In today's digital space, remote work has transformed how colleagues collaborate and innovate. As the appeal of working remotely continues to grow, driven by the perks of not commuting, cost savings, and improved work-life balance, challenges lurk in the background. The art of hosting engaging and productive virtual meetings is the primary concern.
Research indicates that effective digital meetings take the combination of awareness about the digital workplace and the implementation of emerging technologies that drive more capabilities for working together more easily.
Leaders must ensure that the relevant people are not just present, but actively participating, whether in brainstorming sessions, one-on-one discussions, or larger team meetings.
Incorporating proper etiquette, and new ideas, such as interactive icebreakers and a well-thought-out meeting agenda, can transform these gatherings from mundane to invigorating.
This guide provides strategies and tips to enhance the effectiveness of your virtual meetings. From the initial stages of planning to the final sign-off, every step holds the potential to inspire and connect your team. Let's explore how to make the most of this new-age meeting paradigm.
Remote Meetings vs In-Person Meetings
Before diving into best practices for remote meetings, it’s important to understand their strengths and limitations as compared to the more traditional form of conducting workplace meetings. This can help organizations optimize their communication strategies.
Remote Meetings
Advantages
- Flexibility: Remote meetings allow participants from different time zones and locations to come together without the hassle of travel. This can foster inclusivity, as team members working remotely can participate equally.
- Cost-Efficient: Organizations save significantly on travel expenses, venue bookings, and other logistics. Additionally, the digital tools available today often come at a fraction of these costs.
- Documentation: Many online platforms offer recording features, ensuring that those who missed the meeting or need a recap can easily access the information.
Challenges
- Team Building: Virtual teams often face challenges in three main areas: communication, trust-building, and a perceived lack of clarity.
- Engagement Issues: Keeping participants engaged during virtual meetings can be challenging. The distractions available in a home environment can sometimes outweigh those in a physical meeting space.
- Technical Difficulties: Connectivity issues, software glitches, or hardware malfunctions can disrupt the flow and productivity of the meeting.
In-Person Meetings
Advantages
- Human Connection: Face-to-face interactions can build trust and foster a deeper understanding among colleagues. Non-verbal cues, body language, and the immediacy of the interaction often lead to more profound communication.
- Focused Participation: Being physically present in a dedicated meeting space often minimizes distractions, leading to more engaged discussions.
- Spontaneity: In-person meetings can sometimes lead to unplanned brainstorming sessions thus fostering creativity.
Challenges
- Logistical Constraints: Coordinating schedules, booking venues, and managing travel can be time-consuming and expensive.
- Exclusivity: Colleagues working remotely or from different locations might miss out, leading to potential feelings of isolation or being out of the loop.
Before Remote Meetings
Make the most out of your remote meetings with a little bit of planning and prepping. A lot of the groundwork for running a successful one needs to be done before sending the meeting invite. Here is how you can ensure the meeting serves its intended purpose and assist the team in making progress.
Do You Actually Need a Meeting?
You don’t want to be the organizer of a meeting whose participants end up feeling “This could have easily been an email”. So, even before you plan a meeting, it’s your responsibility to think through whether or not the meeting is absolutely necessary. Will it add value to all the participants involved or end up becoming a one-way street of communication?
As a bonus tip, if you’re not 100% sure, incline towards using other options that are asynchronous, such as sending a recorded video.
Invite only the right people to maximize productivity
Executive chairman of Amazon, Jeff Bezos once said, “If you can’t share a pizza among your team, your team is too big”. The same can hold true for virtual meetings, especially recurring ones.
At the time of setting them up, we tend to include everyone, even peers remotely related to the discussion. While it does not seem like an issue at the time, in hindsight, it can cause severe loss of productivity.
When it comes to deciding who to invite to a meeting, the best course of action is to look at the agenda carefully. Then, you should first include people based on how much skin they have in the game, i.e. ownership with respect to the projects that are going to be discussed. Lastly, visualize how they would be able to contribute to the meeting — and voila, you have a solid guest list!
Sharing Agenda in Advance
The difference between an okay meeting and a great meeting is careful planning. When you prepare a carefully thought-out agenda and share it with your team in advance, you give them the flexibility to organize their thoughts and come prepared with ideas and suggestions. A clear agenda gives the meeting direction and prevents it from being derailed into a casual chat.
