Make Meetings Productive
Best practices, Online meetings, Tips n tricks, webconferencing No Comments »With today’s pace of business, constant barrage of information, and economic pressures, who isn’t strapped for time each and every workday? Surely avoiding meetings is a way to free up time for something else more pressing. This thinking assumes that going into it, you don’t expect anything real to get accomplished. The Harvard Business Review article Is Your Company As Dull and Unproductive As Its Meetings? caught my attention and turned my thinking around. Why not embrace meetings and treat them as a key way to strike more off our daily punch lists? Critical to the success of this is effective moderation, engagement, and managed participation. Online meeting services, also known as web conferencing, can help with all of this, improving meeting productivity and maximizing the value of every meeting. Here are a few ways:
Use tools that allow participation – Simply watching and listening makes for a boring meeting experience. Allow your colleagues to be active during your meeting. A shared whiteboard enables multiple users to contribute to a brainstorm session, add or remove action items, and snapshot visuals for review and annotation. Be sure your online meeting tool saves all team contributions to the whiteboard as you peruse multiple virtual whiteboard pages during your meeting, and as you end your meeting.
Use engaging media – Nobody likes “death by PowerPoint”, and merely sharing PowerPoint slides in an online environment may drive participants’ attention elsewhere. Take your meeting participants to relevant websites to validate points, show video clips to assess needs or provide testimony, use live video to establish a personal connection with your participants. And by all means if you do present PowerPoint slides, use pointers and graphical mark-up to focus your audience on key points as you speak.
Exercise your moderation skills and tools – Your great meeting leadership skills will transition well to an online meeting environment. And, you will now have more tools to make moderation even easier. Know when to “open the floor” for ad-hoc discussion and when to “give and take control” using virtual microphone for a more structured and focused approach. Want someone to temporarily take the reins as meeting leader? Make sure your meeting tool allows you to selectively give moderation powers to a colleague – and more importantly let’s you remove them to get your seat at head of the table back.
Offer up several ways to communicate – Use multi-way audio conferencing – either VoIP or phone – to speak, but also allow participants to use text-based chat. This is a great way to get all ideas out on the table, especially from those who typically may not win any airtime at an on-site meeting. Be flexible with your agenda and pause every now and then to read what’s happening in the chat, addressing any questions, issues, and ideas for further discussion.
Record for those who cannot attend – Don’t waste so many cycles polling for availability and finding the ideal day and time when the whole clan can come. Rather, schedule the meeting for when your key stakeholders can attend, either online, by conference call, or ideally both. Record the meeting so that others who wish to be informed can be – on their own time. You will avoid repetitive one-on-one recaps with those who could not attend. Make sure you’re using an online meeting tool that captures everything – content, shared media, VoIP audio, and phone audio – so that nobody can plead ignorant at accountability time.
So don’t give up on meetings. If you and your colleagues underperform in an on-site, face-to-face meeting environment, try it again online. You can improve productivity using tools unique to this environment and potentially save big on time, travel, and room rental costs.
Finally, do not tolerate meeting mediocrity. Your company or institution cannot afford it. Expand your meeting management talents by leveraging new online tools that can help you and the team accomplish so much more.
- Donna Christopher, Elluminate Director of Marketing