GoToMeeting offers additional employee training and demo-sharing solutions, not to mention video conferencing hardware. A meeting with a vague purpose can lead to confusion and wasted time. To make things easy for everyone, prepare a formal agenda with all the issues to be discussed in the meeting, and sort them according to your business needs. Send this agenda at least 24 hours before the meeting, and confirm that everyone received it.
This article delves into the world of virtual meetings by offering practical tips to boost engagement; and introduces a few ideas to make your next meeting more fun. Additionally, we highlight several common mistakes that should be avoided to ensure a successful virtual meeting. The best way to communicate during a virtual meeting depends on what’s happening in the meeting and who’s participating.
Stay on track
In an in-person meeting, it’s easy to try and include everyone because you’re all in the same room. It’s surprisingly similar to including everyone in a remote meeting because everyone is in the same virtual space. However, hybrid meetings present a challenge, but there are ways to be more inclusive in hybrid and remote meetings. After a virtual meeting, you should share takeaways and action items to be addressed with attendees. Consider whether you also need to send the meeting recording, transcript, and minutes or schedule a follow-up meeting if necessary. After years of remote work, many of us are still learning how to run a successful virtual meeting.
So, if you’re making presentations to explain the annual report or growth of the marketing team, then make presentations more appealing. If you can break the ice and make the environment more welcoming, then the meeting wouldn’t be an unpleasant one. Whereas, if your company has more than 500 people working and you’d want to conduct many organization-wide meetings, then Zoom would be the best pick for you. Different kinds of meetings are affected in different ways by remote work. Reflect on the actions the team should start doing, stop doing and continue to do with this template.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long a virtual event should last depends on the nature of the meeting, but anywhere between 20 and 60 minutes is a good timeframe to aim for. A meeting that is too short won’t cover all the topics and issues that need to be addressed, while meetings that drag on too long make it easy for participants to zone out or lose focus. For example, you can set up a customer feedback room where you keep a link to your CRM database, chatbot data, and the results of your customer surveys. During meetings to improve the customer journey, your team can access all the data they need in real-time and work together to create a more refined customer experience. You can even track time to a specific task to ensure you stay on target. Hubstaff lets you create projects and tasks within those projects.
Many best practices for an online meeting are the same as they would be for an in-person meeting—they just need a little tweaking. Using tools like Hubstaff, you can plan your meetings and take the guesswork out of who is supposed to be doing what. Studies show CEOs attend an average of 37 weekly meetings and spend 72% of their work time in meetings.
The diagrams you can create may even prove helpful for training new team members or when used as a point of reference when completing performance reviews with remote employees. We’ve all been in those meetings where a few people dominate the conversation. Whether the meeting is remote or not, try to be a better listener by being the last one to speak. Not only does it encourage greater team participation; it may allow you to learn something new.
For example, you can ask everyone about their most convenient time. Then, compare the various times to identify whether you can create a schedule that works for everyone. If not, you can choose something closer to the time they gave you. Your role as meeting facilitator is to ensure that the meeting how to run a effective remote meeting runs smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. Lastly, be wary of labouring a point with one other attendee that’s unlikely to soon garner a conclusion. Rather than taking up everyone else’s time, use a phrase like “let’s finish this on another call,” so the rest of the team can move on.
Staying in touch with remote employees by email, text, instant messaging, phone calls, and virtual team meetings is a start. But what the entire team really needs is a shared understanding of how processes work and how responsibilities are divided up. The good news is that you can run effective virtual meetings if you stick to the best practices. This article will walk you through what to do before, during, and after a virtual team meeting to ensure it’s highly effective.
- Different time zones, communication gaps, and technical issues are the greatest problems in virtual meetings.
- This gives participants the chance to add their own agenda points, research the topic, and prepare what they want to say—and ask—in advance, saving valuable time.
- This can lead to lots of wasted time spent trying to deal with technical clutter rather than getting actual work done.
- Another fundamental piece of a productive remote meeting is the space from which you run said meeting.
- Be friendly, polite, and punctual —behave as you would in an in-person meeting.
Doing so will keep the meeting on track and leave attendees feeling like they were a part of something meaningful. It’s extremely easy to deviate from your initial purpose and find yourself discussing irrelevant material, especially during a virtual meeting. However, at times, making the work-related meetings fun can go a bit overboard.
