How to Run Engaging, Useful Meetings when Suddenly Becoming a Fully Remote Workforce
By: Paul Burke
Tags: Teamwork, Remote Working, Remote, New York, Team Collaboration

Remote meetings have become an essential part of a workflow for many enterprises over the past decade. But for some large traditional ones, although they have started to support and leverage remote meetings, there is still a strong onsite contingent.

Over the next few weeks to months, we will all be thrust into remote meetings as opposed to in person ones. Given the traditionally high volume of meetings that run big organizations and the possible network congestion they could result when going full remote, I wanted to offer some practices to consider for running the effective remote meetings.

The Anatomy of a Meeting

The best online meetings include three essential principles: connection, collaboration and feedback. By maintaining them you will make participants feel more engaged, keep the meeting productive, and move the initiative forward — which is the reason for the meeting to begin with.

However, in order to get this outcome, you need to remember that there are three parts to running successful meetings—before, during, and after—and each phase has a set of best practices that should be considered to get the most out of the event.

Part 1: Before the remote meeting

Anticipate and empathize with your audience. Help them help you.

1. Understand your online meeting tools

Most companies use collaborative software (Skype for Business, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Slack, Confluence, etc.) that ensures everyone can see the same thing at the same time, provides tools to manage the conversation, and record comments on whiteboards to help participants follow the conversation.

2. Prepare a shared space

In addition to the meeting tools themselves, documentation and ongoing collaboration tools are also needed to effectively manage meetings. Most companies have made investments in video conferencing but other information capture and multi-person collaborative editing tools like mural, confluence/jira, google docs/g suite or slack may be additional tools to consider to enable collaborative ideation at a distance.

These tools create a shared space to allow for timely documentation and sharing of meeting outcomes. They also help reduce the number of meetings needed by making the work, tasks, and objectives visible in shared artifacts and lists with accountable people identified.Be sure to consider and discuss information security risks with your InfoSec team as you define and work to set up these alternatives.

3. Plan the agenda carefully and share it in advance

Gathering together for a remote meeting takes effort, so do not waste time during the meeting on things that could be shared ahead or are not core to the reason for the meeting. Have a plan with specific items to cover and stick to that plan. Share the agenda ahead of time to those you invite, so that everyone can prepare and be ready to participate. Seek to give people time back if the issues are resolved more quickly than planned.

Especially in peak network times throughout the day, consider whether the meeting is needed at all. If the agenda can be converted to another means to collect information and feedback like a shared digital collaboration space, consider that alternative and avoid the meeting altogether.

4. Invite the right people — and limit the number to the most essential

It’s difficult to hold a remote meeting with a large number of participants. Due to the capabilities of the technology, the ability for everyone to contribute to the conversation can be challenging.

Amazon recommends “two pizza meetings”, or the number of people that could eat two pizzas, as a good guideline of how many folks can be productive in a working group. Keeping under 8 people is good because there is a higher expectation for the participants to engage in the conversation. If the meeting purpose is to get feedback and the right people are in attendance, you will expect to hear from those participants to make progress towards the goal.

5. Develop “the rules of engagement”

Uncontrolled or uneventful meetings create a number of issues in organizations from trust erosion to unnecessary work. To manage to the best outcome, it is important to clearly define what type of meeting you are having, make sure attendees know which one they are attending, and have clearly understood rules of engagement.

Status Update Meetings. These meetings are often called “standups” in agile organizations. They should be short and each participant should seek to succinctly articulate (a) completed items, (b) items in progress, and (c) blockers in the way of progress. Information Sharing Meetings. These are more fluid but should be focused by the meeting goal. Each person should know what information is needed or to be shared and know their role in the meeting. Decision-making Meetings. These meetings should contain pre-read materials with clear points where decisions are needed. The meeting host should be sure to include the decision makers and ensure they are attending to hold the meeting. This person should also consider whether any other attendees are needed beyond the decision maker. Problem Solving Meetings. These may be fluid and use more design thinking methods to help problem frame or solution. This meeting may require more visual aids and collaborative work tools (described in #2 above) beyond the typical enterprise set up. Plan ahead and make sure you can access these extra tools. Innovation Meetings. These may be fluid and use more design thinking methods to help problem frame or solution. This meeting may require more visual aids and collaborative work tools beyond the typical enterprise set up. Plan ahead and make sure you can access these extra tools. Team Building Meetings. These meetings are intended to keep teams connected at a distance. The content may be shared ahead or presented in real-time depending on the objective of the team building.

Whether it is a brainstorming, a project update, approval session or any kind of recurring meeting, set up the rules and circulate it to participants before the meeting, or set it up for a longer time period.

