In the era of coronavirus, more and more people have been having their professional meetings virtually.
Now that people have started to get used to the process of working remotely and are getting comfortable working in this way, it’s time to start really thinking about how to make this type of meeting as effective as possible. Especially since working from home can be distracting even during the best of times, you want to be sure that the time you’re taking away from your staff getting to work within the business is well spent in your meeting.
To help you with this, here are three ways you can make your virtual meetings more effective.
Stick To Your Agenda
Just like with in-person work meetings, virtual meetings should have a specific agenda that’s adhered to.
According to Richard Trevino II, in addition to sending out an agenda to everyone attending the meeting before your virtual meeting starts, you should also inform everyone how much time they’ll be allotted to have the floor during that meeting. Additionally, once the meeting starts, make sure you assign someone the task of keeping everything running on-time by monitoring how much time each person has spent speaking or presenting so that your meetings don’t wind up running too long.
Only Discuss Things That Can’t Be Handled In Email
In many businesses, meetings wind up being a big waste of time because they’re merely spent going over things that could easily have been handled in an email. So when you’re taking the time to meet with people virtually during the work day, it’s your responsibility to ensure that what you’re meeting about is of the utmost importance.
To help you determine this, Keith Ferrazzi, a contributor to Harvard Business Review, suggests that you try to make the majority of your virtual meeting time spent on solving problems in a collaborative way that can’t easily be done over email. By doing this, everyone will feel like their time has been well spent and that something has actually been accomplished.
Discourage Mute And Encourage Cameras On
With most virtual meeting software, not everyone involved in the meeting has to be seen or heard. And while this might be appealing for some, in order to get the most out of your virtual meetings, Howard Tiersky, a contributor to Realtor Magazine, recommends that you encourage people to keep their cameras on and not to use the mute feature. This will help everyone pay attention to what’s going on and will help to keep meetings from going too long.
If you’ve been participating in a lot of virtual meetings lately, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you ensure that these meetings are being conducted in the most effective way possible.