A Great Virtual Meeting & the Future of Virtual Meetings
We’ve all had a Virtual meeting in the past 12 months. Virtual meetings are here to stay! Having an effective virtual meeting is no longer optional for many people and businesses. It’s crucial that businesses ensure virtual meetings are as productive & effective as possible. Here’s how to make these virtual meetings effective and what the future holds for them.
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Virtual meeting meaning
Let’s start by defining what a virtual meeting is. If you are looking for the boring dictionary definition, then here it is. To me it’s basically having a meeting with someone using video or audio via your computer or your phone. That person might be close to you (in another building close by) or in another state or country.
Benefits of virtual meetings
So why have virtual meetings? Well in some cases virtual meetings are necessary while in others it’s out of convenience. Here’s why:
To Save Time
Some people have a virtual meeting simply to save time and avoid driving to the meeting. Even if the meeting is a 10-minute drive the simple fact of having to prepare yourself for the meeting, drive 10 min, park, go up the building and drive back to the office or your home is a wasted 20-30 minutes that can easily be avoided.
Reduce Costs
If you have a customer or a team member in another city, state or country then a virtual meeting significantly cuts your costs down. This gives you the option of having weekly one-to-one meetings virtual meetings without the need to travel. You can combine that with an annual retreat where you physically meet once a year however continue your periodic meetings virtually (online).
Greater Flexibility
The virtual meeting allows for much greater flexibility where you can for example have a video call for a quick 15-minute or 30-minute meeting to go through certain topics. In cases like this you need to ask yourself, does it really make sense for me to drive 20-30minutes to a 15-minute or 30-minute meeting?
Virtual Meetings also give you the flexibility to carry out a meeting closer to your next destination. For example if you had to pick up your son from football practice on the other side of town. You might want to carry out the virtual meeting from your home, office or coffee shop closer to your son’s practice.
Because it’s the Only Option
With all these limitations on travel, the pandemic and Covid, sometimes virtual meetings are the only option especially if international travel is involved. On other occasions a customer or team member might only accept a virtual meeting due to a health condition or fear of being in a closed & crowded room and catch the flu, covid, etc.
In some cases such as ours in meetingforgoals.com we are scattered across 4 different countries in 8 different cities. Having a meeting where we bring in several team members from 3 or 4 different countries to meet periodically is not really a viable option. In actual fact, now that we are so used to virtual meetings, we can even gamify our meetings (more on that later).
How to Have Successful & Effective Virtual Meetings
Now that you see the benefits of virtual meetings, you need to ensure that the meeting is effective. The key to having a great virtual meeting is really very similar to treating it like you would treat a an in-person meeting.
Prepare in Advance by Having a Meeting Agenda
Having a meeting agenda is crucial to the success of any meeting and virtual meetings are no different. If you are not sure what a meeting agenda is or how to prepare one, then you can refer to one of our previous articles here.
The meeting agenda will help you set your objectives for the meeting, decide the outcome and help your team members recognize right away what it is you are looking to achieve from this meeting. It’s also a great way for them to also prepare for the meeting and join the meeting with their questions and concerns. You can use meetingforgoals to help you set the agenda and conduct the meeting.
Having a meeting agenda also lets team members decide if they are the best person to be in that meeting or perhaps someone more qualified should replace or accompany them. To simply state it, it saves everyone a lot of time and lays the foundation for a great meeting!
Be on Time
Don’t be that guy or girl! Everyone hates it when you arrive late to a meeting especially a virtual one! It’s simply a waste of everyone’s time and frankly disrespectful. Just don’t do it, you can’t blame it on traffic. Plan to be ready 5-10 minutes in advance. I like to have 5-10 minutes to clear my mind and look over the meeting agenda one last time. If helps me have a more focused meeting.
Stick to the meeting agenda
It’s easy to get derailed and talk about something else however try to stick to the agenda as much as possible. It’s sometimes easier to allocate someone solely responsible on getting the conversation back on track. You can call him the facilitator. You can also have another person be the timekeeper where his sole responsibility is tracking the time for each topic.
Both the time keeper and the facilitator play a crucial part in sticking to the meeting agenda. Allocating them officially gives them an obligation to interfere and it smoothens out the awkwardness of interrupting the conversation to get things back on track. After all its their job and responsibility to do so!
I find that having the facilitator or time keeper interrupt provides a much better setting or atmosphere than if a random person where to interrupt. That could be perceived as rude.
Always have video on
You wouldn’t have a “regular” physical meeting without showing your face now would you? Having your video on is highly advisable and leads to a much better meeting. It’s always annoying to get a video call with 5 people for example and have 1 person with their camera off. Just put some decent clothes on and turn the camera on! Staying in your PJs all day is not healthy anyway.
Ensure your mic works Great
Nothing makes a virtual meeting more difficult than a faulty or chopping microphone. Ensure you have one that is working properly and that your voice is clear to the other people in the meeting. You might want to also consider having a backup mic just in case the one you are using causes tech issues.
Most of the video meeting apps have a built-in feature where you can test your mic beforehand. If you haven’t had a virtual meeting for a while you might want to consider using the mic testing feature just to be on the safe side.
