How To Engage A Virtual Team | Quick Quotes Activity

How to Engage a Virtual Team: Quick Quotes Activity

Make a Deeper Connection by Sharing Powerful Words that Resonate with You and Your Team

It’s amazing how engaging quotes can be. I had a mentor who used to say “a choice of words is often a choice of worlds.” A single statement or quote can shift our whole perspective. In this chapter, I’m going to share how you can use quotes to really engage your group while remote. 

Also, if you jump ahead to the Getting Started section, I have written my framing and directions for this exercise, which is called Quick Quotes. You can read along and adapt that script to fit your group and personality.

This exercise is a proven strategy to increase engagement online and offline. While you can certainly tailor it to your group, I’ve tested the activity with thousands of leaders and educators. I help some of the top organizations on the planet make connection easy, so this isn’t something I just pulled out of my pocket and thought might work. It’s been field-tested and tailored for you. And the impact it has on engagement in a given moment is immense.

Keep in mind that none of the exercises (or any activity for that matter) is a solution for chronically low morale or engagement. But they all can provide a boost and an attention reset for sure! 

Sharing Quotes to Create Connection

You only need Google to lead the exercise. However, I’m going to be utilizing and sharing a variety of quotes from a deck of cards we created called We! Engage Cards. As the name implies, this is a really great resource to engage your team. 

You can order the physical deck, but you don’t have to. You can download a free digital version at www.weand.me/free. If your team members don’t have We! Engage Cards, send this link to them as well ahead of the exercise. 

I’m going to be inviting people to choose quotes. Then we’ll have some discussion around them in a creative, gamified way. The Quick Quotes exercise is really great for creating connection before content. Yet it can also be used as a closing or debrief exercise too. 

Often when we try to get engagement from a group, it actually borders on manipulation. We’re trying to get team members to do something that they may not feel like doing. But when you can create and foster a culture of connection, it’s different. Having a clear intention for doing any activity and sharing it with the group goes a long way toward this end. 

The Quick Quotes idea offers a bit of disruption in your typical flow of meetings. Meetings are usually filled with words, right? We say a lot in any given meeting. In fact, if somebody is talking most of the time in a 60-minute meeting, they might say roughly 9,000 words when speaking at the average rate of conversation, which is about 150 words per minute. (That’s according to the National Center for Voice and Speech.) Only this is a monologue.

That’s one reason we love quotes. It’s a way to get to the point. A short profound statement can make you stop and reflect. Whether the quote is particularly insightful, witty or outlandish, a well-crafted sentence causes our brain to process things a bit differently. 

Below in italics is the actual phrasing I might use when speaking to a group to help frame and lead this exercise. In between, there are some facilitator notes that offer helpful variations or ideas as well. 

Getting Started

To begin Quick Quotes, if you’ve got We! Engage Cards, grab a handful with quotes on them. Alternatively, if you don’t have the cards, you can Google quotes. Choose a quote that represents an idea you care about or believe in.

If your quote is on a card, hold it up to your camera to share. If you Googled it, type the quote in chat on Zoom or whatever platform you’re using. What I’d love for you to do as a group is to fill the chat thread with quotes. When you’re meeting virtually, everyone can speak at the same time by typing. By scrolling up the chat you can also “listen” to what everybody has shared.

Feel free to go completely off script once your group has shared quotes. You can have people break out and have discussions about what was shared. But what I’ll invite you to do is a little quote swap.

Find a quote that somebody else shared that you believe in and connect to in some way. Then what I’d love for you to do is unmute. Read the quote that stuck out to you and tell that person what, in particular, resonates with you about the quote they chose.

One of the cool things about sharing what we really believe in is that we find other people who believe in the same things. That’s much more engaging than discovering surface-level commonalities, like that you live in the same state as someone else. Learning about what others value is an amazing way to make deeper connections.

There is something neat about seeing quotes in written form. But the impact really lands when they’re verbalized in a group. We’re taking wisdom, something shared recently or long ago, and we’re bringing it back to life. This idea, too, that a choice of words is often a choice of worlds can come alive when we share and reflect the quotes that really resonate with us.

Other Activities to Increase Engagement

This is the last of four chapters on activities to engage virtual teams. I hope this was really useful to you. 

I’d highly recommend also checking out the previous three chapters which highlight other exercises to increase engagement. These are great activities to improve connection with your virtual team.