How to Lead a More Productive Virtual Meeting
Due to COVID-19, the majority of individuals have had to adjust to the new reality of working from home for prolonged periods of time and attend more virtual meetings than ever before. Here at Ensightful, we have gathered our top 5 tips to lead a more productive virtual meeting.
What are the Meetings Goals?
One of the most crucial things we can manage in order to lead a productive meeting is to have a clearly defined goal. Setting a goal keeps the conversation on track and avoids having yet another meeting go to waste.
The easiest approach to establish your meeting’s goal is to first determine whether or not a meeting is the most effective technique of achieving the objective. Ask yourself if this topic is best discussed over a scheduled meeting or if it can be resolved in a less time-consuming approach.
Prepare a Collaborative Agenda
Similar to establishing your meeting goal, it’s helpful to prepare an agenda with everyone who will be participating in the meeting. Agendas are excellent tools for keeping a meeting on track and ensuring that everyone is aware of what is going on and what will happen next. Implementing an agenda into your day-to-day meeting can decrease meeting time by up to 80 percent, leaving more time to work on other important projects.
Agendas are essential for creating productive meetings as they:
- Define expectations for attendees
- Allow participants to add agenda items as required
- Helps in estimating how long the meeting should last.
Who’s the Meeting Leader?
A lack of leadership is the root cause of many poorly run meetings, therefore the meeting leader is one of the most important people in the room. They are in charge of summarizing the meeting and planning the agenda for the following meeting. The meeting leader is also responsible for following up with participants between meetings to verify that all action items are on track and to provide support and resources if an individual is having difficulties.
Encourage Participation
So you’ve gathered everyone who will play an important role in your meeting, but the same handful of people are the only ones participating in the conversation. This is bound to happen in almost all your meetings, which is why it is a good idea to encourage participation from the more quiet attendees.
Oftentimes, individuals will stay away from engaging in conversations if they feel like the environment they are in is negative. Something as simple as a greeting before the meeting begins can establish a more safe environment that can encourage people to participate in the conversation.
For Example: “Welcome everyone, before we get started, I would just like to say how appreciative I am of each and every one of you for your hard work and commitment to this company/organization. Your contributions are well appreciated”
Create Action Items
Action items are discrete tasks that must be accomplished, usually by a single individual or a small team or group. Because many individuals overestimate how well they are likely to remember things, especially after long meetings, action items are needed in order to work towards goals that have been defined in the meetings.
A major error that teams make when constructing action items is creating them too thoroughly. An action item should always be broken down into the smallest job until it cannot be broken down further. When creating action items, remember to keep the three W’s in mind: who, what, and where.
The purpose of these suggestions is to help provide a helpful guide to a more productive virtual meeting. Implementing even a few of these solutions into your daily/weekly meetings will immediately alleviate many of your existing meeting concerns while also greatly improving the efficiency of your team meetings in the future.
