Virtual meetings include gatherings like virtual board meetings or remote team meetings–which can be highly productive and engaging for a number of participants. The combination of technology and well-defined objectives can go a long way to keeping remote employees happy, engaged, and productive. 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. Skype’s screen-share allows them to view product development while they add notes and updates into Gitlab project management boards in real time. Remote meetings can be just as effective and productive as the ones you conduct face-to-face.
Remote meetings can get messy — especially when one person speaks on top of another or you don’t know what the other people in the call want to talk about. You can also use advanced tools like Krisp’s AI meeting assistant to capture meeting notes and summaries, which you can easily share. Most organizations have adopted a policy from 2023 that only essential people should join in on meetings. This is a move to promote productivity, as the team’s time is quite valuable. With proper preparation, running and managing a virtual meeting becomes much easier.
Check out action items are in progress
So let’s dive right into how you can run successful and engaging remote meetings by trying out these best practices, sequentially. 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. Use a remote meeting agenda tool like Fellow to create reusable meeting templates, remind your teammates to add talking points, and share the agenda one hour before the meeting. Once you’ve agreed on a day and time to meet, it’s very important to commit to a set of rules that will help the team make the most of each meeting. You can send these rules as an email, or add them as talking points in your first team meeting agenda.
- It may sound silly, but he was exerting his presence — he was well known and respected.
- Hence the company policies are not really remote-friendly, we just do what we used to do in the office only remotely.
- If your meeting only needs all participants for a part of the time, do that first, and tell those people to feel free to leave when they are no longer necessary.
- In addition to bringing the team closer together and increasing employee satisfaction, this virtual water cooler chat can get team members prepared to participate more during the meeting.
- Utilizing the technological tools at your disposal helps increase involvement and engagement.
The video camera doesn’t show every speaker throughout the meeting. Some software shows an icon or picture of who is involved in the meeting, but it is good practice to introduce everyone attending. Managers at OnPoint Consulting post pictures of attendees on the wall when the video is not used, because people are more willing to participate and are more open when they know who’s on the call.
Give your colleagues—and yourself—a break if anything does happen to disrupt the meeting. This means you don’t have to worry about searching for the right tabs or sending invitation links once your meeting is already underway. 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. Depending on the nature of your work or the type of goods or services your company produces, real-time awareness can reduce duplication of work.
Making remote meetings better with Lucidchart
Don’t just start the main discussions immediately after the meeting begins, as you may need to acclimate the participants to the new environment. Here are a few virtual meeting icebreakers that you can start with. It is paramount to create an effective meeting agenda beforehand. A well-crafted agenda outlines the precise topics of discussion, the time allocation, and the expected outcomes.
To encourage collaboration and engagement during remote meetings, allow individuals to either speak up or ping in their contributions to the conversation online. For introverts, this might make participation and sharing new ideas easier. How can we expect our remote meetings to be effective if we never talk about what makes for a good one and what we should avoid? With your attendees, periodically create mutual expectations about what makes for a good remote meeting. Surface expectations, like “let’s keep all contributions to no more than 60 seconds so everyone has a chance to speak,” and give colleagues a chance to reply. To combat meeting fatigue in longer meetings, it’s helpful to set norms about when folks can take breaks, stand up, and stretch.
Before logging on to your discussions, prep yourself with some (or all!) of these best practices. As with any meeting, it’s easy to get carried away and have an efficient 30-minute virtual meeting turn into a three-hour meandering catch-up session. Put a hard stop time on your meeting and put a time limit on each person when they need to share updates to keep everyone on-task. A simple way to keep your virtual meeting attendees engaged is to give each person a role as well as responsibilities that goes with their title. One person might be the note-taker, one person might be tasked with a brainstorm for the next session, another might be a report-generator. Give each person a job so they’re more inclined to stay involved and to participate in the conversation.
This ensures that every participant understands whatever is expected of them and will adhere to the stated rules. Nevertheless, it would be prudent to navigate these issues to ensure productive and engaging interactions. For example, a team of UX designers should be able to share their wireframing tool directly in the meeting room so their teammates can view and interact with a new app design prototype. 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. To encourage greater participation and involve multiple people, use a digital whiteboard.
The golden rule of teaching, storytelling, and even virtual meetings is “show, don’t tell.” Rather than simply talking about a new product design, pull up your wireframe so all participants can see it. This is a more effective way to communicate ideas that will keep participants engaged. In this article, we’ll share our recommendations https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ for setting up and running successful and focused virtual meetings. We’ll also show you how Switchboard can help you work smarter with side-by-side collaboration and permanent meeting rooms that store all the documents and apps you need in one place. Conducting successful team meetings remotely will always be a learning process.
All top best practices for remote meetings of 2023 focus on increased productivity, enhanced communication, and inclusion. Having Krisp by your side can elevate your meetings, enabling you to focus on the most important aspects of your virtual gatherings. You can generate short and focused notes or dive into detailed summaries that capture key discussions, decisions, and action items. You can also share these notes effortlessly with your teammates after the call, ensuring everyone stays on the same page. As the need for effective remote team meetings grows, Krisp emerges as the ultimate solution to optimize your remote interactions.
Rule number one of any productive meeting is that it has a clear purpose. Make sure everyone in attendance at your virtual meeting knows what the objective is before the meeting starts, and understands what needs to be addressed and accomplished during your time together. Virtual meetings can often be productivity drainers when they are abused.
You can even involve your team members in this discussion—create a team charter and allow team members to contribute rules or norms that they expect each other to follow. This process will establish greater buy-in for the agreed-upon rules. Get started with the template below, and use Lucidchart to record ideas in real time. It’s difficult to hold a remote meeting with a large number of participants, due to the capabilities of the technology and the everyone’s ability to contribute to the conversation. Start practicing it with smaller groups of people and increase the number when you achieve remote management success. 1-10 people is a good number to start, because if there are a lot of people on the call, there is a lower expectation you’ll need to engage in the conversation.
In a remote environment, meetings are your lifeline, your connection, your glue to the rest of the team. You don’t need in-person meetings to create social cohesion as long as you run fun, un-soul-destroying remote ones. Remote meetings have long been a popular option for nationwide or global organizations with participants all over the world. These virtual conferences have become the norm in the wake of Covid-19, with many offices shutting down or limiting their in-person capacity. There are companies out there that have completely distributed teams.
When conducting your remote meetings as a video conference, take advantage of what’s really possible with the format. Share presentations and get real-time feedback from your team. Use it to livestream any events that remote employees otherwise can’t attend, such as quarterly all-hands meetings or training workshops. For team members who are unable to participate live, make recordings of the video meeting that can be shared for viewing at a later time.