ThemeEngagement & energy
CardCard 32 of 63
Questions5 to explore
StepOpen the session

Personal Presentations

Participants introduce themselves

Personal presentations online take longer than you expect and flatten out faster than in a room, so design them with intention.

Asking participants to introduce themselves is standard practice, but the round-robin version (everyone speaks in turn for a minute each) is particularly painful online. Attention drifts during other people's introductions when there is no shared space to hold people in, and by the time it is your turn you have forgotten what the first three people said.

The goal is for people to feel seen and for the group to have a sense of who is in the room. There are better ways to get there online than going around the box grid one by one.

Online, specificallyThe round-robin intro that works passably in a room becomes a patience test online because people have no social reason to stay focused while others speak; structured or visual alternatives work far better.

In a remote session

The same building block as it plays out online: how experienced facilitators tend to handle it when the room is a screen. Illustrations to react to, not rules to follow.

Use chat or a shared board

Good facilitators ask people to type one line about themselves in chat or add a sticky to a board (name, role, one word for how they are feeling). This is faster, everyone participates at once, and the facilitator can highlight interesting answers.

Give intros a prompt

Instead of 'introduce yourself,' they ask for something specific: the city you are joining from, the last project you finished, or one thing nobody in the room knows about you. A constrained prompt produces more interesting answers than an open one.

Keep verbal intros short and purposeful

If verbal round-robins are important for this group, they cap them tightly (thirty seconds, name and one thing) and model the length themselves. They do not open the floor and hope for the best.

Questions to plan around

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

How much time have you actually allocated for introductions, and is that realistic for the group size?
What do people genuinely need to know about each other for this session to work well?
Is there a format for introductions that suits this group better than speaking in turn?
How will you handle the participant who uses intro time to speak for four minutes?
Will introductions create a sense of group identity, or just consume time?

What trips people up online

With groups over ten people, verbal round-robins are almost always too slow online; switch to chat, a board, or a prompted poll.
People tend to follow the length set by whoever goes first; if you want short intros, model one yourself and be explicit about the time.
Introductions that are only functional (name, role, department) miss the chance to build the social connection that actually helps a group work together.