If someone told you in February that your workforce would need to work 100% virtually in March, you would have said they were nuts. And yet here we are. The coronavirus is forcing leaders to work in ways that we once thought impossible. Heads of state are communicating via iPhone videos. News anchors are broadcasting from their basements. People are forced to work from home. We’re discovering how to make it work because given the option – make do or go out of business – it’s an easy choice.
Gratefully, we’ve got the technology. What’s required is a marriage of tried-and-true technique and technology. Some things are fundamentally important in any meeting … now we must apply them virtually.
Regardless of whether you’re meeting face-to-face or virtually, there are some critical things you need to do before you meet. They will make the difference between wasting time and getting something accomplished. Imagine the multiplier effect if everyone in your organization put even five minutes into planning their meeting. Now’s a good time to make this a habit.
Here are four things you must do while meeting virtually.
- Meeting outcomes – What will you leave the meeting with? If you don’t start here, you will waste your time. You wonder why people go off on tangents – it’s because they don’t know they’re off topic. If you are too general, i.e., “We’re meeting to discuss the budget,” people will cover lots of territory that you don’t care about. Be more specific. Instead, “We’re here to agree on 3 to 5 ways to cut the budget by 10%.”
- Agenda – Now is NOT the time to wing it. It’s hard enough to keep people’s attention under the best of circumstances. Add kids at home, breaking news reports and the shelter-in-place food temptations to the typical multitasking temptations and you’ve got a very distractible audience. A tightly-timed agenda is your first line of defense. For each meeting outcome, figure out how long it will take to achieve and plan out a logical sequence.
- Decision making – What decisions are you making and how will the decisions be made? For each discrete decision, whose call is it? Who will be involved and how? If you clarify that up front, you will make sure the right people are on the call – and they will be motivated to participate (assuming they value the decision). Don’t invite people to your meeting who aren’t influencing the decision.
- Cameras on – By now your standards for “camera ready” have fallen precipitously. That’s the good news. Cameras make people more present and significantly less likely to multitask. Don’t buy the argument, “My camera takes up too much bandwidth.” That might have been true three years ago, but not anymore. You’ll hear fewer “Can you repeat that question?” (or toilet flushes) if cameras are on.
Author Saul Alinsky wrote, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Now’s your opportunity to get really good at collaborating virtually and learn ways to save time and airline travel once this storm passes.
Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash.