How To Make Your Virtual Meetings Productive

Being on month five of working from home I miss face-to-face team meetings. Grabbing a colleague and jumping into a conference room with a whiteboard for a quick brainstorm feels like a Luxury of the past. Every quarter our leadership team would find somewhere in the world to be in person and spend 2 to 3 days in a conference room strategizing and working out a variety of topics from promotions to innovation to messaging. I never thought I would say I miss those windowless conference rooms and saggy catered lunches.

Enter big sigh here.

What we are really missing is human contact so how can we replace that in a virtual environment?

To be honest, we don’t know when we’ll get back to normal or if what has become the ‘‘new normal’ is a permanent thing.

Either way, as team leaders, we have to create “sync” without being in person. Sync is that thing when teams “gel” and it happens when people are physically together. It’s what makes teams productive. Even though we’re all in different places right now, we have to generate sync with our team to make sure we are all on the bus and moving in the same direction. One way to do that is to have effective virtual meetings with your team.

How To Handle Team Meetings While Working From Home

Our work environment has been turned upside down. The kitchen table is now our office and the kids and spouse are now our lunch buddies.

I think it’s safe to say having a well-timed, distraction-free meeting is a thing of the past.

Here’s what I do to make sure I make the most of my remote team meetings.

Prune and groom your overall calendar so that the virtual meetings you have can be well prepared for and executed:
- Lump meetings of the same type together. For example, if you do one-on-ones with your team create a 2 to 3-hour block and bang them all out at once. One on ones are very conducive to video calls.
- Avoid “cattle call” meetings. If you’re in a meeting with 20 or 50 people and the topic is simply an update just ask for the slides and give yourself back the time.
- Send other people to your meetings. You might have people on your staff that could stand in for you and it would be a good growth and development opportunity for them. Another great way to lighten your calendar.
- Have others move to make your schedule better. Yes it’s okay to ask somebody to move their meeting to accommodate you don’t you do that for others like all the time?

Reduce 1-hour meetings to ½-hour meetings.
Stay on task by making an agenda and sticking to it.
Finally, will an email do?? If the topic of your meeting isn’t so important send an email instead.

My Go-To Tool For Virtual Meetings

Zoom and Go To Meeting are widely popular right now. But my go-to tool to hold virtual meetings with my team is Meetings In Teams by Microsoft. It includes audio, video, and screen sharing. And you don’t need to be a member of an organization or even have a Teams account to join a Teams meeting. You can find more information about it here.