One way to make your meetings more visual and interactive is with an online whiteboard like FigJam. Use it to brainstorm ideas and get teammates’ ideas for features and improvements. Some people love to talk, while others are more quiet and observant. However, everyone should feel comfortable contributing to a meeting regardless of their personality style, so find inclusive ways to involve your quieter team members. When working remotely, you never know what can happen—a dog barks, a child runs into your room, the doorbell rings.
By holding your meeting in a quiet workspace (not a cafe) and using noise-canceling technology, you can limit distractions and how much they affect your coworkers. The diagrams you can create may even prove helpful for training new team members https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ or when used as a point of reference when completing performance reviews with remote employees. It’s the ability to manage conflicting tensions—rather than always seeking cohesiveness—that is the most predictive factor of team performance.
So how can we make these gatherings as effective and productive as possible? In this article, we’ll cover some basic best practices for virtual meetings and look at some remote meeting software options organizations should consider as well. Virtual meetings are online gatherings powered by specialized video conferencing software and meeting tools. They let dispersed teams scattered across different regions and time zones work together through video conferencing technology, without needing to meet in person. 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.
During the remote meeting
That way, folks can fast forward the video to the spot where the relevant info is instead of having to watch the whole thing. Using tools like Hubstaff, you can plan your meetings and take the guesswork out of who is supposed to be doing what. For recurring meetings, start the meeting with a review of TODOs of last meeting. Learning to do this is extremely important for running a good meeting.
Planning an icebreaker is a great way to strengthen coworker bonds, stimulate better brainstorming, and create an atmosphere of inclusivity during your remote team meetings. If you’re part of a remote or distributed team, you probably understand the struggle of finding a meeting time that works for everyone — especially when your teammates are in different time zones. In this post, we’ll cover seven best practices you need to know in order to run effective team meetings with distributed teams. Staying for long hours in front of a computer screen can lead to burnout. Moreover, long hours spent on virtual meetings can lead to virtual meeting fatigue.
secrets of engaging remote meetings
On a remote team, you’re less likely to be caught tracing your hand in your notebook, but the chances of having ineffective meetings only increases. Video conferencing apps often have time limits on free plans, meaning every wasted minute is precious. It’s even easier to talk out of turn when you can’t read body language in a virtual meeting. Small talk can eat up half of the meeting because everyone’s a hermit the rest of the day. After years of remote work, many of us are still learning how to run a successful virtual meeting.
Give your full attention to the speaker and the meeting itself. 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. This way, you can see exactly how much focus time you’re getting. Meetings aren’t always unproductive — but they do inherently take time away from focused work. If you’re scheduling meetings (especially recurring meetings with large headcounts), proceed cautiously.
Working remotely is still a relatively new concept for some people. And everyone on the team should understand the company’s policy in order to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. The biggest challenge of remote meetings is to keep people engaged and interested. Feel free to overcome this challenge using the guidelines and tips above. But it is important to remember that when it comes to attendees’ engagement, it really helps to think outside the box and give your own solutions a try. Finally, the best way to make your team meetings better is to ask attendees how the meetings are going — the ultimate act of stewardship.
Give people things to do
If the team isn’t used to speaking up, try changing your approach. For example, encourage people to use the chat function to ask questions or rotate who leads the meeting. Use humor and informality to get people talking, but just like in-person meetings, don’t force anyone to speak or put anyone on the spot. Another important part of following up is asking attendees how well the meeting went, and if they have any feedback to make your team meetings more productive.
Use metrics to measure engagement — uploading the videos privately to YouTube, or any other service will give you metrics about them. You will see if anyone is watching those recordings, which ones are most popular, etc. This way you will be in the know and able to make data-driven decisions. Maybe some of those recordings will be useful for the newcomers in their onboarding. In Spain, there is even a term coined for the overload of meetings — “reunionitis” as if it were a disease. Before exploring the main tips to follow in 2023, it is crucial to understand exactly what you may need to resolve.
They know the agenda and the drill, so they’re perfectly capable of doing it. Carlo Borja, Online Marketing Team Lead at TimeDoctor also warns from including everyone in every meeting, because they would end up just staying silent. It will be great if people just do their email and not speak.
Of course, for such a meeting to be productive you need all the participants to have read the memo. 1) Zoom.us — Organize video conferences, share your screen, and even record the meeting. Using a meeting minutes tool like Fellow.app will help your team stay in sync and know exactly what everyone should be doing — even when you’re distributed across the globe 🌎. That’s why, if you manage a distributed team, you should always prepare an agenda prior to the meeting.
Some managers feel the need to schedule additional check-ins to make sure their remote team members stay productive and have the resources they need. While some team members might need the additional support, others could feel overburdened and micromanaged by this tactic. So resist that urge—talk to your team first about a cadence that works for them. When establishing rapport and building trust with employees through remote meetings, it’s important to let your team know what’s actually expected of them.
With these tactics in your toolbox, remote meetings will run more smoothly, and you’ll know exactly what to do the next time your pet interrupts a meeting. The following tips will help make virtual meetings more interactive, productive, and effective. Keeping your team engaged is at the heart of a productive and happy workplace. Whether you’re managing a fully remote or hybrid team, you can start applying some best practices to your team meetings and make the most out of your time together. Finally, one more thing you can do to keep employees engaged during your virtual meetings is to ask specific team members for their opinion. This is a great habit you can adopt, especially when one alpha individual tends to take control of your discussions, or when part of your team is concentrated in one area.
- For recurring meetings, start the meeting with a review of TODOs of last meeting.
- Getting a grasp of some of the challenges your remote team is facing helps you make adjustments to your meeting calendar that will have the greatest impact.
- But in addition, decide as a team that you are going to disagree, talk about the elephant in the room, make tough decisions and keep moving forward through this crisis.
- Virtual meetings allow teams working remotely to come together and share ideas, collaborate, and brainstorm the same way they would in person…but from anywhere.
- This approach is commonly used at Rentbits — Dan Daugherty (CEO) shared that they use a combination of Slack and Skype for all remote meetings to engage employees.
They can then zoom out to compare them side by side before making a final decision. As you’ve led remote meetings, have you ever felt like members of your team are not paying attention or that they are distracted by incoming messages or whatever’s happening at home? The best way to counteract this issue is by asking employees to participate. Strive to keep every remote meeting collaborative and engaging for your employees.