Council Post: Five Steps To Help You Conduct Better Virtual Meetings

With the rising impact of the coronavirus, virtual conferences have become the norm as businesses strive to remain productive while abiding by social distancing rules.

Virtual meetings are not entirely unfamiliar to businesses, but it is becoming evident that these meetings will be a core part of businesses moving forward. Management needs to find strategies to make meetings effective and easy to execute.

Here are five simple strategies that you can implement to have better virtual meetings.

1. Plan out the meeting.

When planning a virtual meeting, answer the following questions:

• Who will be attending the meeting? Identify the participants of the meeting, and communicate your expectations to them beforehand.

• When will the meeting be? Coordinate with team members to find the best time. If you have employees working in different time zones, schedule the meeting at a reasonable hour for everyone.

• What will be on the agenda? Come up with an agenda, and share it with the participants in advance so that they can better prepare.

Holding a meeting without a purpose or any type of organization can lead to time wastage, unproductive discussions and fewer accomplishments.

2. Check your equipment and technology.

Determine the technology that would make the virtual meeting possible. Check with your team members to ensure everyone has the right equipment, such as headphones, a working computer, a phone and a webcam. Then, keep the following steps in mind:

• Help your team prepare. Will participants be required to appear on video during the meeting? Let them know in advance. If it’s a videoconference call, make sure everyone has access to a camera.

• Choose conferencing software. Is there a specific application that users will need to download to attend the meeting? Encourage them to download and install the software before the meeting.

• Test the software. If you are using a new system, test it before the day of the meeting to confirm that it is working as required. Learn how to create the meeting, share your screen, mute microphones and add users to the call. Additionally, encourage the participants to test their equipment in advance to avoid last-minute technical difficulties.

• Set up reminders. Schedule reminders for the meeting on your online calendar. Also, set automatic reminders to be sent to the participants a few hours before the meeting.

3. Keep participants engaged.

Virtual meetings might be new to everyone in your team. Therefore, make an extra effort to keep the participants engaged. Here are some ideas you can follow to encourage engagement during the meeting:

• Allow casual conversation. Small talk naturally happens at the start of a meeting. Allowing remote participants to get into some small talk can build camaraderie and help everyone ease into the meeting.

• Encourage participation. Create opportunities for participation during the meeting. As the meeting’s host, it’s your job to allow people to ask questions and to guide the conversation.

• Ask questions. During the meeting, check in regularly to ensure participants are attentive and following the discussions. Ask open-ended questions to spark discussions.

If your in-person meetings were engaging and featured plenty of discussions, make sure that is not lost with virtual meetings.

4. Conclude with clear calls to action.

Meetings should all be about reviewing past actions and setting future goals. Every meeting should end with a set of action items to be completed before the next meeting.

• What needs to be done? At the end of each meeting, you should have concrete action points.

• Who will be in charge of executing? Participants should know the roles they will have to play to ensure the action items are completed.

• What resources are needed? Any resources that will be needed to execute the action items should be discussed and agreed upon during the meeting.

A virtual meeting that ends with no clear call to action has failed to achieve its objective.

5. Share the meeting notes.

After the virtual meeting ends, make a summary of the important things discussed, and share the notes with the participants. Capture the action items identified in each agenda, the person or teams responsible for them, and the delivery times. An even better way is to record the meeting so that you can transcribe it to ensure all essential points discussed in the meeting are captured.

Conducting virtual meetings comes with its challenges. However, preparing well in advance will ensure you have a well-attended, engaging and successful meeting. Follow the strategies above to conduct successful virtual meetings.