How to Make Online Meetings More Effective?

If I ask you to raise your hand if you started working remotely for the first time in your life this year, I think most of you will raise your hand. As a natural consequence of this, many people started to hold meetings for the first time in their lives, using programssuch as Zoom, MS Teams, Google Meet .But how effective are these meetings? I receive a lot of emails from people who are not happy with these online meetings and miss having face-to-face meetings like they used to. Especially if you are a person who likes to socialize, you may have resisted online meetings for a long time. But now we all know that even if the pandemic period has passed, online, that is, virtual meetings have become an integral part of business life. People will no longer want to travel 1-2 hours for a one-hour meeting. Of course, in the future, we will have face-to-face meetings over coffee and tea, but we will have at least as many, if not more, meetings online. So it is imperative that we stop complaining and learn how to conduct these meetings effectively . I am sharing below an email I received from an executive who wants to move forward on this topic and my response. I hope this will help make your online meetings more engaging and effective. If you have any suggestions to add to these suggestions, please send them to us via the form below.

Dear Ms. Bahar,

As you know, in order to maintain social distancing, we have been holding our meetings via video conferencing for 5-6 months, but we are just learning how to conduct these meetings effectively. In these meetings, there are a lot of clues that the participants do not verbalize, but that need to be taken into account, but most of our managers think that these online meetings are unproductive because they cannot read these clues and they are uncomfortable with these meetings.

Are there any tips you can give us for online meetings to keep people focused on the meeting, to encourage participation and feedback, to facilitate these meetings? Also, are there any effective ways you can suggest to encourage people to interact? We don't communicate as well in these meetings as we do in face-to-face meetings. I also notice that people tend to rush to finish their speeches quickly. Maybe they are uncomfortable seeing themselves on the screen while they are speaking, I don't know. In a teleconference format, how can we make conversations flow more smoothly? How can we encourage everyone to really participate in the meeting and share their ideas, questions and concerns?

Signature,
Tired Tele-conferencer

Dear Tired Tele-conferencer,

Thank you for your question. I would imagine that most of the people who are reading us right now have the same concerns as you. It is already difficult to get people to pay attention and focus in any meeting, and if people are not in the same room, if it is a remote meeting, it can be even more difficult. It's very frustrating when you talk about something for 9 minutes and you ask the other person what they think about what you said and they say, "Sorry, I didn't quite understand what you said, can you repeat it again". Because it can actually mean, "I'm bathing my cat right now, I didn't listen to you.

Meetings are often ineffective because people feel little or no responsibility to participate effectively. There are 4 main reasons for having a meeting:

*Creating an Influence on Other People,

Since these are all active processes, passive participants rarely do a quality job. The prerequisite for any meeting, virtual or face-to-face, to be effective is the voluntary and interested participation of the participants. Here are a few rules to help you with this:

1-60 Second Rule.

First, never assign the group to solve the problem before they have fully felt the problem. Do something in the first 60 seconds of the meeting to help them experience the problem. For example,you can shareshocking or provocative statistics, anecdotes or analogies that dramatize the problem. Whatever tactic you use, the aim is to make sure that the group understands the problem (or opportunity) before you try to solve it.

2-Rule of Responsibility .

When people enter any social setting, they constantly try to determine what their role is there. For example, when you enter a movie theater, you unconsciously define your role as an observer, you are there to be entertained. When you enter the gym, you are an actor, you are there to exercise. The biggest threat to active participation in virtual meetings is allowing those on the team to unconsciously take on the role of observer. Many define their role in this way when they receive the meeting invitation and "log in" to the meeting and decide to work on something else at the same time while the meeting is going on. To counter this implicit decision, create an experience of sharing responsibility early in your presentation. Don't try to do this by saying things like "I want this to be a conversation, not just my presentation, I need all of you to participate." That rarely works. Instead, create an opportunity for them to take responsibility in a meaningful way. This is best done using the next rule.

3-No Hiding Place Rule.

If everyone is responsible for something, no one feels responsible for it. Don't let this happen in your meeting by giving people tasks in which they can actively participate so that there is nowhere to hide. For this, define a problem that can be solved quickly. Divide people into groups of 2 or at most 3 people and give them a very limited window of time to take on this task with a short solution and a medium to communicate with each other (Video conference room, Slack channel, messaging platform, voice calls). Then get their solutions.

4-Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Rule-

Nothing quickly disengages a group more than showing slide after slide after slide of numbing data. No matter how smart or intellectual the group is, if your goal is real interaction with them, you need to present a mix of facts and stories. Create your PowerPoint presentation in the leanest and simplest way that fits the MVP. In other words, choose the least amount of data you need to inform the group. Don't add a single extra slide unless you want to lose participants very quickly. Just because you bombard others with information does not mean that they will have a better understanding of the issues and a better grasp of the subject.

5-5 Minute Rule.

Never pause for more than 5 minutes without giving participantsanother problem to solve . Your participants are in a completely different place at that moment, with dozens of distractions. If you don't consistently maintain the expectation of meaningful participation, they will retreat to that tempting role of observer and you will have to work very hard to bring them back. To end the meeting, you might consider a wrap-up presentation or brainstorm a list of alternative solutions by the group. You can then give the team the opportunity to take an online survey or vote to decide where to start.

I have adapted these tips from an article in the Harvard Business Reviewby our business partners Joseph Greeny and Justin Hale. You can find the full article here . I hope this summary has helped you.

Love

Bahar Sen