For most of the years I’ve been in business, helping clients meant leaving my home office and delivering onsite services.
With conferences cancelled and many people beginning to work remotely, my first thought was, “It’s going to be awfully quiet for the foreseeable future.”
My second thought came as I pondered this question:
How can I be useful to my clients in the near term?
The answers came quickly. Then I wondered whether my clients knew these services were available. This is why I wrote this article.
4 Ways I Can Help You Right Now
(1) Moderate Your Meetings
Many of you know me as the guy you hire to facilitate tough planning and problem solving meetings.
Those meetings just got tougher because now you are trying to pull them off virtually.
It would be better if everyone in the meeting can focus their brainpower on the issues that need to be addressed and not waste any energy figuring out the whole remote meeting thing.
This is how the process works:
- You and I talk about your goals and agree on the meeting objectives.
- I draft an agenda and a facilitation plan, and run it past you.
- You schedule the meeting using the meeting platform of your choice. (If you want I’ll set it up. My preference is to use Zoom.)
- I facilitate the meeting making sure the group stays on track and meets its goals. I also balance participation.
- Within a day I send you written notes of all the major decisions.
(2) Coach Your Leaders
You’re not going to hire a facilitator for every meeting. For more routine meetings, your managers will need to lead them.
This will be a new and uncomfortable experience for many of them. They need to learn these skills.
Your instincts might be to have them take a course online to build the skills. They probably think they don’t have time for this.
That’s why I’d like to help them one-on-one. I’ll sit in on a meeting or two, and then provide feedback and actionable tips they can implement. It’s a learn while doing approach that your managers will appreciate.
I’ve detailed my remote meeting coaching service at The Meeting Hero site.
(3) Deliver Custom Webinars
When you have an employee development goal you need to meet, I can help by building and delivering that remote training for your employees.
It’s also possible to do hybrid learning for your employees who are still working onsite.
Some topics I can imagine might come in handy right now include:
- Staying Cool When Stress Is High
- Setting Up a Productive Workspace at Home
- Effectively Participating in Conference Calls and Remote Meetings
- Establishing an Effective Home-Based Work Routine
If you have a need related to interpersonal skills, remote productivity, or leadership; I’m ready to develop and deliver a program for you.
(4) Provide On-Demand Courseware
Last year I partnered with an award-winning e-learning company. That means I can now provide you with more than 400 microlearning courses on demand in the following areas:
If you need to send employees home, and you’re worried they won’t have enough to do to stay busy, now would be the perfect time for them build skills.
It’s also a great time to have them knock out state-mandated sexual harassment training. I have a terrific program that meets the requirements of any state, including these six which have mandated training.
Flexible Help
I’m going to do my best to stay home not spread the virus, but I want to do more than that. I want to help.
If you’ve got a project that can be done remotely and need someone to get after it, reach out to me. If I’m not the best choice, I may know the perfect person for you.
