9 Practical Tips To Take Control Of Your Virtual Team Meetings
Virtual team meetings have exploded in recent times with some teams choosing a 2-meetings a day cadence just to keep on top of things. The format of virtual together with their regularity has heaped pressure on managers to facilitate these meetings effectively. Based on our observation of managers in the past few months, we’ve compiled 9 practical strategies for you and your managers to maintain team focus and engagement in virtual team meetings. All the best!
? Be purposeful. Take the lead in the meeting, show purpose. Maintain a structure or format to your meetings despite their frequency. If your manager joins these meetings, it’s still your meeting to facilitate, so invite them into the conversation with targeted questions and yet maintain control. The virtual format means you need to be more overt or deliberate than you would otherwise be.
? Find time for social. Informal conversation probably works best at the beginning of the meeting while people are logging on. Time permitting and if appropriate, also wrap-up the meeting with a positive non-work-related reference.
? Take some topics offline. Avoid using the team meeting as a ‘catch-all’ meeting, trying to cover too many topics when some topics could be moved offline. For example, if 90% of the meeting is between you and one other, think again. Same for a junior employee that needs repeated coaching that’s not relevant to others in the meeting.
? Pause. Your virtual meetings might be the only visual interaction with others in their working day and as such, give people more time to express themselves, ask questions, explain the background behind a problem, rather than cut them off and provide a quick solution. In a world where it feels all about managing the workload, we need to balance this with depth in our conversations.
? Anything else? Be careful that you don’t fall into the trap of the lazy question, the one that you ask 2 or 3 times in every meeting and only get an average answer from the group. It’s usually a closed question, i.e. Is your workload OK? Anything else? Did you understand it? Instead, look to expand your open-ended questions in your meetings, i.e. What’s your workload like at the moment? David, what can we do to help you reach your goal for today?
? Teachable moments. Use time in your team meeting to reinforce why we do things the way we do as a teaching moment. If you have a more experienced team, alternatively ask them why they do the things the way they do.
? Take notes. It’s so simple. If you’re asking people to share their priorities over the day, take notes and hold them accountable at the end of the day.
? Quieter ones first. For the quieter individuals in your team, try going to them first for contribution, rather than the louder ones. By bringing them in earlier, they just might be engaged for longer.
? Flip 1 a week. If you’re having daily meetings, flip 1 of these meetings each week to make it all about the team and not about the work. Keep it light, keep it social, keep it fun.
For more ideas on how you and your organisation can elevate your virtual meetings, please reach out to Tonka Learning at 1300 597 294 or at [email protected].
Thank you. Tonka Learning
