10 Essential Resources To Make Your Virtual Meetings Successful
What was once resorted by companies to tackle geographical barriers is standard practice now. If you think, virtual meetings were conducted when diplomats, officials, clients, or other stakeholders were present in a different region or country and would often be the last option when nothing else worked out.
Cut to 2020, virtual meetings not just became mainstream but inevitable as well. A global pandemic rattled conventions and nailed the fact that remote working and collaboration was possible and that teams and professionals could still be productive, efficient, and timely in the absence of supervision - or micromanagement to be precise.
With our daily routine starting and ending with virtual meetings, we felt it was absolutely necessary to shed light on some of the most essential resources to make your virtual meetings successful.
Let’s get started.
The Rise Of Remote Working And Virtual Meetings
At the time when industries and market segments were getting disrupted with newer startups and revolutionary ideas, a viral outbreak shattered dreams and aspirations. The ones to survive and tackle this mammoth crisis were the ones to instantly adapt to emerging trends and adopt technology to run their businesses as usual.
Work policies in several companies were rewritten when virtual meetings became the standard medium for collaboration and communication. There was definitely a struggle during the initial phases of adoption but companies managed to come up with workarounds and remedies to keep their productivity up and going. Newer tech stacks and tools were introduced to smoothen and streamline virtual meetings and make them mimic a personal conversation.
Key Virtual Meeting Statistics
- 80% of the companies brought in mixed or virtual forms of collaboration techniques during the pandemic.
- Zoom arrived as the most prominently used tool to conduct virtual meetings.
- Close to 64% of the businesses believe that this shift to virtual meetings and environments would be either long-term or permanent.
- The HR department has the highest share in conducting virtual meetings (63%) followed by sales, operations, and finance at 62%, 57%, and 56% respectively.
10 Essential Resources To Conduct Successful Virtual Meetings
If you’re a manager, a business owner, or a solopreneur solely relying on virtual meetings to connect and collaborate, you need a set of solid tools and approaches to have successful outcomes. For quite some time, we’ve been getting hands-on with diverse approaches and systems to find out what works and what doesn’t during virtual meetings.
Here’s an extensive list of the resources you will ever need.
The Right Meeting Roles
Virtual meetings are difficult. Neither does it offer the vibe of being physically present nor is there a collective decorum online. Conversations are chaotic and with technical interferences and glitches, meetings are often chaotic and prolong to extended hours. To avoid such instances, assign the right roles to your attendees.
Let there be one coordinator organizing and setting up calls, one professional working on the minutes of the meeting, and one presiding resource. Maintain well-defined time slots for conversations, questions, and presentations as well. With these established before the meeting, your team would be better prepared to assimilate information.
Have The Right Tools
Having the right tools will smoothen the process by 80%. So, work on having the right internet connection with adequate bandwidth to accommodate smooth video calls, the right communication tools that help you record and conduct seamless sessions, note-taking apps to share anecdotes and ideas, and more. Upgrade your tech arsenal to meet virtual meetings demands.
Deploy Collaborative Mediums
Unlike physical meetings, collaborating virtually is quite tough. You wouldn’t know if your team members are actually noting down crucial information or if all the required pieces of information are in one place. So, deploy collaborative mediums and tools like Google Docs, Slack, Trello, or more to have every team member on the same page. You could even assign roles and access using these tools for moderation.
Set Up An Agenda
Let’s be honest. Most meetings don’t have a set agenda. They are set up to discuss a lot of things, ultimately becoming futile with no solid outcomes. To save everyone’s time and effort, have a proper agenda for your meetings. Define your goals for your sessions, what you intend to discuss, the team members you intend to have a word with, and desirable outcomes from the session.
Having this will eliminate all the pep talks and small conversations from the sessions and get you straight to the point. You will also come back on track with these pointers whenever you deviate from your goal. Do this for meetings of all time scales.
Have Tracking Tools For Meetings
Most decisions and ideas are lost after a call is closed. This could be due to home-based shortcomings (more on this later) or distractions such as emails or social media. So, what you discuss during your virtual meetings gets diluted further.
To prevent this, have the right tracking tool to ensure your ideas and that of your teams gets a tangible shape in the future and that discussed strategies are implemented. This could be a recording of a session, minutes of the meeting, or just a to-do list with employees assigned to tasks. This helps you track the success of your meetings.
Eliminate Unnecessary Team Members
You could further smoothen your virtual meetings and avoid confusion by having only the required team members. This not just saves you bandwidth if you’re using free tools and basic internet plans but paves the way for impactful sessions and effective outcomes as well.
As for kickstarter ideas, you could avoid freshers and new joiners from weekly sync-up calls or crucial meetings and keep the core of the team involved.
Implement Gamification
Gamification is a brilliant way to encourage engagement among your team members and reward them for being active and sometimes proactive. Make your sessions interesting with storytelling, have a leaderboard set up for those who show up to meetings on time, break down goals into smaller quests and come up with more creative ways to turn your meetings into games to eliminate mundane days and tasks.
Prepare Your Plan And Material For The Meeting
If you’re organizing the meeting, prepare the material beforehand. This is different from having an agenda. An agenda will tell you what you need to discuss but the material will tell you how. Have presentations, anecdotes, notes, or references ready for your session and have a flow to your meetings. That’s where storytelling comes in handy as well. Keep it cohesive and you’ll have more involvement from your team members.
Foster A Level Playing Environment
A lot of employees often feel left out or under-recognized in virtual meetings. This is obviously due to the technical shortcomings as well. However, to eliminate such instances, foster a level playing field and involve every single team member. Since you would only have the required team members, ask for their suggestions and ideas, get their inputs and encourage them to voice their opinions. This will significantly boost morale in your team meetings and among members.
Respect Home-based Shortcomings
We aren’t used to this new setup and everyone’s just adapting to it. While we’re at it, make it a point to respect the home-based shortcomings of your employees. Acknowledge that not everyone would have the right system, medium, or internet connection to start off with. Most of us have workarounds. There are also instances of children interrupting sessions, calling bells, home deliveries, ambient noises, and more. Make it a point to move on from such interruptions and focus on your session. If possible, have a sense of humor about it.
Wrapping Up
Virtual meetings need not be cumbersome and redundant. You could make them interesting and enriching with our suggestions. So, the next time you’re setting up a meeting, implement these and observe the difference.
Good luck!
