How can you ensure team members understand online meeting goals?

This is an ageless best practice and a fundamental in being prepared for meetings. Along with the agenda, preparation should include ensuring materials are assembled for each agenda item, and ready for easy access and use as part of the meeting.

Having an agenda is very important. The meeting invite should include a brief agenda. If there are various topics which will be addressed by different team members then the invite should include the names along with the topics and the time allotted for the same. This will help in accountability, time management and gives a clear understanding of the objectives of the meeting

Meeting agendas typically contain a list of topics to be discussed by the team. Some meetings go one step further and define a goal and expected outcome for the overall meeting. The ‘Future of Work’ can now take this one giant step forward and define the desired outcome for each agenda topic. Selecting an outcome for each topic will allow the team to stay more focused on reaching that outcome and enable each member to understand appropriate behaviors vs. inappropriate behaviors during the meeting discussion.

Idéalement, il faut inclure dans l’ordre du jour, le travail préparatoire de chacun. Ainsi, on s’assure que la réunion sera la plus courte et la plus efficace possible, étant donné que une partie du travail aura été fait calmement en amont.

ensuring that team members understand the goals of online meetings is crucial for productivity and alignment. Here's how you can achieve that: Agenda Setting: Share a clear agenda before the meeting, Communication: Clearly communicate the purpose of the meeting in invitations. Engagement: Encourage participation and engagement during the meeting. Ask for input, opinions, and suggestions from team members to ensure they are actively involved Follow-ups: Summarize key points and action items at the end of the meeting. Consistent communication, clarity in objectives, and active involvement from team members are key elements to ensure that everyone comprehends and aligns with the goals of online meetings.

Meetings should be kept short and to the point and never extend past their allotted time schedule. Parkinson's Law states that people will naturally expand a task or conversation to fill the allotted time. People will become much more efficient (without sacrificing quality) if we set a stretch goal and encourage people to be more respectful of each others’ time. Some teams attempt to hold a standing meeting to encourage similar behavior and urgency. The ‘Future of Work’ allows us to automatically create a stretch goal that is half of the allotted time in order to establish a difficult, yet still attainable, goal.

An older term for this is "meeting norms". From a best-practice perspective, having a company established set of meeting norms that can be consistently leveraged and adapted for each situation allows for a more efficient session and easier participant understanding and alignment.

As the saying goes, " A picture is worth a thousand words" or more :) They can be used to inform, educate and channel discussions toward meeting agenda items and drive toward accomplishing the desired meeting outcomes.

If you want your team to be actively engaged in ANY meeting - especially remote/online - it's your responsibility to engage them. It's not about flashy or clever slides, or games or gimmicks. Just make them part of the conversation if you want them to pay attention to it. Use these team meetings for brainstorming. Even cross-functionally. Sometimes the most creative ideas come from the people in other roles. When you share messaging, ask how what you're talking about impacts each of your team members. Let them share ideas about how they feel they or their team can/will contribute or manage this new information. Have the team members drive the agenda. A shared doc where team members can add discussion ideas or needs is a simple tool.

Facilitating an effective meeting is both an art and a science. When things start to go sideways and people start to display bad meeting behavior, who should be responsible for maintaining order and good meeting behavior? If you think that it is someone else’s responsibility to help maintain order, then you obviously don’t understand the importance of accountability/group consensus in managing one of the most critical activities that lead to organizational excellence. Every team member must feel empowered to maintain order throughout a meeting. We now have the ability to create clear expectations so members understand what type of behaviors are appropriate during a conversation along with a description of what behaviors should be avoided.

to send the objectives and goals to the team prior to the meeting along with meeting invite and also before to start the meeting so all the team well aware of the objectives.

It is imperative to clearly state the purpose and expected outcomes in the meeting invite and agenda. At the start of the meeting, briefly reiterate the objectives and keep focused on the objective, ensuring that discussions do not go off point.

It is important not only set up an agenda before the meeting, but also share relevant documents or materials with your team before the meeting. This could include existing ad visuals, data on ad performance, or creative briefs. Providing this information in advance allows team members to prepare and understand the context.

I think an important aspect of driving effective online meetings is to encourage sharing video to re-introduce body language as a means of communication. Team members should be set up for success by having camera configurations that allow for them to look directly at the camera, and speakers should spend as much time surveying the body language and engagement of their audience as they spend on using visual aids. All too often, a shift to slides equates to a shift to the audience multitasking, so trying to foster video driven conversations can often help with improved effectiveness.

Pro tip: if you are the one leading the meeting, make sure to delegate taking notes to a teammate so you can focus on the meeting’s dynamics and to actively listening to your team’s feedback. Another great tool is to use a software to automatically take notes for you during an online meeting!