Virtual Meeting Etiquette
Good manners will take you a long way. You want to always try to maintain good meeting etiquette by not alienating or offending your peers. Here are some guidelines to help maintain good meeting etiquette:
- Don’t check your email or work during the meeting. That’s just bad manners and annoying. Besides everyone can hear you type.
- Ensure your cell phone is on silent mode
- Make sure you don’t have background noise.
- If you are in a meeting with many people, then everyone might want to keep their mic on mute until its their turn to speak
- Don’t eat while having the meeting.
- Avoid disruptions. I personally don’t mind when someone’s son or daughter interrupts. It’s sometimes a nice ice breaker. A single interruption from a child can be funny however multiple interruptions are frustrating to the meeting and a waste of time. If you expect to be interrupted, then announce it at the beginning of the meeting and keep the interruption to a minimum. This helps smoothen out the interruption.
Virtual Meeting Ice Breakers
I love staring the meeting with an ice breaker. It helps kick off the meeting on a lighter note and makes it more fun. If you have periodic ice breakers, then people will start looking forward to the meeting out of curiosity of what the ice breaker will be. It’s a good way to gamify your meetings. Try not to announce the ice breaker ahead of time to create some excitement and suspense. Harvard Business Review had a nice article on small talk you might want to check out.
There are many ice breaker examples you can find online. You can use ice breakers like sharing a picture of when you were a child with everyone or pictures of your baby if you have one. Perhaps take turns in telling a 1-minute story about something embarrassing you did as a child. Everyone loves a cute or funny story.
Relax and Make the Virtual Meeting Fun
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article virtual meetings are very similar to regular physical meetings. Just relax and have fun. Try to enjoy the meeting. I find a few jokes or a lighthearted discussion is always better than a serious meeting. Afterall if you are meeting with your colleagues then you don’t need to be so serious.
Take Minutes of Meeting
Ensure that someone is taking minutes of meeting with all points discussed on each topic. Highlight who is responsible for what via action items (more on that later). The minutes of meeting also keeps an official record of what was discussed and who is responsible for it.
This tends to remove a lot of misunderstandings and ambiguity from the meeting. It also keeps everyone aware and alert that an official record of what was discussed is available and can be referred to at any point.
Choosing the right tools for your virtual meeting
Since the rise of the pandemic we have seen many tools that have risen to the occasion to facilitate our lives. Most notably of course is zoom. “Join a Zoom” meeting has been synonymous with the pandemic for many of us. If you don’t know how to use Zoom, then you can check out this nice video on how to use it.
There are of course many other great tools such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and many more. I will not go through each one as there are many articles online that highlight the benefits of each.
Other tools that can help are calendar scheduling applications where they will tell people when you are free for a meeting. This avoids the back-and-forth emails to set a time. You can find a nice list of which ones to use and their benefits here. Of course if you have a flexible schedule then you don’t need a calendar scheduling application.
Eventually as you conduct more virtual meetings you can look for tools that are specific to whatever issues you are having. There are countless tools out there that solve many problems or facilitate your meetings.
You Had a Great Team Meeting, Now What?
So you’ve had a great meeting and allocated action items to people however if those action items are only verbal then they are very likely to be either misunderstood or simply shelved. You need to allocate action items during the meeting in writing so that everyone knows what they are supposed to be doing.
Use tools to allocate action items. Meetingforgoals has a great tool to help you allocate action items to people so that they are responsible for it. Having a record of it in their dashboard and in your dashboard makes it very difficult to forget or misunderstand the task. Moreover if the task has a due date then people are likely to abide by it.
Once the meeting is done everyone should get a copy of the minutes of meeting automatically. You also might want to consider copying immediate managers in some cases.
If there are action items, then ensure to follow up on these action items. There are many productivity tools out there that will send automatic reminders to whoever is responsible for the task to be completed.
The Future of Virtual Meetings
Now that you know how to conduct great meetings, you might be thinking “what is the future of virtual meetings”? Well the infamous Bill Gates claims that most virtual meetings will move to the metaverse within 3 years. He also claims we will be interacting through avatars and virtual reality sets.
Whether you believe in the same principles as Bill Gates or not, it’s clear virtual meetings are here to stay. Their advantages cannot be ignored. The number of companies with remote teams are growing and many companies are adopting this trend of virtual meetings.
I believe most company will adopt a hybrid type model. I don’t believe many employees will return to commute to work “normally”. It’s simply a waste of time. Now that the option is available people will simply look for a job that allows them this liberty and companies cannot afford not to have it and risk losing great talent.
Conclusion
Having virtual meetings works well for whoever is prepared and has the tools to do so. Employers need to adapt their business and their toolbox to their team’s needs to make them as productive as possible. Using the right tools is crucial to provide great ways to improve communication and productivity. It’s important as well to have focused periodic meetings. There are many tools out there that can help employers out there to help facilitate this great transition that we are going through.
Being remote and having the luxury of virtual meetings allows employees to have many advantages that people will not be ready to give up easily.
Virtual meetings however can backfire for the employers that are not prepared. Adapting and pivoting to a new way of working and adding new tools is not an option, it’s a necessity.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Do you agree? Are you having purely virtual meetings or a hybrid model?
Hadi Ossaily
Hadi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Meetingforgoals.com & Global Saas Partners. Hadi has been an entrepreneur for over 10 years and has founded, acquired & exponentially grown several online businesses.
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