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Tips for organising virtual meetings
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How can we ensure that virtual meetings are productive and effective? Here are some tips to organise virtual meetings
We can make face-to-face meetings work for us if we are good at reading body language and other visual indicators. When participants are looking tired we can propose a break. If some people are looking annoyed we diffuse a potential conflict. In short, we are good (or should be) at using our emotional intelligence and reading the signals and responding so that we manage our meetings to best effect.
When organising a virtual meeting, it can be easy for the chair to seem disorganised or non-responsive and lose control, or otherwise cause the experience to be less than satisfactory. This is clearly frustrating when these failures mean that the meeting fails to achieve its objectives. So, what can you do to ensure that the teleconferences you manage are productive and effective?
Organising the Virtual Meeting – Set Up:
Keep teleconference meetings short
In face-to-face meetings you can afford to have some time outs, mini-breaks or a temporary side-track. It takes the pressure off the audience. You cannot afford to do any of this during a conference call.
Brief, energetic meetings tend to be more productive and less costly than longer ones. As well as this, your agenda should be relevant and more focussed on decision points, status updates, action points or outlining future plans and strategy.
Make sure you can reasonably address the intended purpose in the given time frame, and specifically define your expectations.
Limit the number of attendees
Keep your teleconferences to the minimum number of participants that you need. If there are too many people on the call, you will not be able to involve everyone and you can see if people have zoned out. Invite only those who are truly necessary to achieve the meeting’s goal.
There may be people who want to simply listen in on a meeting to know what’s happening. This is unavoidable but the more people on the call the harder it is to control.
In this context, more is not necessarily merrier!