Are You Having Effective Online Meetings?

I had a call with someone last week who said he was walking through the world in a sort of haze, like he was surrounded by a cloud with vague feeling of dread. He said he felt every time someone reached out to him, the phone rang, he opened his email, he had another endless video meeting, he was waiting for an invisible shoe to drop with more dire news.

He was having a very difficult time feeling productive and seriously doubted his ability to “work like I used to”, especially since it seemed like he was on so many video calls he didn’t have time to get things done. He was exhausted.

In my field I’ve seen so many offering free or low-cost mindfulness workshops and webinars, meditations, consulting and coaching, and it’s been wonderful to see the response to these programs. I’ve personally led quite a few myself, including talks on how to manage stress while working from home and managing more online time than ever before.

I love the way the internet is being adopted here, to give us a way to stay in touch and the beauty of a product like Zoom (I don't work for Zoom) is that it allows us to connect on a deeper level than on a conference call or watching somebody read their slide presentation to us. The interactive quality of Zoom has killed death by PowerPoint to a large degree and that’s great too.

However, all this wealth of information combined with work meetings and perhaps working from home for the first time is overloading us to the point of exhaustion. It is definitely not the most effective way to manage in a pandemic.

We may have gone just a leeetle too far with all of this togetherness. We’ve been taught that the more meetings we have the more productive we are. After all, there’s so much accomplished in a meeting isn’t there? Really? Yeah, not so much.

Because of the reason we’ve all gone virtual there is a subtext to every meeting. "How are you?" "Are you homeschooling too?" "What do you know about what’s going on?" "Are the beaches open?" "Did you hear that…"

We are all stressed and struggling to deal with this, and more meetings isn't really helping is it? Being in wall to wall meetings every day is not productive in the long run. What we need to do is be more effective with meetings. That means setting up some guidelines in advance for everyone including yourself and sticking to them.

Create a guide to meetings and distribute well in advance of the meeting. It should include the following:

• Link to platform specific instructions (here’s Zoom’s getting started) and ask them to test their system before the call
• Make it clear whether you require video or not and if so give them access to information on how to set up their home office space for video meetings so they don’t feel silly
• You may assign someone to moderate the chat and handle technical issues in the chat rather than holding up the whole meeting for one or two technical issues
• Limit participants to essential only
• Allow people to go to audio only if they need to for reasons of quality of audio or  to reduce Zoom fatigue
• All participants should be on mute unless speaking to avoid disturbances
• Ask participants to submit suggested agenda items and questions in advance to reduce duplicate issues and allow people to have a sense of ownership
• Start the meeting with a moment to fully arrive and allow people to become present
• If it fits, allow each person 30 seconds to 1 minute to checkin with how they are doing personally.
• Distribute an agenda in advance with time allotted for each portion
• Keep length to a minimum and that includes the time for each speaker
• Private or small group checkins might be done individually as needed. You may want to suggest people ping specific individuals if they need to check in
• The last few minutes of the meeting should be for summary and next steps
• End with a positive note and end on time