What Readers Have to Say,
"In terms of cost-effective investment,
you will recoup the purchase price in the first 5 minutes of your first meeting!"
I facilitate lots of online meetings and they can be almost impossible to do well. Michael Fraidenburg’s book zeros right in on practical, useful, insightful, and creative tips that I have already begun to use to better engage participants and make productive use of everyone’s time. In terms of cost-effective investment, you will recoup the purchase price in the first 5 minutes of your first meeting!
Dale Burkett
Sea Lamprey Program Director, Great Lakes Fishery Commission
Great practical advice… As an experienced facilitator, I’ve struggled with the transition to increasingly using the virtual meeting space. For example, it’s a challenge to keep on-line sessions focused on outcomes and participants actively engaged… Given the amount of human resources we spend meeting on-line, the book is a great value to maximize effectiveness of this resource.
Rich Lincoln
Founder and Senior Advisor Ocean Outcomes
Mastering Online Meetings takes many of the skills excellent meeting facilitators use and applies them to online meetings, which in many ways, are more challenging than in-person meetings. I’ve experienced a lot of awkward silences in response to questions during conference calls, so I found the prompting questions offered to deal with silence in online meetings to be especially helpful. This should be required reading for anyone who will lead online meetings.
Steve L. McMullin, Ph.D.
Past-President, American Fisheries Society
Michael Fraidenburg’s new book Mastering Online Meetings is excellent… Michael is a master facilitator, a remarkable teacher, and a darn good writer.
I am looking forward to sharing Michael’s book with my colleagues and clients. Many organizations are committed to enhancing collaboration while also reducing their carbon footprint. So, they are dramatically increasing their use of online meetings to forego travel costs and eliminate fossil fuel consumption. Mastering Online Meetings will soon be a go-to design guide for successful online meetings in organizations that are committed to a more sustainable future.
Brian Stenquist
Professional Facilitator and Founder of Meeting Challenges
I have struggled how to handle many difficulties when conducting both online and in-person meetings. Michael Fraidenburg’s book has a wealth of great ideas on how to deal with common and not-so-common difficulties. I plan on consulting this book often.
Dr, Scott Bonar.
Professor, University of Arizona
One of my favorite things about Mastering Online Meetings is that it is geared specifically toward that, online meetings. Mike couldn’t have predicted our rapid shift to a work-from-home culture when writing this book, but his timing couldn’t have been better. Many ideas in M.O.M. are just plain sound meeting tips—doing plenty of pre-meeting planning like tip number 7, “Set Expectations—Clearly and Early”, for instance, or tip number 10, “Why Are We Meeting? Name the Meeting Deliverable.” And the book is broken into sections that any facilitator will recognize: Before the Meeting Tips, During the Meetings Tips, Evaluation Tips, and After the Meeting Tips, to name a few.
But even within these recognizable tactics for in-person meetings, Mike provides ways to gear these tactics to an online platform. Here I’m thinking specifically about tips like number 31, “Pre-decide How You Will Collect the Input from Meeting Participants,” where Mike goes into both the “why?” and the “how”—online chat platforms and asynchronous input, for example, or number 32, “Mind Mapping—Your Online Flip Chart” which is followed by a discussion of Google Docs.
Whether you choose to read MOM from front to back, or skip from section to section based on your own needs, you’re sure to find tools you can put to use right away. New facilitators will learn meeting best practices, seasoned facilitators will learn how to take their best practices online, and, most importantly, meeting attenders of all stripes will benefit from better communication, clearer expectations, and fewer Zoom meetings that #couldhavebeenanemail.
Emily Gray
Facilitator | Mediator | Writer | Editor
This book provides practical, logistical support for hosting digital meetings along with motivating, inspiring guidance on how to best engage participants. The pairing of effective, time-tested facilitation tools with thorough explanations of modern adaptations make this book the perfect companion for anyone who is embarking on planning digital meetings, as well as facilitators who are looking for a few new tools to add to their toolbox.
