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As the pandemic caused by Covid-19 continues to rage throughout the world, businesses are being forced to meet remotely. Gone are the days of gathering around the water cooler and working out details over a sandwich or a coffee. Virtual meetings have become the new normal, and there is definitely an art and a science to run a great virtual meeting. Virtual meetings can yield great results if you keep the following ideas in mind.
- Preparation is the key to your success. Understand that you can’t just do what you have always done in live meetings and think that will transfer fully to virtual meetings. Having a firm agenda for the meeting will keep you focused, and having a few virtual images to keep people’s attention is another important tactic.
- Make sure to test your equipment beforehand. Nothing is more embarrassing and disruptive than not being able to start the meeting because of a faulty connection or lacking the software you need to communicate. Making sure you are up and running at least fifteen minutes before the attendees log on is a good rule of thumb. This way you have a bit of time to troubleshoot problems should they arise to run a great virtual meeting.
- Keep the meeting focused on a very specific agenda. Meetings that take place in an office tend to get off track, and there is always the hallway to complete required business. But a virtual meeting needs to be tight and follow a specified agenda to keep the clients and employees engaged for the short time they are with you. Don’t try to cover too much at once. Do stick to the planned agenda. Even if you have to meet again sooner than you normally would, this is still preferable to dragging out the meeting.
- Maintain etiquette throughout the virtual meetings. If you keep the meeting focused on a specific task, you are less likely to have a wandering audience. Many virtual meeting attendees see virtual meetings as a license to check email, text, eat breakfast, and multi-task in general. Avoid these behaviors yourself to lead your team to a quick, fruitful meeting for all. You might actually end up saving yourself time and energy with the virtual meeting model.
- Make sure you show people’s faces so that communication can be as thorough as possible. Barring technical difficulties such as not enough bandwidth to support video, people should be able to see each other so that they are better able to ask and answer questions, and they can more easily build community. Keeping up with the team mentality is more difficult virtually, though not impossible, if you can see each other.
