Make Your Virtual Meetings Bearable and Effective

Lately, I’ve been rolling straight from one virtual meeting to another. Zoom to Teams to Teams, and back again. It’s exhausting. Why do virtual meetings feel so tiring and even ineffective? Is there anything we can do to make them better? 

Some best practices specifically for virtual meetings are: Learn the technology. Keep files to share in a convenient place. Clean up your desktop, and turn off notification pop-ups. Keep your camera ON and make eye contact. Clean the camera background behind you. Make sure you’re in the frame, well-lit, and close to your microphone. Give everyone a little space to prepare and chat at the start. If necessary, introduce everyone briefly in an organized way. Finally, follow-up about how the meeting could run better.

Meetings aren’t everyone’s favorite way to spend time. In his book, “Death by Meetings,” author Patrick Lencioni talks about the problems with meetings and the reasons to hope that the bad meeting culture can change. We can all change our attitudes and approaches to turn a meeting into a valuable experience for everyone involved. In the virtual world today, having good meetings is more important than ever.

What’s Wrong with Badly Run Virtual Meetings?

Badly run virtual meetings are just as damaging to your company as any other poor meeting. In-person meetings that are off track, though, are sometimes easier to notice and recover. From wasting time trying to get everyone online, on camera, and being heard, to miscommunication, offended co-workers, and essential tasks left unresolved, there are many things that can go wrong. Some of these problems are unique to a virtual environment. Others are simply more common as well as harder to notice and correct with virtual meetings. 

In general, badly run virtual meetings are a result of managers (and participants) not preparing well and not understanding that they have to adjust their practices and expectations to the virtual environment.

What Pain Does that Cause For Your Team and Business?

Most of us have probably been in a bad virtual meeting. From problems of connectivity, sharing, and even just communicating, your meetings can be an exhausting part of peoples’ days. Miscommunication, interruptions, and people talking over each other are common. Participants may become distracted and disengaged. While one person is struggling to get their technology working properly, everyone else is getting impatient and frustrated. When patience wears thin, disagreements become arguments, creativity drops, and collaboration goes out the window. When your team starts to feel as though they’re wasting time and effort in meetings, they’re going to experience more individual burnout and the team’s performance will suffer. 

How Are Virtual Meetings the Same as Face-to-Face Meetings

With the technological advancements in recent years and the necessity created by the Covid pandemic, virtual meetings are even more common than in-person meetings. Despite their differences, they are still meetings and traditional good meeting practices still apply. All meetings should have an agenda, someone in charge of managing the meeting, and a plan of what to accomplish during that meeting. Everyone present should have a reason for being there, and contribute their part. By the end of the meeting, decisions should be made, actions assigned (with deadlines), and everything documented. In this way, the basics have not changed. 

How are Virtual Meetings Different?

Just because the basics remain true, though, doesn’t mean everything is exactly the same. There are many ways virtual meetings differ from face-to-face meetings.

Limited Communication

Although you may find that your team communicates well in-person, don’t be surprised if their communication seems stilted with a virtual meeting. Even with audio and video being used well, virtual meetings lack some detail in the cues that you use in-person such as tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, and other subtle non-verbal cues. This can be especially difficult if some members of your team struggle to understand certain cues even in person. A good moderator of the meeting may help to smooth out these rough spots, but don’t be surprised if your team struggles during meetings, at least initially.

The reduced non-verbal communication of a virtual meeting makes it more difficult to engage in respectful disagreements. Think about how easily the tone of an email can be misinterpreted. Now take that level of communication into a format where people are on the spot to respond immediately. It’s really easy to miscommunicate and offend or hurt people.

Limited Bonding

Most people enjoy meeting their co-workers face-to-face, so it’s not a surprise that virtual connections aren’t leading to great bonding experiences. Building comfort and reinforcing those connections can be challenging in a virtual environment. Shared experiences, spontaneous conversations, and even the experience of different personality nuances are much harder to come by when you’re working virtually. There’s also something about the immediacy of a face-to-face moment that is difficult to recreate. The in-between-meeting chats, getting up and moving to a different room, and such all give participants a bit of a break. In virtual settings, when your participants stay in the same chair, at the same desk, and keep staring at the same camera and computer screen, there is no break.

Multitasking

Multitasking (also called not paying attention) is an area where many leaders are frustrated. When a person is present in an in-person meeting, they probably aren’t going to be able to multitask much. However, when working or attending a meeting virtually, this leaves the door wide open for distractions. Don’t be surprised if you find that the meeting participants are slow to respond or don’t seem to be following along. They may be taking on other tasks at the same time. Often they’re doing such important things as checking email or Facebook or even texting friends in the same meeting with sidebar comments. This may make it challenging to keep them on task.

Easy Ways to Make Your Virtual Meetings More Effective

Although it may take some time and practice to hold an effective virtual meeting, there are steps you can take to get there quicker.

Some things are true of virtual meetings just like in-person meetings.

They’re both just meetings of people, after all. 