Establish and Standardize Proper Meeting Etiquette
When you’re creating rules for your organization’s meetings, look at some established best practices and standardize them across the board.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Join the meeting from a quiet location or using a noise-canceling software
- Microphones should be on mute unless it's your turn to speak
- Turn off phone notifications and put other devices on silent mode
- When others are speaking, let them finish. If you need to talk, wait for them to pause
Being Mindful of Time Zones and Schedules
Did you know, Canada alone has six different time zones? For companies that have flexible working schedules, employees may start their days at different times even within the same country. In certain cases, this difference might span across global time zones. When setting up your next meetings, make sure you account for these discrepancies. It would be useful to incorporate relevant guidelines in the overall meeting etiquette as well.
Remote Meeting Tools
Selecting the correct remote meeting tools is not just about bridging geographical gaps; it's about fostering collaboration, streamlining communication, and ensuring team members feel as connected online as they would in a physical setting. The right tool can make the difference between a productive discussion and a frustrating series of technical glitches.
Video Conferencing Platforms
- Zoom: A popular choice for online meetings due to its easy-to-use interface, HD video quality, and features like breakout rooms. Zoom is especially helpful for larger team meetings where smaller group discussions may be necessary.
- Microsoft Teams: Integrated with the Office 365 suite, Teams is not just a video conferencing tool but a comprehensive collaboration platform. It’s perfect for those who already rely heavily on Microsoft's suite for their daily tasks.
- Google Meet: With seamless integration with Google Calendar and Google Drive, Google Meet is the go-to for those invested in the Google ecosystem and enables screen sharing effectively.
Brainstorming & Collaboration Tools
- Miro: A digital whiteboard platform, Miro is excellent for brainstorming sessions. With a variety of templates, teams can visualize their ideas, plot out project timelines, or even conduct a SWOT analysis.
- Trello: This visual collaboration tool allows teams to create boards, lists, and cards to prioritize and organize their projects. It's an excellent tool for keeping track of tasks and responsibilities.
- Slack: Beyond just being a messaging platform, Slack integrates with numerous other tools, making it a hub for team communication and collaboration. Channels can be created for different projects thus ensuring discussions are focused and organized.
Engagement & Feedback Tools
- Mentimeter: This interactive presentation software enables real-time feedback during online meetings. Polls, quizzes, and Q&A sessions can be integrated into presentations, ensuring that participants are engaged
- Kahoot!: Transform your effective virtual meetings into interactive sessions with quizzes that can serve both educational and team-building purposes.
Scheduling & Time Management Tools:
- World Time Buddy: When coordinating online meetings with participants from different time zones, this tool provides a visual representation of overlapping times, making scheduling hassle-free.
- Doodle: Instead of endless email threads trying to pinpoint a time that works for everyone, Doodle allows participants to mark their availability, streamlining the scheduling process.
File Sharing & Documentation Tools
- Dropbox: For teams that require frequent file sharing, Dropbox offers a simple and secure platform. With the ability to create shared folders, teams can ensure that everyone has access to the necessary files.
- Google Drive: Beyond just file storage, Google Drive offers collaborative tools like Google Docs and Sheets, where multiple team members can edit documents simultaneously.
It's also essential to ensure that all participants are comfortable with the chosen tools. Consider holding a brief training session or providing resources to help team members familiarize themselves with new platforms. After all, the key to an effective virtual meeting is not just the tool itself but how adeptly it's used.
Safeguard your Meeting Against Tech Interruptions
Even with top-notch technology and all the best infrastructure, there are chances of lapses and interruptions during remote meetings. You can’t control a power outage due to a massive snowstorm, right? But the show must go on. So it’s in your best interests to have safeguards in place to tap into at the time of unanticipated disruption.
For example, if you use Zoom as your primary video conferencing tool, make sure you include the dialing-in options for your invites (or have them handy if you anticipate any tech interruptions). Similarly, when using tools such as Google Docs have the offline mode enabled so that you are able to work during a network outage as well.
Turn Your Camera On
Video calls work better — there is science behind it. Humans respond better when they see people’s facial reactions during conversations. If you default to using video in your meetings, you will find that attendees are more likely to be focused, simply because it feels more intimate, just like a face-to-face interaction. This will result in improved engagement throughout the meeting as well.
Having said that, using videos during virtual meetings should always be the participants' choice because different people might have different levels of comfort being on camera. You might even have a few employees who suffer from camera fatigue.
