructions for how to facilitate them in your meetings. And if you subscribe to my newsletter to get this checklist, you’ll also get my free one hour on-demand masterclass, How To Be A Better Zoom Host.

04:57 - So go on over and get the Zoom Host Checklist and have some fun for the rest of NetHui, let’s go play some games. .