• Set expectations before the meeting. Have an agenda to make sure your team knows what the meeting is for, what they’ll each be expected to contribute, and how they’ll know the meeting was successful. Is it to inform? To consider a situation and make a decision? Something else? If you aren’t clear before the meeting starts, you can expect it to be a waste of someone’s (everyone’s?) time. 
• Engage your team. You may be the one who called the meeting, but that doesn’t mean you should do all the talking. Make sure everyone present has a role and knows it. Give everyone time, and seek their input. Asking for someone’s input shows you value their ideas. Valued people feel better and perform better. In a virtual setting, it’s much easier for people to hang back, sit it out, and not get involved. Pull them into the conversation. After all, if you don’t want to hear from them, why are they there?
• Empower your team. Make sure if there are actions to be taken, they’re distributed fairly and appropriately. Empower the people who own those actions to address them as fully as possible. Empowered people are engaged people. Empowered people feel more valued. People who feel valued and empowered will perform better, contribute more, and feel better about it. If you aren’t going to empower your team, you might as well take all the actions for yourself. Don’t do this. It’s terrible for your team and terrible for you, too. 
• Encourage respectful disagreement. This is where ideas come from. A quiet meeting where everyone accepts and agrees without discussion is a bad thing. It means you aren’t hearing what people really think. You aren’t getting the most creative ideas. You’re almost certainly getting an average-to-poor decision that most people think is safe to support (or worse: unsafe to oppose).
• Take time to summarize. Have you captured all the decisions? Have you assigned all the tasks? Do they have deadlines for their follow-up? Five minutes spent on this now will prevent hours of confusion and finger-pointing later.

Some things are a little different for virtual meetings:

• Learn the technology. Before you sign on to a virtual meeting, make sure that you know how to run the meeting platform. Do you know where your camera and microphone controls are? How to share your screen? If you’ll be sharing, do you have your necessary files in a clean and convenient place? Have you cleaned up your desktop? Your background? Turned off notification pop-ups? Are you in the frame of your camera and well-lit? If you’re not sure how to do these things, take time to complete a “mock” meeting or watch a tutorial so you’re prepared and can be efficient with your time. It reflects poorly when you fumble around with audio, video, and file sharing. It’s beyond embarrassing if a notification pops up that your audience shouldn’t see. Will you expect others to share files? Make sure they’re prepared, too.
• Encourage people to turn their cameras ON. Encourage, but don’t demand, attendees to have their cameras on. When speaking, it’s good to look AT the camera. This gives other attendees a sense that you’re looking at them. The usual view of people looking just a bit off-camera can be subconsciously unsettling. For those reluctant to be on camera, sometimes it’s helpful to remind them that there are a lot of communication cues we receive by watching the faces of people speaking. This is especially important for listeners with difficulties hearing and if the audio isn’t the best quality.
• Improve your lighting. If the main light in your room is directly above or behind you, your face will be in shadow, and the picture will look noisy. Put a softened light source in front of you and a bit to one side or face a window where indirect outside light is coming in.
• Stay close to your microphone. Being further from your microphone makes background noise and echoes worse, and makes it harder for others to understand you. Do you like listening to the people who sound far away in a tunnel?
• Give everyone a little space. Before you dig into the tasks of the meeting, consider spending a few minutes checking in and asking participants what they’ve been doing. In the current world of remote work, people miss opportunities to just meet and chat. Giving them a bit of time at the start to do this will help people connect and open the meeting on a positive note. If there are multiple people who don’t know each other, use some simple ice breakers to get everyone talking and warming up a little bit. Where are you joining from? What’s it like there? Does anyone need a minute to get ready? Giving people a little space, and three minutes of informal chat really helps to set a comfortable tone and ease communication.
• Introduce everyone briefly. If there are people who don’t know each other, go through a round of introductions. You should go first to set the framework. Others will naturally follow your lead, so if you are crisp and to the point, they’re more likely to be, too. If you ramble about your entire work history, they may feel pressure to provide similar detail, and your time (and the attention of your team) will slip away. 
• Organize the introductions. If you have a lot of people to introduce, in a virtual meeting you don’t have the spatial cue of going around the table to tell people what order to introduce themselves. There’s no guarantee that other attendees are seeing the same layout of faces on their screen. Avoid people fumbling and talking over each other by either following a shared list on your agenda (you do have an agenda, right?) or designating one person to call on people. 
• Follow-up after the meeting. Since every meeting is going to be slightly different, follow up with some of your team members individually and ask for feedback. Getting their opinions can help you improve for the future. If someone struggled with the technology, reach out and help them to be better next time.

How These Tips Help Your Team and Business

Although each team and business may experience different results and benefits, there are a few main ways that you can expect to see results. If you follow these tips, your team will show up better, be easier to understand, and feel more connected. Seeing and hearing each other well goes a long way towards better communication. Having a short check-in allows your coworkers to share personal projects, professional work, or maybe something else that they want to share. They’ll feel more understood and supported.

You’ll also see that people are more engaged during the meeting. Having interactive meetings and tasks assigned keeps them busy and will limit multi-tasking as much as possible. By taking regular feedback throughout the meeting, they’ll also feel as though they have a stake in the meeting and can participate freely. By implementing these tips, you’ll be helping your team to thrive and ultimately your business as well.

If you or your team is struggling in a virtual environment, these best practices can help them to overcome barriers and thrive. Consider implementing these ideas today to get the most from every workday.