If you have the kind of job where you can work from home, you have probably been on hundreds of virtual meetings in the past four months. And this will most likely continue for the foreseeable future as many 
companies have no set date for when they will have employees return to their offices. There are plenty of articles with overall tips for working from home. Here are my tips for effective virtual meetings:
Follow meeting norms – If your company had meeting guidelines and standard practices when you were all in person, continue to follow them. During my interim engagement at the University of Vermont Health Network, I became very familiar with the meeting norms in IT and shared them in a previous blog post – “We’re at meeting norms”. I consider them best practice. They included behaviors that contribute to productive, collaborative work. I can honestly say that the meetings there were some of the most productive, focused, and efficient meetings I have seen in all the organizations I’ve worked in. One of the most useful is having 25- or 50-minute meetings. When you are working in whatever home office setup you have, you do not have to move between meeting rooms. But you still need time between calls whether it’s a bio break, time to stand up and stretch, organize your follow-ups, or get ready for the next meeting.
Know how to use the tools – Get to know all the features of your preferred/default video conference tool and be comfortable navigating in it. But be flexible and quick to adapt to other tools as needed if the meeting host has a different default tool. Be patient when technical issues arise and work together to resolve quickly or find a workaround. People are more supportive and tolerant of issues now compared to when there was just one or two people remote with everyone else in a conference room together wondering why the remote people were having issues.
Facilitate large groups as you would in person – Depending on the size of the group, encourage everyone to be on camera (25 may be a reasonable max visually), use the chat and raise hand features, agree on when to take breaks, and be flexible/nimble with screen sharing by different participants.
Make the most of your video – Lots to say on this one. Have a neat and non-distracting background wherever you are working. If you use a virtual background, remember that when you move around it looks very choppy and that parts of you may get cut off. If you must get up and leave your computer briefly, turn off the camera – moving around can be very distracting to others. My experience is that more and more people are using cameras even for 1:1 calls to increase the human connection in this time of social isolation. At the same time, recognize that “zoom fatigue” is real and accept if someone wants audio only.
Share your schedule – If you have very critical meetings that you cannot be interrupted for, let your family members know. Recently, while I was doing a group interview with a client to gather system requirements for an ERP vendor selection, my husband suddenly appeared over my shoulder with a vase of flowers from the garden. He knows I keep fresh cut flowers on my desk and that it was time for new ones that day. I was embarrassed but my client thought it was sweet. One of the men in the group said it was making him look bad. We all laughed and picked up where we had left off.
Be sensitive to place – While you will find most people still working from home, leaders and staff in hospitals may be in transition back to the office or rotating there a few days each week. Small groups socially distanced in conference rooms and individuals working from home may be the mix for any given meeting. Adjust as needed since this is likely to be audio only.
Accept that dogs bark – My home office is above our front door. I can usually tell when a delivery person walks up. I know that the doorbell is going to ring, and the dogs will bark. Very predictable cause and effect. If I am not the speaker at the time, I try to quickly mute my mic before the commotion happens. For the people you meet with often, you are probably getting to know who all has dogs.
And then there are virtual meetings at scale. For the client mentioned above, we are planning virtual 2-day vendor demos for each of the finalists with many participants. Earlier this week for another client we held a 6-hour session with 25 people. And there are more and more virtual conferences replacing in-person conferences. I covered that recently in “Time to reimagine industry conferences”.
Now if we really want to think virtual at scale, remember it is an election year and campaigns are going virtual. I was on a grassroots fundraising call for a political campaign last month and there were reportedly 170,000 people who called in to listen to the speakers. And the technology worked without a glitch!!
Kudos to the technology companies providing us with these solutions. And kudos to IT staff everywhere who have implemented the tools and make sure they work for their organization.
If you have your own tips for virtual meetings, I would love to hear them.
Related Posts:
Time to reimagine industry conferences