Virtual meetings have gone from a weird novelty occurrence to a strange reality, to become the industry standard in almost every field, in a matter of two years. The pace at which we’ve adapted to this practice is nothing shy of remarkable. In a relatively short amount of time, we have not only gotten used to conducting virtual meetings, but we came up with many tools, ideas, tips, and overall best practices for them. While the internet is filled with an overabundance of tips and tricks on virtual meetings, they can essentially be separated into two categories.
The No-Brainers
If you are having a meeting through Microsoft Teams or any other virtual communication software then please turn your webcams on! Seeing the individuals you are having a meeting with, as opposed to them being disembodied voices floating in a sea of obscurity, makes an incredible amount of difference.
The passage of time slows down when meetings are online. So keep your virtual meetings short and to the point. Keeping employees engaged in a virtual meeting is much harder than it is in person. There are some helpful tools you can use to mitigate this fact but one of the simplest ways to go about it is to keep your meetings short.
The Deep Cuts
Integrate your performance management solutions into your communications software to make your virtual meetings more powerful. If you are in a virtual meeting through Microsoft Teams, and you tell your employees to fire up another software during the meeting, you will encounter some employee engagement issues.
Strong human connection is something that tends to get lost when people are working in remote models and conducting virtual meetings. The best way to maintain it is through encouraging feedback and communication. To fully integrate feedback and employee input into your virtual meetings use performance review software that supports 360-degree feedback.
Incorprate polls, notes, and other interactable elements into your meetings. The more interactive your virtual meetings are, the more your employees will be engaged. Discussions are interactive on their own and they would be sufficient in a face-to-face setting but when people are sitting at home by their computers, it takes more than simple verbal communication to keep their attention. Having shared notes that everyone in the meeting can influence or polls they can all partake in are small but effective steps.