During Remote Meeting
So, we’re finally here. It’s the day of the meeting. You’ve invited the right people, have a clear agenda, and set some basic housekeeping rules. Now it's finally time to have your remote meeting.
Icebreaker and introduce New Team Members
If you have any new joiners in the meeting, make sure you introduce them as common courtesy; or even better, ask them to introduce themselves. This will not only ease up any tension within the room but also serve as a good icebreaker.
If you need to further break the ice, maybe ask them something as simple as how their day is going, or what has been the highlight of their week. Try to make the online meeting feel as natural as a face-to-face one and pick up on facial expressions and other body language cues.
Reiterate the Agenda
Once you’ve made sure all attendees feel comfortable, it’s time to jump right into the meat of the matter. Drive home the purpose and objectives of the meeting right from the start. This will especially help the attendees who might not have been able to go through the agenda.
Assign Roles
During every virtual team meeting, you need to assign different roles as you would for an in-person meeting. You should have a timekeeper, note taker, someone to ensure you’re sticking to the agenda, and so on. Depending on the nature and size of the meeting, one person is often tasked with all these responsibilities or they are shared among two or three colleagues.
However, you do have to make sure that you’re rotating these responsibilities among different team members. Otherwise, it can get pretty mundane for the same people to do the same thing at every meeting. One fun way to do this is to run a lottery at the start of every meeting to assign roles.
Limit One-way Presentations and Monologues
Just like in-person meetings, virtual meetings can get pretty lethargic to attend. However, body language cues are hard to come by digitally and you might not realize when the attendees are tuning out. So, it won’t hurt that the meeting organizer tries to limit any sort of one-way communication such as a long slide deck, presentations, monologues, or reports.
As mentioned earlier, asynchronously sharing such information might turn out to be more effective since your team members can choose to view it at their convenience within their work schedules.
Give Participants the Option to Drop Off
We get it, you had to invite eleven people to your bi-monthly marketing retrospective meeting, including folks from other functions and pods. But, they don’t have to feel compelled to attend the entire hour when they’ve already given their updates right at the beginning.
When holding virtual meetings, encourage participants to drop off when their time is done.
Keep Attendees Engaged with Casual Conversations
Keeping people engaged during a virtual meeting can be a daunting task. The good news is that there are many conversational aids to keep people engaged during your remote meetings.
Here are few tips:
- Convey highly technical or dull topics through visual aids such as charts or graphics.
- Encourage your virtual team to brainstorm and collaborate over problem-solving.
- Chat about something non-work related and be sure to include the introverts.
Avoiding Sidebar Discussions
This is something that virtual meetings share with in-person ones. Despite having a clear agenda and purpose in mind, meetings tend to digress into different tangents. Avoid doing this to ensure your virtual meetings are more productive, and more importantly, don’t stretch beyond the pre-decided time limit.
It might sound tough, but it’s as simple as sticking to the agenda, noting down sidebar discussions, creating breakout rooms specific to different topics, or just assigning time limits for each action item.
After the Meeting
You did the setup right and had a fantastic meeting. But what you do after the meeting should not be underestimated either.
Here are some tips to help you with ensuring overall success.
Outline Action Items
You likely had someone to take down minutes during the meeting. This is when they come in handy. When you’re reaching the end of your meeting, make sure you outline the action items with clarity, including the scope of work, owner, and other details. Let all the participants know what’s expected of them in terms of the next steps. You’d be surprised how something so simple can boost productivity.
Run a Virtual Water Cooler Session
Missing the water cooler talk after a productive meeting? That’s something you can incorporate into your virtual meeting as well. After the end of every meeting, give people time to stay back and have the same types of conversations, if you sense the need to.
Sending Out Meeting Notes and Follow-ups
People jump from one meeting to another throughout the week, which makes it easy to miss details easily. As a best practice, make sure you or a designated note keeper is always sending out meeting notes to highlight progress and set follow-up objectives. Feel free to include additional valuable information on anything discussed during the meeting as well.
Maximize Your Productivity Through Effective Remote Team Meetings
The first step to being productive in your organization’s remote work style is to really understand how to make your virtual meetings more productive. This will help you take your team from good to great.
Disclaimer: Borderless does not provide legal services or legal advice to anyone. This includes customers, contractors, employees, partners, and the general public. We are not lawyers or paralegals. Please read our full disclaimer here.
