Five essential tips to maximise the effectiveness of your online meetings.
With the challenges presented by COVID-19 the way meetings are conducted has changed, and this particularly affects crisis team meetings, where time is often short and quick, effective decision-making is required. Follow these five tips to ensure your crisis team meetings run at maximum effectiveness.
Ensure you know who is (and isn’t) on the call. Just because the online meeting technology puts up the video stream from each participant, that doesn’t mean everyone has a perfect view of who’s on the call.
Some participants might be using their tablet or phone and have a minuscule screen. Their view will be greatly reduced, if they have one at all. So follow good meeting protocol right from the start by doing a roll call. And remember, it’s just as important to know who isn’t on the call but should be. There’s no point everyone discussing a legal issue for 10 minutes only to discover that we forgot to invite anyone from Legal Department on the call.
Screen share is useless to those dialling in. Collaboration platforms allow those with poor connections, or without the collaboration application, to dial in, but obviously they won’t see anything. If what’s being shared is important, then it will need to be described to anyone who can’t see it.
Body language won’t work. It’s easy to inadvertently talk over someone else on an online call. Those almost imperceptible visual clues that we use in a physical meeting - such as giving way to someone by nodding at them - won’t work in an online meeting. On the plus side, there’s a chance that nobody will see you raising your eyes to the skies because Tony in Compliance has just returned to an issue we thought we closed out 15 minutes ago.
Nurture contributions from participants. Some participants on online calls remain stoically quiet, perhaps out of fear of interrupting someone else. A good chairperson will encourage quality, open information-sharing and debate. Remember, the loudest or most senior person on the call isn’t always right.
Close out the meeting with actions and responsibilities. You wouldn’t skip this step in a physical meeting, but it’s less likely to happen in an online meeting. And remember, many collaboration platforms allow you to record the call. Take advantage of this so that you have a really good record of who said what - and what they promised to do, by when.
So make sure your next online crisis meeting runs at maximum effectiveness and sets up your organisation to deal with the situation quickly and efficiently.