Best Practices For Leading Remote Meetings

It’s hard to read nonverbal cues signaling that someone wants to speak when there’s a mix of in-person and remote employees. It’s important to enable the chat function so everyone can participate and have equal visibility regardless of whether they are present in the meeting room or tuning in remotely. One of the struggles with hybrid meetings is seeing everyone’s faces. Remote employees are on a small screen and in-person employees are scattered in a boardroom, making it very difficult to hear and see one another.

• If you look at those questions, it all comes back to communication.
• This is particularly important in online meetings, since issues with internet connectivity and audio or video quality can lead to miscommunications.
• It’s also important that remote employees have good technology so the in-person employees can hear and see them.
• Avoid overloading high performers with too many team assignments.

Putting off problems allows them to accelerate, which is counterproductive to business success. As Frisch and Greene from the Harvard Business Review allude to, it can be tempting to just suggest that everyone waits until they’re back in the office to address certain pressing issues. Working at home generally makes for a more relaxed workday, but some people take moderation too far.

How To Run A Hybrid Meeting

When your video is turned off, it can send a message to others that you are merely attending to get credit for attendance, but not for any other reason. To show others you are engaged and present at the meeting, turn on your video so others can see your bright, shiny face and facial How to run a successful remote meeting expressions. If any people weren’t able to attend due to a scheduling or time zone conflict, send them a recording of the meeting. They’ll be able to catch up on the things they missed and can make sure they’re clear about the outcomes and action items from the meeting.

Others are fact-finding missions that contribute to the research phase of a larger project. The type of goal doesn’t matter, so long as each meeting has one and all of the participants understand their roles in it. Agenda TemplatesKeep all of your meetings running smoothly with these pre-built meeting agenda templates. If possible, set up a communication channel for process questions/discussions that’s separate from the task-related communications.

As the facilitator, it’s important to be cognizant of participation in order to ensure that one individual isn’t dominating the conversation. Team Meetings GuideLearn how the world’s best companies run effective team meetings – featuring insights from Figma, Buffer, Close, Webflow, Shopify, and more. Chiefs of StaffTrack key takeaways from executive meetings, enhance alignment across scaling teams, and amplify the CEO’s communication to help the company flourish. MeetingsBuild collaborative agendas, record notes and action items in real-time, and never forget what was discussed.

Fun Not Cheesy Ice Breaker Games & Activities Your Employees Will Enjoy In 2022

Basic video conferencing platforms are perfect for smaller team meetings and can either be set up in advance or initiated on the fly. But what are some examples of conferencing technology? And what meeting management tools do you have available to you? If you’re thinking, “Yes, but this has always been true,” you’re right.

These focused catch-ups are beneficial for you, your colleagues, and the wider business, especially if you work in a remote or global environment. If your virtual meeting tool has a chat function, tell people to use it. The chat window is a valuable place for noting important ideas and asking questions without interrupting the presenter. A virtual icebreaker or activity will also help you start the remote meeting on a positive note and will encourage a sensible segue into the main topic better than idle chatter.

Setting goals for employee development helps people feel like they’re progressing toward something, even when working from home. Set smaller action items toward those goals that you can follow up on in future meetings, too. Gathering and processing high-quality input during a virtual meeting can be challenging, especially since visual cues are harder to read. Use a phone-based survey tool like Poll Everywhere to collect on-demand feedback from attendees on specific topics in real time.

This ensures you’re both on the same page and understand what’s expected of you afterward. This is where a dedicated tool or one-to-one meeting template comes in handy. For example, employee experience platform Culture Amp provides a useful one-to-one template line managers and employees can fill in ahead of their meeting.

Once you’ve defined and communicated the purpose of your meetings, you should specify a dedicated time for them. Scheduling a recurring calendar invite is much more effective than relying on ad-hoc catch-ups. In fact, it’s proven that regular one-to-ones are beneficial for employee engagement. Background noises, such as people taking notes on their laptops, add tremendous noise to a virtual meeting. Remind participants to hit mute if they will be typing or if they have other noise going on in the background, such as kids, TVs, traffic, and pets. Before the coronavirus crisis, companies decided on their own if they wanted employees to work remotely or to have a full-time office attendance requirement.

But as noted above, working remotely tends to expose in-person practices that are already problematic. If there is one thing you should do right now, it’s to examine your meeting culture, and your assumptions about what good looks like. It’s worth remembering that this goes back to choosing the right games and activities for your remote workshop and ensuring they work in an online setting. Keep them simple and easy to explain and practice how you deliver the instructions. All the exercises you run in an online setting should be clearly explained and clarified before you begin.

Tips To Run Effective Retrospective Meetings Remotely

In a virtual setting, you can just have everybody scan or take a photo of their pictures ahead of time. Then you can put that into a slideshow to share and review during the meeting. It’s a really creative way to get everybody talking and lighten up the mood of the meeting. This also acts as a bit of an icebreaker and can be done at the beginning of the retrospective. The third important key to running an effective retrospective meeting over a video conference is to make sure that you are visualizing the conversation as much as possible. There are different ways you can visualize the feedback you are receiving from the different team members.

My research suggests that only around 50% of meeting time is effective, well used, and engaging — and these effectiveness numbers drop even lower when it comes to remote meetings. Just because everyone is at home doesn’t mean they’re available to go beyond the allocated time. Treat remote meetings like in-person ones, and respect a hard stop time. How you manage your meeting is equally as important as what platform you use to host it.

When you really understand the challenges your remote or dispersed team is facing in their day-to-day, you can use that to improve your remote meetings. Improved communications make a world of difference for the better functioning of virtual teams, and meetings are a key part of those communication practices. No matter what kind of meeting you’re running, here’s how you can optimize your remote meetings.

If there were side discussions that were tabled, make sure they are surfaced afterwards. Tag the relevant people on your dedicated Slack channel, so participants can choose how, when, and if to keep them rolling. By submitting this newsletter request, I consent to Slack US sending me marketing communications via email.

Employee and team dynamics are complicated, even when you can meet in person. But when you’re working remotely, manager-employee relationships can suffer and may call for a new approach. Even some of our most common one-on-one meeting advice may not have the same effect when working remotely.

The leaders managing remote employees also face new hardships when it comes to leading completely virtual communication. For remote teams, a solid A/V setup is absolutely critical for an effective stand-up meeting. If you can’t hear or understand your teammates, how will you know what they’re working on? Whether you use Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, or video capabilities built into HipChat and Slack, make sure that it works for all team members and everyone can hear and see one another. Otherwise your stand-up meetings will be spent troubleshooting, wasting everyone’s time.

Especially for remote employees, those things that tie everyone together like the company culture, vision and mission can start to feel distant. Remind everyone what you’re all working toward to help reinforce a sense of culture for your remote teams. These are our best tips to make the most out of your remote meetings. You will find that several of the best practices listed here are familiar to you already, because they are good practice for all meetings, in person or remote. On a remote team, you’re less likely to be caught tracing your hand in your notebook, but the chances of having ineffective meetings only increases.

How Are Online Meetings Set Up?

You know those days where you’re in back-to-back meetings? At the end of these hectic days, it’s likely that you’re not going to remember what’s needed from you. So, if you’re running a meeting, be sure to categorise the important takeaways and action items and share them with your team as soon as you can after the meeting. Where possible, assign roles and responsibilities to individual items. Have people write down their questions during the meeting. If meeting remotely, encourage your team to share questions in the messages section of your video conferencing platform, or encourage them to DM you on Slack.

And you can always share the meeting minutes asynchronously with other people if needed. Brought to you by Slite, a communication tool that empowers remote-first teams. In your agenda, it’s also a good idea to assign team members to specific topics so they have the floor when the time comes. Again, this gives your team members adequate preparation time. Your next rule for virtual team efficiency is to never go into a meeting without an agenda. So your first step is to get your meetings on the books.

If you’re meeting in person, laptops should be closed and phones should be off the table (unless you’re taking notes). “Oh, but I can focus on the topic at handandcheck my email simultaneously,” some might say. Besides, for every person with a laptop open, there’s a person sitting next to them distracted by their typing or peeking to see if they’re just cruising social media. Even for co-located participants, meeting time can make a difference. Our capacity for creative thinking is the highest right after sleep, so schedule that brainstorming session first thing in the morning.

Team Building Activities To Bring Your Team Together And Have Fun!

You can also ask attendees to prepare anything needed or review documentation ahead of time. Remote teams A simple platform that tells you how remote teams really feel, and fosters action-oriented 1-on-1 conversations. Though planning and organization help all meetings go off without https://globalcloudteam.com/ a hitch, running a hybrid meeting takes extra planning and organization. But putting in the effort can help your hybrid meetings be efficient and productive ones that your team wants to attend. Using videoconferencing is a better solution to run a meeting in this manner.

How To Run Effective Team Meetings

Regardless of whether your team is remote/distributed or co-located, the best stand-up, or scrum, meetings consist of team members answering a standard set of questions and answers. Consistent questions help people prepare as they know in advance what information they’re expected to share. In general, it’s hard to take part in really long video calls. Then, when you’re in the meeting, make sure to stick to the agenda and keep to time.

Online Meetings

For some meetings, the chat room can be used as a second channel of communication that the leader or another attendee moderates. Utilizing the technological tools at your disposal helps increase involvement and engagement. How can we expect our remote meetings to be effective if we never talk about what makes for a good one and what we should avoid? With your attendees, periodically create mutual expectations about what makes for a good remote meeting.

Make these notes accessible to everyone who attended the meeting by posting a summary and any relevant documents on the relevant Slack channel. Alternatively, you could record the meeting and send out a link to the video meeting after. This is particularly valuable for team members working remotely or companies with a globally distributed workforce. Creating a virtual meeting agenda is crucial for remote meetings where communication can be challenging.