How to host cool online meetings 😎

Published in

heycar

5 min readOct 25, 2021

hey, I'm Igor!

I'm a front-end developer based in Berlin and I work at heycar. I come from Brazil, I love music, movies, and bad jokes 🤪

But I hate meetings.

Because of that, I'm trying to change a bit the meeting culture inside our company. So come on this journey with me! Let's go!

🖼 This content was initially presented in the format of a Zoom meeting to my heycar colleagues. You can check the original slides here.

Why are we talking about this?

During the past year, online meetings have become an essential part of our daily routine. The lack of human contact or personal interaction might turn most meetings into something boring or repetitive 😴.

If we make a little bit of effort, we might turn these meetings into nice, interactive, or even energetic and enjoyable moments.

What am I doing about this?

For a few months, I’ve been having some new ideas and testing them in the meetings I host (e.g., stand-up, retro, keynote). The origin of such ideas usually vary… they might be the result of some research, sometimes they're the result of remembering past experiences and focusing on working on specific pain points, and in other moments the ideas simply come to me.

Now, I’m going to present some of the things that I noticed during this time and show some ideas.

⚠️ This article doesn’t aim to give out rules, and most of what I'll write are my opinions. Use whatever you find helpful for yourself or your environment.

Just a reminder: I still work as a front-end engineer. Just keep in mind that anyone part of a team can try and make a change!

While you read this article, I’d like you to keep **the motto** in mind.

The face time

Usually taken for granted, the choice of turning on the camera is something I will always recommend. And there are a few simple reasons for that:

It shows that there’s a real person behind the screen
It shows respect towards the other people in the call, i.e., you are present and paying attention
You can show your smile 😄
It’s less lonely 🥲

Sometimes you might not want to turn on your screen because maybe you're having a bad hair day (who DOESN'T?) or there's a mess in your background. But keep in mind that this makes everything more personal and relatable. You can also use some features that will blur your background.

The waiting room

There’s something you can do to avoid the silence and/or awkwardness of the waiting room ⏰ ― that moment you wait until everybody joins the meeting.

Play some music while you wait for people to join ️(but, before the meeting, test out the best way of doing this to make sure everybody listens. I play it on my phone, for example).
Greet people and wish them a good day.

Out of respect to the ones that already joined, don’t wait too much! I suggest that in short meetings you should wait for 2–3 minutes and in long sessions no more than 5 minutes.

The ice breaker

For some types of meetings, it's interesting to include an ice breaker at the beginning. They go really well with recurring team meetings, where the host knows the attendees and they know each other (e.g., stand-up, retro).

But they can definitely be used in other types of meetings, in order to literally break the ice and even make yourself more relatable to the other attendees.

Here are some ice breaker suggestions for meetings where you’ll be the only one presenting (e.g., team stand-up, keynote).

Jokes, Memes 🤪
Times the Simpsons predicted the future 🔮
Curiosities (about the universe, your country) 🌎
Inspirational quotes 🧘
Songs (The Lion King, pop songs, days of the week) 🎶
Short quiz 🧐

If you're hosting an interactive meeting (e.g., retro), you want to make people comfortable speaking since you’ll need their active participation throughout the session. The ice-breaker is also the opportunity to make yourself relatable and show that you also participate. Below are some suggestions.

What place do you want to visit? 🌍
How are you emoji-ing? 🥰 (mood of the team based on emojis)
Superpower 🦸
Two truths and a lie 😱
Spirit animal 🦄
Meme of the week 😜

If you use a retro board, you can simply include one of these options as an extra column where the participants can write down their answers and later present them to the team.

The words

Everything that comes out of your mouth 🗣 during the meeting is extremely important. After all, you’re the host!

So these are a few things to keep in mind:

Speak at an appropriate pace (not too fast ⚡️, not too slow 🐢)
Make it funny (if it fits the meeting and you’re comfortable with it)
If you don’t sound interested, the attendees probably won’t
Study and plan your meeting (so you’re not lost while speaking)

The slides

Sometimes you might need to present some slides. Sometimes you might not need them. So ask yourself if they’re really necessary.

Make something that will keep the public’s attention.
Include images (or emojis 🤗 if they’re appropriate)
Don’t write too much text. If you really need to, then move the rest to a different slide.
Does the template make sense? For example, if you want to get people's attention, you should probably use a colorful template with big letters, graphics, and images. Here you can find some presentation templates.

(This content was initially presented in the format of a slides presentation. You can check them here and see what I'm talking about!)

The waste of time

If the public needs to complete tasks, you should set up an amount of time, but verify if they’re done before the initial deadline (e.g., use a song as a countdown, check the number of responses vs. amount of attendees, etc.)

If you need to facilitate a debate, know when to interrupt someone and give the voice to the other people 🤫.

Don't ask individual questions unless you have a small group or enough time to go through all the answers.