Leave a Comment / Management, Leadership, Productivity / By Tim Lauenroth
How many online meetings have you held with your project team recently? Likely, the number of online meetings you and your team have held over the last few months has also increased significantly.
In the meantime, meetings via communication platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx or Zoom have become indispensable. However, many people still find it difficult to make these digital meetings effective. Compared to meetings at present, other basic requirements have to be observed. On the one hand, this is a big challenge. On the other hand, you can save a lot of time with the effective design of digital meetings and still achieve the objectives of the meetings.
We want to share with you 5 quick tips that will help you make your online meetings more effective, thus increasing the productivity and success of your digital project team.
1. Use the right technology
The foundation for successful meetings is using the right tool. We recommend Microsoft Teams as your central communication platform. With Teams, you have great features to help you make meetings effective.
Teams are also the foundation of the Microsoft 365 work environment. As a user, you can link your Microsoft programs with Teams and also integrate other external programs such as time ghost into Teams.
So, beyond the meeting features, Teams gives you more options that make the communication platform even more powerful for your team.
2. Keep the team engaged
Now we get to a tip to keep in mind during the meeting as a leader — and that’s to keep the entire team engaged during the meeting.
How do you do this?
Take time to have a casual conversation
To pick up and engage each team member during the meeting, casual conversation can be a great opener to create the level of relationship between people that is necessary for the meeting and to foster interaction between them. Plus, by making short small talk, you’ll strengthen the culture within the team and deepen relationships with each person.
Make sure to engage everyone in the conversation at the beginning so that everyone feels addressed and to lower the barrier of active participation.
3. Give each team member a task
When team members don’t have a clear task, they often wonder why they’re even in the meeting and don’t participate much. Therefore, before the meeting, make sure you know what each person’s task is during the meeting and make sure each participant has a task. If people are forced to listen passively, they tend to get tired and bored.
4. Get feedback regularly
The only way to know how the online meeting has gone and how it has been received by the participants is to get feedback after the meeting. Ask yourself as well how you felt the meeting went and what can be improved. Through the mutual exchange, you can constantly improve your online meetings. With the help of feedback, you can implement the suggestions for improvement in the next online meeting.
Small tip: Conduct online surveys
Sometimes a survey tool is helpful because some participants are afraid to give feedback directly. Use this anonymous feedback option to motivate even the last participant to give short feedback.
5. Turn on the video
Even if some team members don’t like to do it, it is still important to show your face during meetings. Due to the lack of contact presence, the meeting automatically becomes more impersonal. Communication skills are key, even in digital meetings. Since facial expressions and gestures have a greater impact than what we actually say verbally, turning on your webcam on your PC is an absolute must.
Successful meetings are all about interaction and intensive, mutual exchange about the topics to be discussed. Due to the lack of video, many ideas and suggestions fall by the wayside, as interpersonal interaction and personal contact are virtually not granted.
That’s why many new ideas emerge when the camera is turned on rather than when looking at black tiles. In addition, the meeting is automatically more fun when everyone gets over themselves and turns on their camera.
Conclusion
In our opinion, all 5 tips are essential to successfully conducting online meetings. Meetings can only be held successfully if the basic interpersonal conditions are created and the appropriate space is given so that the ideas and suggestions of each team member can be introduced. For this, we need the right tools and, above all, motivated, committed discussion partners.
