Easy Ways to Make Your Remote Meetings More Effective
When you work in an office, face to face meetings are a great way to coordinate with coworkers or brainstorm new ideas. This becomes more difficult when one or maybe all of the participants are working remotely. Teleconferencing tools like Zoom let meeting participants show their faces and share their screens, but the challenge of keeping people engaged and focused is made harder when everyone’s not physically in the same room.
The following are some general tips that can help you organize better remote meetings. And with no further ado, the award for “Most Obvious Way to Improve Your Remote Meetings” goes to…
Create Agendas
Seriously. This is a no-brainer for longer form meetings, but we often overlook this step for smaller meetings, especially remote ones. Having an agenda shows other participants that the meeting has purpose and that you value their time. A good agenda starts by defining the goal for the meeting, even if it might seem obvious to you.
The act of writing out an agenda forces you to think about the steps necessary to reach the desired outcome. Sometimes, that means realizing the meeting is not necessary at all, in which case you should forego it in favor of other means of communication.
Plus, it shouldn’t take much time to whip up a quick agenda, especially once you’re well practiced. Even if it’s vague or generic, a bad agenda is still better than no agenda. Share it with the participants ahead of the meeting so they know what to expect going in. When everyone knows there’s a meeting outline, they’re less likely to get distracted by other topics.
Encourage everyone to contribute
The ideal remote meeting has everyone contributing ideas from their own unique perspectives. However, remote meetings make it easy for stronger personalities to dominate the conversation and quieter ones to blend into the background. As the organizer, you should encourage inputs from everyone. To discourage “group-think” — where everyone just goes along with a dominant opinion — frame questions to particular people in a way that gets their honest thoughts. For example, asking “Megan, how would you deal with this situation?” would be better than asking “Does everyone agree with Mark?”
Make the meeting filter-shaped
Elon Musk recently sent out an email to Tesla employees that acknowledged the dangers of bad meetings. One of his pointers boils down to this; if you’re not adding value to a meeting, just leave. This idea should apply to remote meetings as well as in person.
As the organizer, you can keep this in mind when making the agenda. Format it so that items requiring everyone’s input are at the beginning of the meeting. That way, as people are no longer needed, you can say “At this point, if you guys want hop off, feel free.” By being kindly dismissed, attendees no longer feel uncomfortable leaving, and no one’s time is wasted.
Finalize action items and resolution
At the end of the meeting, it’s important everyone knows the outcome and who’s supposed to do what. Unless they’re explicitly stated, people can have different interpretations of what took place and the decisions made. This leads to confusion and, inevitably, the dreaded follow-up meeting.
Send a quick email after the meeting with a final resolution and any items that require action from particular people. Not only does it avoid confusion, but it has the psychological benefit of making everyone feel like they accomplished something during the meeting.
These four things alone will go a long way in making your remote meetings more focused and productive. If your company runs meetings where one or more attendees are remote, check out the Tendii app to facilitate the best practices mentioned in this article:
