How to avoid pissing everyone off when meeting online
Tags: Self Improvement, Work, Meetings, Remote Working, Productivity

1. Keep meetings short — time everything

No one likes being stuck in front of a computer screen, listening to endless droning and needless conversation. But sadly, this is what many meetings have become. Being at home, and being online makes bosses lose their sense of time, and while it may seem like only minutes, hours have gone by for their employees.

The solution is simple: time everything.

If the meeting is supposed to start by 11:00 AM, and end at 2:00 PM, don’t exceed that time, even by a minute. No matter what.

And if it so happens that Jill couldn’t make it, or someone lost a document in the clutter, let that be the end of that meeting. Do this often, and it builds trust among your employees. They’ll try harder to make it since they know it’ll all end. Don’t be carried away with yourself; everyone has other things they’d rather be doing.

2. Prep before every meeting, and trim out the unnecessary

You aren’t Steve Jobs — you can’t give great speeches off the top of your head. Frankly, it’ll just irritate everybody. Make sure everyone knows what their role is before the meeting. Only the essential people should attend, and make sure everyone contributes something.

You’ll find that this will help eliminate pointless information and fluff words. It’ll help trim down your documents into just the essentials. What you don’t want is a lengthy, word-heavy presentation that takes a lot of time to go through. Surprisingly, the fewer meetings you have, the better.

If you think about it, the economy isn’t really moving, so what’s bloating the presentation?

That’s right — you are.

3. Don’t have meetings on weekends

This one is a bit counter-intuitive. Or is it?

Before the pandemic, people went to work on Monday through Friday. Saturday was their holiday. Chances are, they’d have a similar schedule while working from home. Ideally, you want to keep things as normal as possible, so that people adjust better to the change.

Don’t ever have meetings on Saturdays or Sundays. Personally, I would want to be left alone on the weekend, not forced to attend a tedious meeting. I’m pretty sure you’d rather not work on Saturdays, too.

4. Test your equipment

This one is super important. Many meetings during the lockdown have been torn to shreds simply because someone’s webcam stopped working, or the Internet connection broke. Try and preempt as much as possible what could go wrong.

If something’s broken, you can always order it online, or at worst, reschedule the meeting. The whole idea of meetings is to pass information across, and exchange ideas, not “Hello, can you see me?”

No one wants that, and it’s really embarrassing. Be your own tech support.

I cannot stress this enough.

5. Avoid repeat meetings

You should only call a meeting if there’s something new that everyone should know. Don’t call meetings to repeat what you’ve already said.

Instead, send out reminder emails, memos, or even the minutes of the previous meeting. If someone forgot something, tell them in an email — don’t organize another meeting.

In fact, not all information requires a meeting. Some things can be communicated over email, or over the phone. A meeting should be a rare, all-hands-on-deck kind of thing, not one every day.