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

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.

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.