Virtual meetings: 10 best practices for remote teams

Collaboration is essential if you want to see concrete results from remote work. That’s why it’s so important to be able to easily share files and apps in your online meetings. To create a virtual office space that gives you the feeling of being in the same place, permanent meeting rooms are the ticket. They let your team pick up where they left off and hold spontaneous meetings in the same dedicated space at any time. With the right encouragement, your remote employees will begin to feel more comfortable in voicing their opinions, sharing their insights, and becoming active participants in team matters. However, it’s only effective when it’s read, so make the letter or chat message as engaging as possible — fill it with gifs, videos, funny pics from the meeting, etc.

However, one great practice you can adopt to keep your teammates accountable for those things is sending everyone an email with a recap of the meeting. A study by Northwestern University showed that workers who shared funny or embarrassing stories about themselves produced 26 percent more ideas during brainstorming sessions. That’s because sharing personal stories is an important part of building team rapport and trust. Without clear rules of engagement and remote-working guidelines, they can easily be “on” all day and never get a true break since they don’t have a clear separation from work. By setting up permanent meeting rooms for specific projects and clients, you can organize your documents and apps in one place and access them whenever you need them—not just when you’re in a meeting.

Tips For Running A Successful Remote Meeting

A combination of different shared spaces positively influence remote employees presence in a meeting. So if you have to run a remote meeting, the first thing you have to deal with is an internal rejection and a fear of being less productive. It is generally known that managers prefer to have face-to-face meetings instead of remote ones, as the former are perceived as more productive. But there is always a possibility to adapt and improve remote collaboration process and outcome.

Meeting presenters should log in five minutes early to ensure that all the technology is working smoothly. Ending meetings late is a tremendous source of stress for individuals, so don’t run over. Research-based insights can improve your remote meetings and keep participants engaged. It goes without saying that you need to prepare ahead of any meeting you’re leading, and remote meetings are no different.

MS Teams have this one great option that you can create a chat with the participants before and after the meeting. I wanted to start this year’s edition of my Agile State of Mind articles and videos with the topic of remote work. Yet many companies still struggle trying to survive the remote until they can go back to the office. Hence the company policies are not really remote-friendly, we just do what we used to do in the office only remotely. Your meeting minutes should state who is responsible for doing what, and when those deliverables are due.

Ensuring Comprehensive Meeting Transcriptions

This keeps everyone on the same page and lets them see exactly what you’re discussing. Use video when possible to create a stronger sense https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ of collaboration. If you start your meetings by discussing non-work-related topics, your team will feel more relaxed and engaged.

But we can all agree that while the modern workforce is predominately hybrid, occasional virtual team meetings are necessary. The time your team has together, whether in-person or virtually, is crucial to keeping everyone connected, engaged, and productive. Because meetings (both one-on-ones and team meetings) play such a vital role in a team’s healthy functioning, they’re a great place to focus your attention. Try some of the following best practices to start hosting successful, more engaging remote meetings and hold your team’s attention every time.

Pose a question, ask team members to brainstorm and drop in sticky notes with their ideas, and then organize those sticky notes by theme or priority. Remote meetings might currently be the exception to your everyday work experience. But as more businesses and corporations adopt a flexible workforce model, your skill for inspiring employee collaboration and participation will become essential. As part of creating the agenda, you should also decide ahead of time who will facilitate the discussion (likely the person who called the meeting) and who will take notes. While it’s wise to create an agenda for every meeting you host, this practice is especially important when you have multiple—or all—team members working from home. Don’t miss a chance to connect with remote colleagues and help them make their presence felt in the room.

Side-by-side collaboration allows every participant to interact with documents, websites, and apps within the same meeting room. In 1964 people crowded around a booth at the World’s Fair in New York to watch the unveiling of Bell Laboratories’ new invention, the Picturephone1. Visitors watched as delegates in New York and California held a face-to-face video call—and imagined they’d soon be doing the same. But it took several decades for “videotelephony” to catch on. Gone are the days of rigid 9-to-5 workdays and stay-at-your-desk work culture.

Here at monday.com, we’ve established some clear ground rules for when (and when not) to videoconference. Record the meeting — as hard as you may try to gather all participants at a particular hour, there might always be someone absent. To mitigate that, just record the meeting and share the recording with all participants in the email or add it to your meeting notes so it’s easily accessible. Incorporate icebreakers, polls, and Q&A sessions to engage participants. In the fast-paced nature of virtual discussions, details can easily slip through the cracks.

Make it a habit, so the meeting participants will be waiting for your email each time after the meeting. Remind those who participated the main points of the meeting and the direction post meeting. This both increases the effectiveness of the meeting and reinforces the importance of remote meetings to your team members.

• This will empower your teammates to stay on track by having a centralized place where they can find the list of priorities and tasks that were delegated during the conversation.
• Follow these best practices for virtual meetings for better productivity and collaboration.
• To make sure a meeting doesn’t take up too much time—or run over—think carefully about how much time you actually need and schedule accordingly.
• Give your colleagues—and yourself—a break if anything does happen to disrupt the meeting.
• Asking directly for input really helps team members feel engaged.

Collaboration tools like Switchboard are the only way to make remote work as engaging as in-person work. If you’re running low on time, facilitators can also send a follow-up email with the action items, and project managers may choose to visualize the team’s progress through a project dashboard. According to Harvard Business Review, 87% of remote workers feel more connected through the use of video conferencing.

Consider scheduling the occasional sync just to catch up as a team or to plan a virtual team building activity. Think of it as walking over to their desk if you were sharing a workspace. I’ll send something silly from our office that will “magically” show up in video conference land, in order to forge more of a “connection” with HQ. For example, we name our projects after movies, so I’ll send remote staff a copy of the movie on DVD or a picture of the movie to show in our conference.

Document your meetings to ensure they result in action after everyone logs out. Designate someone as a note taker during the meeting, or have someone jot down minutes on a Google Doc or sticky note within your virtual meeting room. Then, while the meeting is fresh in everyone’s mind, share a list of action points and takeaways so everyone knows what they need to do next. In Lucidchart, you can bring remote teams together to brainstorm, align on processes, and work together in real time.

Some ideas include asking them beforehand if they’d like a dedicated slot to present or encouraging people to use the chat function rather than always having to unmute and speak. You can also use a round-robin technique, asking each participant for one contribution before letting anyone speak again. Given that, remember it’s sometimes impossible to cut out all distractions.