Virtual Meeting Management: 5 Tips to Boost Culture & Productivity
By now, many people in the business world have made the adjustment to working remotely, as the global pandemic continues to spread and ravage our way of life. You know this, we know this. It’s something we all have to accept.
While there are plenty of resources out there to help people make the mental shift, we’ve noticed that there aren’t as many resources addressing how to make the culture shift.
It’s easy to count the ways in which social distancing can damage relationships, diminish productivity, and change company culture for the worse. But those downsides are due to a lack of planning and discipline.
If you put a few parameters in place, your team could leverage this new working style to be more productive and collaborative than ever before. It could actually be a cultural boost.
One way to do this is through your virtual meetings.
In-person meetings have often been the bane of many people’s work experiences. They are often far too long, usually involve more people than necessary, and don’t always end in a decision or clear set of action items. Virtual meetings can have all of these same issues, plus people tuning out or experiencing technical issues.
But the virtual meetings also give you an opportunity to be more precise, more aligned and more accountable—and therefore, more productive.
How? Through planning. With virtual meetings, planning is everything. And if you’re working from home, you can put just 15-minutes of the time you save commuting into meeting planning.
Below, we’ve pulled together tips from Michael Wilkinson, Master Facilitator, founder, and managing director of Leadership Strategies -- The #1 Facilitation Training Company in the US. In episode 45, episode 46, and episode 69 he shared with us several of his secrets for mastering meetings on and offline from his book, Secrets of Facilitation.
In light of current events, we thought it’d be appropriate to resurface these industry secrets for making your meetings a more valuable part of the work-from-home process.
Effectively preparing for virtual meetings requires thinking about the virtual details.
Set up a technical environment that ensures every person can be aligned and engaged, have a voice, and stay on-task.
Leverage video in place of audio-only conference calls. Video allows for more engagement. Ensure that everyone can see the same screen.
When you have more than six or so people in the meeting, appoint a moderator—particularly a technical one responsible for those potential tech issues.
There are 5Ps of meeting preparation. Before any meeting, you need to answer:
Purpose - Why are we holding this session?
Product - What do we want to have when we are done?
Participants - Who are the participants and what are their perspectives?
Probable Issues - What are the probable issues that will need to be addressed?
Process - How will we go about achieving the purpose, given the product desired, the participants and the probable issues we will face?
Understanding the product, or what you want to create with the meeting, can be broken down into 3Hs:
Hands - What do you want people to walk away in their hands when that meeting is over?
Head - What do you want them to know that they didn't know before the meeting started?
Heart - What do you want them to believe that they didn't necessarily believe before the meeting started?
To create a meeting environment where opinions are valued, particularly in a multi-generational dynamic, create the ground rule of insights before decisions.
Before you make any decision, discuss what’s been done in the past and any other relevant details so everyone can go in with the same information.
If your voice is dominating the meeting, that's a sign that the group is not moving beyond you, and collaboration isn’t happening. So, apply the “three before me” principle: three people have to speak before you speak. And once you speak, there has to be another “three before me.”
To engage non-participants don’t call on them. Rather take the round-robin approach and call on the two people to the left or right. Then the nonparticipant will know the next in the sequence is their turn and they’re not being singled out.
With diverse members and potential opposing points of view in a meeting, establish the ground rule that solutions come from anywhere to fend off impending meeting dysfunction. Anyone may have an insightful solution so focus on what that is vs. who said it.
Finally, it’s about predicting the interactivity of the group in order to effectively navigate the group dynamics.
The trick is to stay positive, focusing on solutions rather than pointing out problems, and playing to each other’s strengths rather than competing for the top rank. As long as everyone has the opportunity to share and understand each other’s perspectives, the whole of the group will be greater than the sum of its parts, and your collaborative culture can thrive.
Ultimately, virtual meetings are an opportunity for helping people open their minds and work better together, in work and in life.
For more tips and advice, check out: