At time of writing, there is no ban on large meetings here in the UK (although such a measure has just been announced in the Republic of Ireland), and the advice from the NHS is:

wash your hands with soap and water often - and do this for at at least 20 seconds
always wash your hands when you get home or into work
use hand sanitiser gel if soap and water are not available
cover your mouth and nose with a tissue or your sleeve (not your hands) when you cough or sneeze
put used tissues in the bin straight away and wash your hands afterwards
try to avoid close contact with people who are unwell
do not touch your eyes, nose or mouth if your hands are not clean

Although the UK Government is not currently advising that meetings in general be avoided, it may do soon. In any case, the way you run meetings may need to change. Some participants may be self-isolating or subject to travel restrictions, so your meeting may need to be hybrid (some people in the room and some not) or you may switch to an entirely virtual meeting. Of course we’ve been here before, for example with the ash cloud in 2010 stopping flights over Europe. Here are the tips I wrote then. (The section on tools will be out of date, but the general approach still stands.)

Virtual meetings

As with face to face meetings, the starting point has to be the aims: what are you hoping to achieve through the meeting? There's a download on this here.

The next thing to consider is how people will be joining the meeting: what technology will they be using? Will some people only be able to listen and talk, or will people be able to watch and contribute through typing? What is the phone signal or internet access like where they are? The tools available to you may be amazing, but if your participants can’t use them then there will be frustration and disappointment all round.

If your participants can use them, then these tools are worth looking into:

Zoom - video calling with breakout rooms, a recording option, and a simultaneous chat function. You can also screen share: useful for adding in slides or other visuals, or keeping a running note of key points from the conversation in a way that everyone can see.
Google docs - if you need to shared editing while you talk.
Virtual whiteboards, for the times when you might be doing sticky-note brainstorms and clustering in real life, include: Lino, Padlet, MURAL, GroupMap.
For prioritisation, Mentimeter or slido make it possible to poll the participants in different ways.

Have a rummage around the Meeting Toolchest to see what else you might want to use.

Some of these tools are free, or have free basic versions or trial periods. Others you will need to pay for. Many thanks to the facilitators who took part in the IAF England and Wales and London Facilitator Jam hybrid meetup on Facilitating Hybrid Conversations recently. I couldn’t go, but the chat was saved and I gleaned a lot of these tools from it.

Gaining and sharing experience

Here’s a description of a session I ran in 2011, and here’s a lovely description of being a remote participant in a hybrid event by virtual facilitator extraordinaire Pilar Orti, of Virtual not Distant. Pilar has also featured virtual Open Space on her podcast,

If you want to gently increase your own experience of virtual meetings, then join one of IAF England and Wales’s monthly virtual coffee meetups, to see how zoom works in practice.

CPD and Connection

As well as moving to virtual meetings, IAF Global’s Chair, Vinay Kumar, suggests using what may be a quite period in your facilitation life to boost your CPD and connect with others.

Anytime we get professional time that we had not planned for it can provide us an opportunity to improve our own knowledge and skills. Time to catch up on reading, learn new facilitation methods, participate in some of the amazing IAF webinars, meetups and other learning opportunities. Share your experiences and learn best practices from others. Or you could write the case study of the facilitation impact you made recently and consider an application for the Facilitation Impact Awards.

His full statement is here.