Carly Thornburg
Mediator
As someone who facilitates online meetings at least
once per month, I’m always looking for ways to increase participant engagement. This book provides a one-stop-shop for tools and techniques that spark active meeting participation.
Laura Johnson
Communications Coordinator for a State Agency
You had me at tip #1!
Michael Fraidenburg's book is a game changer. It is a must-read for anyone who struggles with how to run more effective online meetings or wants to run their online meetings even better.
As a consultant who spends most of my time in online meetings, I'm often frustrated with technological issues, lack of participation and follow-though, and how to get more done in less meeting (and re-meeting) time. This book is organized and written in a way that makes it easy to find topics and offers tips and resources that you can begin using immediately. I've already starting using the tip on how to easily include information visually with free online tools.
Betty Lochner
CEO, Cornerstone Coaching and Training
I've been helping organizations plan and design better online meetings for years, but Michael Fraidenburg's new book, Mastering Online Meetings, has taught me a lot. His 52 detailed tips cover pretty much every topic a planner and leader of remote meetings could ever want, from discovering the best combination of tools (many of which are free!), why you need to treat every agenda as a workplan, and dozens of tips for keeping participants actively engaged - and much more. I highly recommend this book for remote meeting newcomers and experts alike. Your meeting participants will thank you again and again.
Nancy Settle-Murphy
Guided Insights (www.guidedinsights.com)
If you’ve ever been in a bad online meeting (and, let’s be honest, who hasn’t), this book is for you. I participate in online meetings several times a week, and most of them aren’t as effective as they could be. In Mastering Online Meetings, Michael Fraidenburg gives 52 tips to make your online meetings as good as they can be. Some tips are strategic (use storytelling to engage the audience) and some are practical (use a really BIG screen), but all are sure to make your next online meeting better.
Ben C. West, Ph.D.
Director of Strategic Partnerships, and Professor University of Tennessee
The geographical scope of work of my job my work life has always required a large dose of online meetings, typically among parties with strongly held conflicting viewpoints. I’m rarely satisfied with meeting outcomes, often feeling that nothing was really accomplished, or that whatever was accomplished could have been done by a simple email exchange, or—and this is the worst—realizing that the meeting was essentially a repeat of one in which no one memorialized the outcome. My frustrations aren’t limited to online meetings, of course, but for a variety of reasons, online meetings are more challenging than in-person ones. So I was very interested in what this book had to say.
I’ve been a Fraidenburg fan for many years, having attended his classes and read various pieces he has written. His “Death by Powerpoint” is one of my favorites. I’ve always appreciated not only his insights, but also his down-to-earth, friendly, reassuring, and practical approach to helping people implement his ideas. This book is vintage Fraidenburg. In a mere 130 pages you find a ton of great ideas, some very simple, and some quite detailed, presented in a way that makes them all seem like things you can do at whatever pace works for you. Incremental improvement is just fine. Be patient. If an idea doesn’t work at once, try it a couple more times before you give up. And online meetings pose challenges that can’t be totally eliminated; don’t have unrealistic expectations.
There is much more to this book than the title suggests. Although much of the book applies directly to online meetings, such as use of tools for online flip-charting, many tips apply to in-person meetings as well, especially those that drive home how much of a meeting’s successful depends on how invested the meeting organizer is before, during, and after the meeting. And the book really seems to present a lot more than 52 tips. Some of the 52 are quite simple, but others, when Fraidenburg fully unpacks them, provide a huge amount of food for thought. The book is a bargain. Even if you implement only a couple of simple tips that work for you, the book will pay for itself many times over.
Craig Busack, Ph.D.
I have been actively learning tools of the trade from this author for many many years and have had the privilege of watching him expertly facilitate large groups, both in person, and online. Michael brings a wonderful creativity and level of insight so desperately needed in this time of heightened used of online meetings and communication. So many good tips for both experienced and novice meeting facilitators to keep people engaged, productive and enjoying their online meetings. Thank you Michael for this wonderful resource!!
Marijke van Roojen
LM, CPM, MPH