Rituals for Virtual Meetings: Creative Ways to Engage People and Strengthen Relationships - Paperback

by Kursat Ozenc (Author), Glenn Fajardo (Author)

Do your virtual meetings feel like a drag? Learn how to use rituals to build trust, increase engagement, and spark creativity.

We rely on virtual meetings now more than ever. However, they can often feel awkward, monotonous, and frustrating. If you're not thrilled with your virtual meetings, rituals can help your group break through to better results by providing structures that unlock freedom. With rituals, virtual meetings can be moments that are elevated and nurtured, opportunities for people to build connection and trust while accomplishing a common goal.

In Rituals for Virtual Meetings: Creative Ways to Engage People and Strengthen Relationships authors Kursat Ozenc and Glenn Fajardo show leaders, managers, and meeting organizers how to build rapport and rhythm amongst team members when everyone is not in the same physical space.

Rituals for Virtual Meetings provides readers with practical, concrete steps to improve group cohesion and performance, including:

• How to make virtual meetings more fluid and less awkward
• How to reduce Zoom fatigue and sustain people's energy during meetings
• How to facilitate better interactions with project partners, customers, and clients
• How community leaders can engage members in a virtual setting
• How teachers can engage students in virtual classrooms

Perfect for anyone who needs to engage people in virtual settings, the book also belongs on the shelves of anyone interested in how to increase team engagement in a variety of contexts.

Back Jacket

"I didn't realize how much I needed this book until I read it."--Bob Sutton

Praise for RITUALS for VIRTUAL MEETINGS

"Whether you are an old hand at remote work or are among the millions of us who are newcomers to it all, Rituals for Virtual Meetings is packed with proven tools that make boring gatherings fun, help nervous people feel safe, enable old teams to work in new ways, and so much more. I am so grateful to Özenç and Fajardo for making my new online life more human and productive."
-ROBERT I. SUTTON, a Stanford Professor and author of the national bestsellers The No Asshole Rule and Scaling Up Excellence

"Özenç and Fajardo have gifted us a timely, accessible guide on how to use simple rituals to connect in this new virtual gathering world."
-PRIYA PARKER, author of The Art of Gathering, Host of The New York Times podcast, Together Apart

"Rituals for Virtual Meetings not only offers a complete recipe book of rituals to incorporate into your online meetings, it also talks about why rituals bring meaning and serenity to our remote work and virtual meetings."
-BETH KANTER, author of The Happy Healthy Nonprofit

"Focused, deep, and timely--this book provides much needed guidance on making human connections as remote work becomes the new normal. With just the right amount of background theory, the authors provide a wealth of practical techniques you can use right away. Easy to follow and well-organized, this volume is the go-to resource for engaging distributed teams in meaningful ways."
-JIM KALBACH, author of The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, Head of Customer Experience, MURAL

"If you are craving more warmth, connection, and order in your remote work, I have good news. You just found the blueprint. Fajardo and Özenç's work is science-based, accessible, and spectacularly useful. It needs to be read by every group trying to build and sustain their culture during this time and beyond."
-DANIEL COYLE, author of The Talent Code and The Culture Code

Author Biography

KÜRṢAT ÖZENÇ is a designer, educator, and author. He is a design director at SAP Labs Palo Alto. He teaches design at the Stanford d.school and leads the Ritual Design Lab, where he runs experiments with students and partner organizations on personal, team and human-robot rituals. His work on rituals has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Fast Company, 99U, and Canadian Public Radio. He published his first book Rituals For Work in 2019. He holds a PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

GLENN FAJARDO is a Lecturer at the Stanford d.school and was the d.school's Distributed Learning Teaching Fellow in 2020. He has been a student of virtual collaboration since 2008, working with people and organizations across six continents engaged in social impact work. Glenn was formerly the Director of the Co-Design Practice at TechSoup, a global nonprofit, and is trained in nuclear engineering sciences and public policy.