Master Your Virtual Meetings

It’s time to champion your virtual meetings!

There are so many stories of resilience and happiness spread on the internet depicting people and teams getting together on virtual meetings. The extensive global lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic has overpowered teams to make virtual meetings a necessary part of the day to day work. With stories of people celebrating birthdays via Zoom meetings to colleagues sharing light-hearted jokes, the internet is full of these cases. But, such videos are one in a hundred examples. How does one create such delight in every virtual meeting?

Entertainment is not what employees look for in a routine office meeting, and these disconnect increases dramatically in a virtual scenario. It is challenging to keep all the employees focused on meeting at all times, and managers or moderators can play a large part in changing this.

A corporate meeting usually involves agendas revolving around inter- or intra-team alignments, project summaries, project introduction, employee onboarding, etc. Documents, presentations, sheets or videos may contain a project or team details. It's where the base of the problem starts, looking at a cascade of slides or ant-sized letters on a projector screen might not make sense to everyone in the meeting.

Now picture this in a virtual setting, members need to pay attention to a monotonous update, as opposed to probably patting their dog during work. What will you choose? We will keep the dog any day.

In times like this, employees tend to demonstrate attention by the cliché head nod or the all popular eye contact. And mind it, these also become challenging in a virtual setting.

In a Harvard survey by Justin Hale and Joseph Grenny, the researchers made some interesting observations. The team was aiming to gauge the engagement levels of around 200 attendees with a particular methodology. According to the research paper, after implementing the methodology, the engagement levels of about 86% of participants were higher than usual, in a face-to-face setting. Moreover, more than 15,000 participants have now used the methodology during their virtual meetings.

It's an indication that using innovative ideas may boost the engagement levels of a virtual meeting. But, let's dig deeper with some examples and how you can bring engagement to your virtual meetings by using some of the following aspects.

Introduce the Problem

If you are moderating a meeting, make sure to introduce the team with the problem at the very start. What's crucial here is the participant's attention. As the moderator, you need to shock your audience with some facts, anecdotes, or a story. Of course, this story needs to be in the ballpark of the meeting's agenda. A good start can be some data that shows huge disparities in market needs and supply.

Responsibility

If team members can relate to the problem, it becomes easier for the moderators to assign tasks them. It's because now the members relate to the problem and automatically feel responsible to take action. The major task of the moderator is to spontaneously instigate this feeling that encourages the participants to think and act.

Involve Everyone

High-ranking executives often tend to ignore lower-ranking employees in virtual meetings. These employees can be interns, fresher’s, new joiners, and so on. The obvious reason for this is that their managers are usually expected to brief them. However, moderators should make sure to ask questions or their opinions once every other aspect of the meeting is covered.

The best way to do this is to designate turns to everyone in the meeting. In this way, everyone gets to put their points forward. Moreover, not every employee is the same, some are introverts, while others are a bit more expressive and outgoing. The moderator must make sure that everyone gets the chance to speak.

Infographics speak better than Slides

Use infographics instead of multiple slides. Are we suggesting dumping PowerPoint presentations once and for all? No. What we are suggesting is that one should make the slides more graphic than putting in pointers after pointers. The major advantage of doing so is that an infographic can accommodate information in a much more consumable format. It is easier to understand one graph than to read through line after line of data.

Moreover, moderators must make sure that they use less number of slides (five to 10) and spend more time in explaining them. By doing so, they can build stories around slides, which can raise the engagement levels in the participants. It also allows them to break down the presentation easily.

Ask Questions

Let the team know that you are well informed of each member's role in any given project. Name people and call them out when anything relevant to what they are doing pops up. This will also affect the rest of the participants, as they will know that you can call them out any time when something relevant to their project comes up. You will instinctively have the attention of the rest of the class without even asking.

Moderators can also integrate interactive polls on particular aspects of projects. This will instill a sense of togetherness and confidence towards the leaders. It also enables managers to make informed decisions.

The rapid shift in the workspace setting also calls for immediate action and adaptability. It should reflect in all aspects of work and virtual meetings are one of the most crucial ones. Go ahead and champion your next meeting!

October 2, 2020