5 Tips For Leading Engaging Virtual Meetings

Setting up effective virtual meetings with distributed team members is not easy – especially in 2020, when most people are forced to work from home.

When it comes to increasing productivity and engagement, virtual meetings follow most of the principles that apply to regular meetings. However, virtual meetings are even more challenging; people are more susceptible to boredom, multi-tasking, and many other distractions. Time on virtual seems to fly faster, but so does people’s energy.

In my experience as a facilitator, coach and trainer, I've found that much of meeting dysfunction can be traced to the lack of design, poor meeting management, and participation planning. Not surprisingly, most organizations complain about having ineffective meetings, but they keep focusing on the process rather than on designing engagement.

Experiment with these 5 tips for leading effective virtual meetings. They will help you turn passive observers into active participants.

1) Plan ahead

Send the Proper Links: Every meeting tool or platform has a way to send participants a link to your virtual meeting. Make sure you use this approach, rather than copying and pasting links. Mistakes can get made, which no one will know until the meeting is starting, and people are having technical problems. Send the proper links, phone lines, and everything needed, and send it early. This will reduce your stress and ensure your meeting gets off to a good start.

Publish the Agenda: An effective agenda with time limits for each item is the single biggest predictor of a successful meeting. This is true for in-person or virtual meetings. There are a couple of additional reasons this is so important for a virtual meeting:

• Engagement. It is hard enough to participate in an in-person meeting when you don’t know how you can help or why you are there. If you are on your webmeeting platform, it is nearly impossible. With no one else watching, the temptation to multitask is hard to overcome.

• Details. If the meeting is information sharing only, that is fine. But if you want people to share ideas or opinions and have a conversation during the meeting, the agenda should make that clear to people.

Know the Capability of Your Tool. If you are leading the meeting, you must know how to do more than fire up the tool. Here is just one example: In the conference room, you can quickly go to the flipchart or whiteboard, and you probably do. Do you know how to bring up the whiteboard in your webmeeting tool? If so, do you know how to use it? Did you even know it existed? Spend time getting comfortable with your tool so you can focus on the meeting, not the technology. It will also reduce your stress and make you look far more credible on everything.

2) Establish virtual meeting norms

While each meeting might have its own norms, there is some basic virtual etiquette that everyone should abide by to create successful online meetings.

Think of them as the must-dos of online meeting etiquette:

• The meeting should start and end on time
• Put your camera on (visual language is everything)
• Dress accordingly
• Do the pre-work, and come prepared
• Be present––don’t work on other tasks or stare at your phone
• Turn your microphone off when not talking
• Use the chat to ask questions or make comments (the "chat-tender" will address those when possible)
• Use audio only when requested or during team breakouts
• Also, don’t forget to test all technology (including audio, video, Wi-Fi, etc.) before the meeting. Equally importantly, turn off all notifications, and join from a quiet area.

3) Begin your virtual meeting with a quick check-in

A check-in round helps ground a team by focusing on the meeting rather than on their worries. This is even more important for virtual sessions.

Start the meeting by asking one of the following questions:

• What's got your attention?”
• “What one word describes how you feel right now?”
• “What's the high point of your week. (If time permits you can ask for the low point)

Form a virtual circle, and let everyone answer it one-by-one. The meeting leader or someone they choose runs this exercise, and names the person who should go next.

A mindset check-in drives empathy and focus, but it’s also a way to give everyone their ‘moment of glory.’ Not only can teams members share their emotions but also feel acknowledged by their colleagues.

4) Turn participants into active contributors

Lack of engagement is not an individual issue, but a cultural problem. Rather than trying to ‘fix’ people, organizations must see colleagues as users. Leaders are responsible for designing an employee experience that increases participation.

Furthermore, most people don’t just want to participate; they want to contribute. The objective of any meeting, virtual or not, is to tap into the collective wisdom. It’s about learning, understanding the problem, and creating new solutions, together.

Involve people along the way. Invite them to help design the session or craft the agenda and desired outcomes. Have participants do some prep work. A virtual meeting doesn’t start the day the session happens; it happens the moment you kick off the planning.

5) Leverage the power of pre-work

Designing the session ahead is just part of the preparation; get people’s input and create a session for people’s actual concerns, not what you think they’ll need.

One-on-one interviews don’t just help you understand people’s expectations, but they also make people feel included. Surveys, when well designed, can provide valuable insights – keep them short and include open questions, too.

If your goal is to create a new strategy, share some inspirational reading ahead of time. If your team is dealing with limiting mindsets, make them do some exercises to start reflecting on what’s holding them back.

Pre-work is a powerful way to increase engagement in a virtual meeting before it even happens. Sending an exercise or asking people to analyze material prior to the meeting can save a lot of time. Use the time together to collaborate and co-create not to do things that people can do on their own anytime.

The biggest challenge of remote meetings is to keep everyone engaged and productive. Consider the tips above to design your meetings for active participation.

To your greater success and fulfillment,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

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