How productive and engaging are your virtual meetings?
Everyone is working hard to make this new virtual reality as productive and engaging as possible. As a professional Certified Virtual Facilitator™, I am constantly researching and applying new best practices for how to design and conduct even more effective virtual meetings. Ones that ensure everyone's time is well-spent.
Here are my top 3 actionable tips for immediately improving your virtual meetings:
Begin with the end in mind - i.e. be clear on "the critical few" meeting deliverables. Think about who needs to attend this meeting. Along with sending out the agenda in advance, what pre-reading can you send to help participants prepare and bring their best thinking? If you are clear on the meeting purpose and you have the right people in the (virtual) room, you significantly increase the likelihood of a productive discussion that will lead to actionable outcomes. At the close of each meeting, ask "Who wasn't here that needs to know what we just decided?" - and figure out how you will get them up to speed.
Research shows you need to find a way to actively engage virtual participants every 3-5 minutes. Based on the platforms I've seen, Zoom offers the absolute best and most user-friendly tools for increased virtual meeting effectiveness. They are also constantly upping their game and adding new features - with an incredible online support system of quick video tutorials and articles. From simplest to more complex, my favorites include polls, breakout rooms, and annotation. Manually created breakout rooms help to reinforce a clear purpose. Annotation allows participants to engage through stamp voting and adding their own input to a virtual whiteboard.
During the virtual meeting, be sure everyone is clear on the purpose of each agenda element. Give people a moment to think individually about the topic or a key question. Then invite them to type their input input into chat - but wait to hit send to avoid "groupthink". Or conduct a round robin to ensure you hear from each person. Make sure the meeting has actionable outcomes by deciding Who will do What by When after each topic. At the end, take 5 minutes for a Plus/Delta Meeting Evaluation - what worked well that we want to keep doing; what can be improved for the next meeting?
In these challenging times, I believe we all need to support each other. I truly enjoy helping people take their meetings from good (or perhaps sometimes not so good) to great.
If your meetings are not as effective as you think they could be, I invite you to email me today to set up a complimentary 30-minute virtual brainstorm for overcoming one of your top meeting challenges.
Or, if you really want to accelerate improving all of your meetings, let's discuss a customized, cost-effective half-day workshop for you and your team(s).
I sincerely look forward to hearing from you,
Kimberly
