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Meet will now allow you to raise your hand during meetings - and lower it. That's about it - can it really offer that much value the next time you are presenting to your client or brainstorming with your engagement team? Here is how: Give everyone a voice, without disrupting big meetings.
Hand raising is available to all Meet participants (internal and external), on the web and on mobile. It is not recorded.
Feature requests: Meet finger snapping™ and Meet chalk throwing™
How it works
How it works
As a participant
As a participant
Hand raising is a devilishly difficult feature to use. It works like this:
Click the big button to raise your hand.
Click it again to lower your hand.
When you raise your hand, all other people on the call will briefly see a message.
As a moderator
As a moderator
When people start raising hands for whatever reason, jump over to the "people tab" (1 in the screenshot below). A new section will show those people who raised their hands.
You can lower all hands (2)
You can smack individual people's wrists (3).
When you lower someone's hand, they see a message.
Some great use cases
Some great use cases
Hand raising can give everyone a voice - even people who do not like to speak up in front of a crowd.
Show of hands: You can ask your audience simple questions - "can you hear me?", "who ate too much turkey last week?" etc. This is better than blurting out.
Forming a queue: When you are in a big Q&A session, encourage people to raise their hands, then call them out. Hand raising conveniently puts people in order in which they raised their hands. You can also use Meet's Q&A feature, but sometimes you want people to elaborate on their questions.
Asking for volunteers: If you need one person to do something, many can volunteer and you can pick one.
Voting: "But I have only one option... I need thumbs up, thumbs down, smiley faces, frowny faces and Clippy to express myself!" Really? Do you know how the pros do it?
"Everyone in favor say Aye! and raise your hand." Screenshot. Lower all hands. "Thank you. Everyone not in favor, say Nay! and raise your hand." Screenshot. Lower all hands. "Thank you. The ayes have it. Also, next session will be recorded, sorry for the silly screenshotting business, should have thought about that. Have a nice day."Polling: Voting, as described above, is for spontaneous votes and when you need to know who voted for what - maybe you need to go and discuss in breakout rooms (perhaps you voted on who wants to discuss what issue).
For all other issues, Meet offers polling. Click the activities icon (also known as pyramid-square-ball or the new icon) and create a poll. Polls are anonymous during the meeting. So polling is not a great use case for hand raising.Pro tip: Checking who is the Meet owner: Only the Meet owner can lower hands :-) This will be the person who will receive recordings, for example. In case you are unsure who owns the Meet, if it really matters, this is how you can find out.
The full cast of Holgers.
Starting out: First raiser advantage
Starting out: First raiser advantage
As with every new feature that involves a social setting, it may be weird to introduce. Instead of fabricating artificial scenarios, how about just starting to use it yourself? Let your underground change ninja skills shine and help the team around you.
As a participant
As a participant
The hand raising feature is best used while everybody is muted. When there is a more formal setting, a Q&A session hogged by someone who will not let others speak, a Q&A session where nobody will speak - click the "raise hand" button if you have something to say. The moderator will inevitably call you out.
As a moderator
As a moderator
You may build in opportunities to use the new features by leveraging one of the scenarios above - either spontaneously or at a fixed point, perhaps by creating a slide in your presentation, say for a vote.
A good idea might be to have an ally in your audience that tries out the feature at one point - during Q&A, for example.
Perhaps some of these ideas can be leveraged for many of the recently launched Meet features. I'm curious to see adoption of this very simple, but useful feature in the next Meets that I am inevitably attending. Watch out for me hitting that button. Thank you for reading!
#meetPublished 2020-12-03 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2020-12-03 by Holger Matthies.
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