Design Thinking Techniques to Enhance the Online Meeting Experience
According to the Harvard Business Review, the average worker has attended 13.5% more meetings since the COVID-19 pandemic, with many held online. Given the Federal government’s partial shift to remote work when feasible, it is increasingly important to consider how teams can enhance the effectiveness and engagement of online meetings.
Design Thinking can help. Design Thinking is a problem-solving approach involving empathizing with others, defining their needs, and testing out solutions. Using Design Thinking to enhance the online meeting experience for government teams is essential to optimizing time, enhancing collaboration, and building trust among team members.
Framing is key to achieving meeting outcomes, and this begins before the meeting is started. Crafting an agenda with a clear purpose, goal, and discussion points can help a team stay on time and topic.
Once it is time to start the meeting, consider employing a design thinking technique such as an Empathize Exercise to set the tone for the session. Empathize Exercises get team members in the mindset of key stakeholders – this can be especially beneficial when the purpose of the meeting is problem solving. For instance, start the meeting by placing team members in breakout rooms to discuss how the problem affects the stakeholders’ emotions. Encouraging empathy at the top of the meeting emphasizes the purpose of the meeting and encourages innovative problem-solving that directly benefits stakeholders.
Online meetings offer collaborative tools that are not available face-to-face. This presents an opportunity to apply design thinking techniques and have more engaging and motivating meetings. To iterate on solutions in an online meeting, utilize platforms such as, which enables team brainstorming. For example, Miro (or tools like it) allow a team to place sticky notes on an online whiteboard. In the context of problem solving, placing a problem statement (“How might we…?”) at the center of the online whiteboard and allocating time for team members to add potential solutions, comments, or questions can kickstart a more interactive session and bring forward new ideas and diverse perspectives. This is just one example of approaches that allow team members to build upon each other’s ideas promoting an environment of sharing and collaboration.
Design Thinking elevates many facets of government work, but it is particularly useful to drive engagement within teams. While many miss the face-to-face enthusiasm of in-person meetings, online platforms open new doors that teams could not take advantage of. By integrating Design Thinking techniques in online meetings and encouraging teams to keep key stakeholders at the center of our problem solving, we become better team members, leaders, and consultants.
