4 Tips to Prepare for a Virtual Meeting

Gone are the days of rigid 9-to-5 workdays and stay-at-your-desk work culture. As remote teams grow to be more and more popular, virtual meetings have become all the more necessary to collaborate on projects, solve problems, and exchange vital information. 

In fact, research by Global Workplace Analytics indicates 50% of the workforce holds a job that is compatible with at least partial remote work, and approximately 20-25% of the workforce works remotely at some frequency. In today’s business world, the need for managers, employees, executives, and IT administrators to conduct recurring virtual meetings with key team members from around the state, across the country, or in different countries has become increasingly common.

This brings on a new meeting style that many of today’s workforce members have yet to become fully acclimated with—the virtual meeting. Having a clear understanding of how and why virtual meetings work, and how to make them work for you, is critically important. If your organization is planning on hosting more virtual meetings this year, here are four tips you can use to best prepare. 

Have Reliable Collaboration Tools in Place

Many of the virtual meeting solutions on the market today will fulfill everyday, basic professional needs. You can place calls, host meetings, and schedule time with peers and clients. However, as remote work becomes the standard for many teams, more reliable communication tools will be required to fulfill advancing needs. From Zoom, to Google Hangouts, to Slack, there are a number of communication tools available on the market to choose from when it comes to virtual meetings. 

It’s important to find a solution that not only meets your basic needs, but will also prove to be reliable over time. The communication tool you choose is essential to day-to-day operations, such as hosting meetings and fostering team collaboration. However, the friction that can come from these tools, such as video lag, rough audio, and undependable connections, can make it difficult to keep your virtual meetings as effective as possible.

Your collaboration tools can make or break your virtual meeting; failure to have a properly working video platform means your meeting can’t take place and productivity declines. Be sure to find the right tool with the necessary features to meet your team’s needs, and always prepare and practice hosting your meeting on the software ahead of time to avoid any technology blunders. 

Ensure All Employees Have Access to Relevant Information

Before any meeting, always share the important information participants may need to know or reference throughout the meeting, such as reports, data, articles, or presentation slides. Because your meeting is virtual rather than in person, you won’t be able to share any of these materials in a hard-copy version. Ensuring that your meeting participants have these materials readily available to them beforehand means that everyone has ample time to prepare for the meeting, and can instead “arrive” with thoughts or discussion points in mind. 

This is where cloud-based tools, like document-sharing platforms, enterprise resource planning systems, or file-hosting software can play an important role. Because the cloud is hosted on the internet rather than an on-premise server, these collaboration technologies are easily accessible, simple to use, and flexible. Rather than searching through disparate systems or sorting through disconnected spreadsheets, cloud-based tools can house your important documents and information all in one place. All employees have access to updated and real-time information, making knowledge transfer and information exchange a much simpler process.

That said, these tools aren’t all one and the same. Although many solutions, like Infor's ERP software for example, are advertised as cloud-based solutions, they actually use third-party cloud vendors to deliver their services. This can make document sharing more complex. 

Clean Up Your Background Area

Meeting etiquette is always important, even in virtual meetings. Online meetings often feel less stressful than in-person meetings, which can make it feel tempting to relax, kick back, and be more casual than you would around others in the same room. Before logging into a virtual meeting however, make sure your background is as neat and tidy as possible. 

Clean up and remove any items in your camera view that may be a distraction to other meeting participants; you may even want to consider shifting your background so that it faces a blank wall. According to several studies, the level of distraction in virtual meetings is much higher than in face-to-face meetings. One survey found that “Only 23% of managers gave their full attention during conference calls, while 25% dealt with their email, and 27% did other work. This level of distraction is much higher than in face-to-face meetings.”

By having a clean setting with work-appropriate art and decorations, you reduce the chance that attendees will become distracted. You should also try to attend the meeting from a quiet area that has minimal background noise and movement. 

Create and Stick to a Meeting Agenda

A well-planned agenda gives you a clear idea of what should happen before and during a meeting. It helps team members prepare, allocate time wisely, get a quick response from all participants on the topic, and stop the meeting in time. If problems are identified during the meeting, a well-thought-out agenda allows the team to solve them effectively and quickly.

In an in-person meeting, talking simultaneously or speaking over one another may happen naturally, while in a virtual environment this can be easily disruptive and can cause your team to lose focus. Having an agenda to reference ensures that meeting participants stay on track and everyone who needs to has the opportunity to speak. You may want to create and utilize a meeting agenda template that relevant participants can edit before a meeting. You can also allocate a specific time to each topic and team member, which can help utilize the meeting time more efficiently. 

Organizing effective virtual group meetings is critically important for every company seeking to leverage remote teams. Be sure to use the tips above to your benefit to host virtual meetings that are as effective as possible.