6. Know your tools and have a plan B

When you are the host of a meeting, make it a habit to dial or go online at least 5 minutes early, so you can set up the meeting in advance or fall back to a plan B. In a time of heavy network congestion, you may need to shift to a back up tool. For instance, if you’re Skype for business connection is hung up, consider spinning up a Google Hangout, WebEx, or Zoom meeting or make the activity completely virtual in a collaborative editing tool with instructions by email.

Also make sure that you have planned the agenda to address the potential for technical hiccups that may arise as you get familiar with the tooling or have issues with connection.

Part 2: During the remote meeting

Focus the participants, make personal connections, and collect inputs.

7. Introduce everyone

The video camera doesn’t show every speaker throughout the meeting. Some software shows an icon or picture of who is involved in the meeting, but it is good practice to introduce everyone attending.

Also, in high use times, you may experience delays and hiccups in the call. Consider turning off any video during that time. Although video calls may be preferred for certain meetings to maintain a personal connection, they add significant data to the transmission. Turning the video portion off may increase the quality of the call.

8. Consider small talk before to start

Don’t miss a chance to connect with remote colleagues and help them make their presence felt in the room. Having small talk helps to feel people connected. Don’t underestimate the need to feel connected in an increasingly remote work environment. Try to plan time in to bring the personal connection through.

In times of high stress or uncertainty, even the little things like favorite shows and recent binge watch updates can help people feel more connected socially.

9. Remind of the meeting goal

Remind participants of the meeting goal once starting a meeting. If you use an online collaboration whiteboard or managing the meeting with a PowerPoint, you can easily put a sticker or initial PowerPoint page with a meeting goal and what needs to be achieved at the end, so that all the participants are clear with it at all times during the meeting.

10. Recruit support from the participants

The meeting host has the responsibility to manage the meeting. As the facilitator, each meeting host should recruit for two roles between attendees: a timekeeper and a scribe to write down action points and decisions made. This helps involve participants in the meeting. For a recurring meeting, you can change the roles between participants from meeting to meeting by running a kind of lottery, so nobody knows who will be lucky to be the timekeeper or scribe, writing down the meeting minutes.

11: Have people identify themselves and make sure everyone recognizes each other

This is especially important if some participants aren’t visible to everyone else. A quick, “Hi, Mark here,” before Mark speaks, for example, lets others identify the voice (and the face if on video) of each speaker. Keep note of who has spoken, as well to ask nonparticipants to join in.

12. Be considerate

Avoid side conversations and background distractions. Just like in high school when you didn’t like someone whispering behind your back, side conversations can be confusing and leave people out. Stay on the topic and keep the idea mentioned in rule #9 in focus.

13. Ask for contribution

Asking directly for input really helps team members feel engaged. And remember, listeners can only hear one person at a time clearly, so take turns sharing with each other. It is vital to make every person feel like they have the ability to contribute to the project. Reaching out to everyone in the meeting individually or asking specifically for their contributions is a good way to get people involved. Here are few examples of such engaging hooks.

Are you happy with [the progress, the result, the comment, etc.]? What interests you the most about [this solution] and why? What is your favorite/least favorite part of [this solution]? If you could change anything, what would it be? Why? What’s one thing that could increase your satisfaction with this project, and why?

14. Be captivating and collaborative

Boring meetings are tough to sit through. Since you put the work into organizing a great meeting, make it interesting with lively interaction, good visuals, or set up your own meeting traditions. Plan time to break the ice and make some fun asking ice breaker questions. If planning for better meetings means hosting fewer meetings, it will be worth it.

Part 3: What to do after the remote meeting

15. Send a follow up—quickly

Remind those who participated the main points of the meeting and the direction post meeting. This both increases the effectiveness of the meeting and reinforces the importance of remote meetings to your team members.

However, it’s only effective when it’s read, so make the follow up as useful as possible. Consider the TL;DR format. Make it a habit, so the meeting participants will be waiting for your email each time after the meeting.

16. Check out action items are in progress

It’s vital in remote working relationships that you get very clear and outcome-oriented. Each task or item that emerges from a meeting should be aligned to performance/business objectives and come with expectations for individuals and teams like due dates and level of fidelity. Discuss them as a result of the meeting, send via follow-up email, and don’t forget to control them when the meeting is done.

Conclusion

The biggest challenge of remote meetings is to keep people engaged, interested, and contributing to the goal. For organizations that are newer to fully remote collaboration, there will be a number of hurdles to overcome. Be patient, be reflective, and continuously look for ways to improve meeting best practices.

Teams want to be teams. People want to collaborate. They just need to feel comfortable and familiar in the approach and with the tooling. Like most things, it gets better with practice.

Anything we’re missing? Feel free to let me know.