MAKE REMOTE MEETINGS WORK

With #COVID-19 rapidly taking over life – and seemingly doing so for the foreseeable future – it is no longer causing just short-term disruption, but requires us to adapt our way of working for weeks and months to come.

 

One of the biggest challenges our clients face is how to run remote meetings effectively. There’s a ton of strategies out there for in-person meetings where there’s a plethora of tools to use. Remote meetings are a different animal though:

 

People have a lot more distractions while working from home rather than sitting in a meeting room;

It’s harder to keep people engaged by having them look at a screen and listen for hours;

Many interactions that work in-person don’t work over video conference;

 

It is much harder to notice natural cues for breaks, when a topic has been going on for too long, or when something’s simply not interesting enough for the majority;

 

It’s very easy to go on for way too long in a remote meeting, much more than it is in an in-person meeting.

 

As an organization that works a lot with remote teams and has them ourselves, we’ve gained quite some experience running them over the past 14 years. Here are some of those lessons to help you make your remote meetings work.

 

Consider this first: a meeting is a two-way street!

 

Showing up for a meeting where people are expected to just sit and listen is typically considered to be a waste of time. With all the technology available today, people can just as well look at a recording of the meeting or read the slide deck that was used as a presentation. People come to meetings because there’s value for them to be there, which implies a meeting has to be a two-way street. You give some, you take some.

 

These are strategies I typically use to make meetings valuable for people to attend:

 

Have people drive the meeting for components they own, or part that belong to them. This is different from one person leading the meeting and makes it more like a relay race where everyone plays a role;

Engaging people in a meeting is a powerful tactic as they now share ownership in the meeting and feel their participation is actually required and essential to the meeting, rather than just being there to sit and listen;

Have people create their own meeting notes and summaries that you’ll bundle/collect/merge at the end of the meeting. Different people write different notes and the combination of the whole will likely better summarize the meeting. Even more so, it changes people’s participation as now they have to actively do something with the information they get;

Only invite people you actually need. What do people that are required bring to the table? Do you need them to be at the meeting or can you inform them after? Do you include them because they need to be there or because you don’t want them to feel left out? In addition to that, optional attendees are ambiguous – do you need them or not? If they are optional, what’s their value add if they show up and what do you miss if they don’t? It might sound harsh, but having only the right people at a meeting makes it much more effective.

When using these strategies, you’ll make your meetings much more targeted and effective, keeping you attendees more engaged.

 

Don’t push large swaths of information

 

Whereas in an in-person environment some longer stretches of pushing information might work, in remote meetings it typically doesn’t. This has mostly to do with the distractions people have available which provides them with a break from a long push of information.

 

Much rather, information should be pulled, discovered or collected by the meetings participants. Granted, the type of meeting should enable this kind of interaction. Sharing your quarterly financial results might not be the easiest type of meeting to transform, but nothing’s impossible. It works best though for those meetings where you need to build something collaboratively (like a plan, a slide deck or a presentation).

 

Here’s some simple tactics that I employ frequently during meetings that could drastically change people’s participation:

 

Ask people open questions and ask them to explain their answers. While this might introduce awkward silences at first, it will force interaction and participation quite rapidly and (most) people will be happier for it. The meeting will instantly turn from a sit-and-listen to an active participation meeting.

Ask people to interpret information themselves rather than doing it for them. While not the most efficient way of doing things, it is considerably more effective, especially in remote meetings where you need to do more to keep people engaged.

Let the meeting’s participants draw conclusions and come up with outcomes and follow-up actions. You could even ask and collect people’s individual conclusions and merge them in to a collective one.

Not pushing information is hard, but not doing so with large amounts of information actually makes meetings much more valuable for people to be part of.

 

Breakouts, breakouts, breakouts

 

Another great strategy is to have (lots of) breakout session in which smaller groups either receive or collect information. Smaller groups help people stay engaged and focused and take away part of the discomfort some people might experience about speaking up in a larger group. It’s a very effective strategy to get group input during a remote meeting.

 

One tactic you could use in combination with breakouts is a variation to the liberating structure 1-2-4-all, where you could do a 1-4 in a breakout session and then share with the whole group at the end of the breakout session. The way this would work is as follows:

 

Start with a question you want to have answered, or a challenge you’re facing that needs a solution and share it with the group;

Start breakouts (Zoom, for example, has excellent breakout functionality);

People first reflect themselves for one or two minutes to come up with an answer or solution;

People then share and discuss with the breakout group for up to four minutes;

The breakout ends and every group shared back with the group as a whole.

Because this setup is so simple, it’s quite easy to do quite a number of times during a meeting. A two-hour meeting could easily have four to five of these breakout sessions, making it a considerably more interactive meeting.

 

Make people read before the meeting

 

When you’re trying to limit pushing lots of information to people during a meeting, but you simply have to convey a certain amount of information to ensure people are informed, consider sending it to them before the meeting. You could agree with people that they actually dedicate the time to reading the material, otherwise they could still end up in the meeting uninformed. Then again, this is pretty self-reinforcing; if you assume people have a certain amount of information coming into the meeting and it turns out they don’t, you’ll likely notice this immediately in their participation.

 

To strike a good balance between conveying information before a meeting and not forcing people to do 10 hours of pre-reading, consider these practices that have worked for me in the past:

 

Explain to people why you’re asking to prepare for the meeting and ask them to dedicate, for example, 30 minutes to do so. This is time saved from the actual meeting that you would otherwise spend on pushing this information;

Ensure the information people need to consume as preparation for the meeting is short and crisp. A 175-page slide deck is not short and crisp and is not something that is easy to consume. You want people to enter the meeting informed, not overwhelmed. Make sure they understand what is expected of them and why they need to consume that information;

Actively and frequently refer to the information they consumed before the meeting during the meeting itself. This confirms to people that what they did as preparation was both valuable and necessary. It you don’t do this, people are very likely to skip preparation next time;

Don’t repeat the information that you asked people to consume before the meeting! This would negate the reason you asked them to prepare in the first place and would tell them that the preparation they did was technically a waste of time. For this to work, you have to assume people did their pre-work or the system’s self-reinforcing mechanism doesn’t work.

With everyone entering the meeting informed and up-to-speed, you can spend a lot more time during the meeting on valuable conversations and decision-making, rather than pushing information to people. It will make everyone’s participation much more valuable.

 

Closing

 

Remote meetings are always more challenging than in-person meetings, which is why they require even more preparation and facilitation. Proper tooling will take you a long want, but the biggest impact to the meeting comes from how you actually run the meeting itself and how you involve and engage people during the meeting.

 

There’s no one true way that works for all, so give some of the things mentioned in the blog post a try and experiment with other tactics as well. Only by doing will you find out what works best for your meetings!

 

Like to learn more about distributed teams, remote working and supporting tooling? Reach out to one of our professionals to set up a free introductory video conference!

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