How to Run Engaging, Useful Meetings when Suddenly Becoming a Fully Remote Workforce

As perfect as your home set up may be, remote collaboration takes effort to stay engaged.

Remote meetings have become an essential part of a workflow for many enterprises over the past decade. But for some large traditional ones, although they have started to support and leverage remote meetings, there is still a strong onsite contingent.

Over the next few weeks to months, we will all be thrust into remote meetings as opposed to in person ones. Given the traditionally high volume of meetings that run big organizations and the possible network congestion they could result when going full remote, I wanted to offer some practices to consider for running the effective remote meetings.

The Anatomy of a Meeting

The best online meetings include three essential principles: connection, collaboration and feedback. By maintaining them you will make participants feel more engaged, keep the meeting productive, and move the initiative forward — which is the reason for the meeting to begin with.

However, in order to get this outcome, you need to remember that there are three parts to running successful meetings—before, during, and after—and each phase has a set of best practices that should be considered to get the most out of the event.

Part 1: Before the remote meeting