Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on March 18th, 2020.
Virtual meetings have been growing for quite some time. More and more companies and organizations are replacing fixed locations and mandated travel with remote opportunities. Remote interactions have become norms as it relates to conferences and education.
With the recent health concerns raised about Covid-19 and worldwide calls for “social distancing”, gathering in a disconnected manner is even becoming part of our worship and political advocacy.
Being able to facilitate effective virtual meetings is becoming a primary soft skill!
For those who are now making the transition or want to improve your skill facilitating them, here are five ways for you to have more effective virtual meetings.
Agenda
Regardless of whether the meeting is in-person or virtual, there should be an agenda. This should be considered a primary requirement as there are few things more important to effective meetings than starting with an agenda.
The agenda should immediately communicate the two main objectives of the meeting.
Topics
Determining the topics beforehand ensures that participants know what is to be discussed. Knowing that they can also understand what they might bring to the meeting.
- Are there insights or information that they have?
- Are there questions to which they might find answers and bring with them?
Also, knowing the topics allows the Facilitator to determine how long the meeting might be expected to take.
In a virtual setting (where attention spans are shorter), planning the agenda allows the most important topics to be scheduled first while all parties are the most engaged.
Decisions and Actions Required
A hallmark of ineffective meetings is that they are “all talk, no action”. Few things are more frustrating than having to “have a follow-up meeting” to identify actions and owners resulting from the current meeting.
To avoid this problem, list the expected decisions and actions required as part of the agenda!
From the start of the meeting, all participants can see what objectives a meeting is intended to satisfy.
This is putting Stephen Covey’s principle of “Starting with the End in Mind” into practice.
The objectives of a meeting are the decisions or actions being sought; any discussion is our pathway to get there.
@Bob
Unlike in-person meetings, virtual meetings often lack context and non-verbal clues upon which we depend. Instead of looking at someone when we ask a question or expect someone to start talking, we are all staring at a camera.
The net effect is usually silence!
To avoid this problem, I use the @Bob technique.
Replace “Can I get the details of the merger?” with “Bob, would you share the details of the merger?” With this simple change, there’s no confusion as to whom the question or expectation is targeted.
The same technique works equally well if we are addressing more than one person.
- A Subset – “Let’s get an update from Terrance and Stacey.”
- The Entire Group – “Can everyone share the project updates starting with Sales?”
Named directives are one effective method to overcome our lost visual & suggestive clues.
Ban The #MutedBlankScreen!
Few things make virtual meetings more ineffective than participants hiding behind their Muted Blank Screens! Invariably, engagement suffers and it makes the job of facilitating doubly challenging.
Facilitators facing this problem spend inordinate amounts of time continually “checking up” on attendees with rhetorical questions, repeating & recapping addressed topics, or querying multiple times for response.
Let us just all agree.
Share Responsibility
Virtual meetings are challenging. Due to the disconnected nature of the attendees and the lack of social clues with the visible audience, it is tough to act as the Presenter.
Whereas in-person attendees can raise a hand or simply interrupt, virtual sessions often use functionalities like a ‘Raise Hand’ or ‘Chat’ feature.
Presenters who are speaking and navigating a slide deck often struggle to manage the multitude of gateways that participants have available to seek attention. The result is a virtual meeting that quickly becomes little more than a video that causes attention to wane.
Before you know it, the audience is lost!
By assigning one or multiple Facilitators to manage audience reaction and feedback, the Presenter can focus their energy on content delivery. When a question arises or an interruption point manifests, a Facilitator can signal the Presenter enabling a much more effective flow. With that flow, the audience can stay more engaged with the material and provide valuable feedback.
Make Them Shorter!
The length of our attention spans has been inversely linked to the scope of our technological advances. While true for in-person interactions, it is doubly important in the virtual meeting setting.
If the material can be delivered and decisions made in 15 minutes, the meeting should be 10-15 minutes! There is simply no patience in virtual settings for being late or losing sight of the meeting objective. Too many external stimuli can draw our attention away, so quickly addressing the issue and assigning actions for takeaway should be the goal!
#StartFiveEndFive
This is one method that you can use to keep meetings short and on focus.
Whereas most meetings are scheduled for a default 30 minutes starting and ending on the half-hours, SFEF schedules meetings to start five minutes after and end five minutes before.
The net effect is a 20-minute meeting (instead of the default 30 minutes).
Wrap-up
Usage of virtual meetings has been growing and current societal events are making them the norm. Whether it be for work, education, worship, or any other gathering of people, being able to effectively meet remotely is a premium skill. The pressures of distance and costs (time and money) of travel to close it will only serve to make it more so tomorrow than it even was today.
Improving our skills at facilitating effective virtual meetings is simply a requirement.
Here is a recap of our improvement tips.
Be sure to share your own helpful hints for having more effective virtual meetings in the comments below.
Likewise, if there is a related topic that you would like to see, suggest that as well.
