In the modern world of digital development and a pandemic impact, where virtual meetings are a new normal, it’s always desirable to have productive and effective meetings without technical or organizational issues. As a result, many companies and businesses shifted to work from home and started hosting daily sessions to business meetings on virtual platforms.
As communication is the key to every effective working process, it’s essential to consider every detail before hosting virtual meetings. Here are three tips for hosting the most effective virtual meetings.
1. Get prepared beforehand
Before running a meeting, especially if it’s a virtual meeting, planning everything properly is essential. The project manager or team lead can organize the virtual meeting’s hosting preparations. It would be clear the meeting’s platform or app where it’s going to be hosted, the number of participants, the topic of the discussion, main questions to be discussed, and a schedule to keep the focus and make the meeting process more organized. Virtual meeting agenda should include:
- Time and platform
- Main topics
- Speakers and participants
- Breaks, in case of long meetings
- Resources and documents
Prepare an email before the meeting and send the invitation to all participants to remind them about the upcoming meeting, including the schedule, to have an idea of the primary purpose of the meeting. Also, if you use Whatsapp for business purposes, you can send invitations via a Whatsapp chatbot and reach your participants easily.
Think about the purpose you want to achieve during and after the meeting, and make sure that you have enough time and resources to achieve it. For example, if you have a speech, write it down beforehand and edit if necessary. Keep all the folders and documents separately in the place you can easily find.
2. Use the right apps and tools
The productivity of virtual meetings mostly depends on good technical preparation, which means choosing the right apps and tools to prevent failures during the session. For example, you might share a presentation, share your screen or talk with the open camera and unmuted speaker, so it’s essential to ensure that the chosen app can provide all the technical necessities mentioned.
Besides choosing the right platform for you, make sure you also have a good Internet connection, clear speakers, and a web camera with good quality. Zoom and Microsoft Teams are the most popular among virtual meetings, but there are also many other apps to organize your virtual meeting. Take your time and research every platform and choose the fastest communication channel, which will also be appropriate to your requirements and equipped with advanced tools.
Choose the app which can give an option to record the meeting. But besides that, make some meeting notes during the meeting, so you can quickly see the whole image of the meeting after the session, before watching the recording.
3. Engage all participants
Virtual meetings can involve different participants, who speak all the time, mute their microphones, and keep in silence until the end of the session. To avoid such situations, ensure that all the participants are involved in the discussions. Ask them questions and listen to their opinion about the topic or understand better if they have any questions. Being distracted is less possible if they were involved in the discussion.
By engaging all the participants in the session, in the end, you will have a more effective and constructive meeting with exciting insights and comments. Also, before starting a discussion, set some rules. For example, if someone is speaking, and another person has something to say, they can press a button to raise their hand to talk the next.
You can do social media monitoring and see what topics and discussions are actual and integrate them to fit your meeting topic. Try your best to have engaging and exciting conversations to keep the participant’s attention during the whole meeting.
Conclusion
To sum up, virtual meetings have risen in popularity in recent years. Many companies use online platforms to organize their daily or business meetings. So, it’s essential to make sure that all the organizational and technical parts are prepared correctly in such conditions. It’s also about planning everything, choosing the right platforms, making participants engaged, and if you consider all these components, you’ll have more productive virtual meetings.
