Tips for More Effective Virtual Meetings

Virtual meetings are becoming more the rule than the exception – but can you run a virtual meeting as effectively as a face-to-face meeting?  Perhaps or perhaps not – however, here are some tried and true tips and tricks from the PMs at Beaconfire that might help get you a bit closer to virtual meeting bliss…

• Set those expectations: Have a detailed agenda posted for the meeting ahead of time. This is good meeting etiquette regardless, but especially important for virtual meetings because people’s attention will wander (or worse yet, they will sign off) if the call leader isn’t prepared.
• Be a person, not an automaton: Personality and rapport is the grease of any meeting, and this is even more true of virtual meetings. If people are enjoying the conversation, they will pay attention and participate. A little banter, especially at the beginning is good; the key is to find a balance between fun conversation and making sure that the tasks at hand are addressed efficiently.
• Keep the train on the track: Have a strong facilitator present who can jump in and keep the agenda on track, minimize tangents, allow all members to participate rather than have one outspoken individual monopolize the call, etc.
• No room for wallflowers: Make everyone talk. Find ways to involve every person on the call. Ask questions to people by name, even if they are rhetorical.
  “John, do you agree with that?”, “Jane, how do you feel about that from a technical standpoint?”, “Bob and Sue, do you have anything to add?  I know we talked about this a little earlier today.”
  Not only does it make people feel included, If I, for one, thought there was a chance I might be called upon, I would be less apt to “knock out a few emails.”
• What email had that number? If this is a standing meeting, use a conference call system and provide the same call/web information every week.  Don’t waste everyone’s precious time by having to patch people into the call one-by-one (with your fingers crossed that they will all be there at the end – be honest – we’ve all been there….)
• Can you see what I see? Show your screen, have people log in to web conferencing software whenever there are documents or items to review as a group – it helps to keep the “what page are we on?, where do you see that?” to a minimum.
• Everything in moderation: Sitting on a phone and staring at a computer screen is quite boring and taxing at the same time. When possible, make the virtual meetings short and to the point, and have more of them if everything cannot be addressed in an hour or less. While you may argue that scheduling a series of meetings is harder than scheduling one, from our experience it is easier to schedule three 1-hour meetings than one 3-hour meeting. Most people can find an hour here and there in their schedule. Not everyone can find three adjacent hours.