Tips for better online meetings

Conducting online meetings with people from different locations can be difficult to manage. If you prepare in advance and ensure that your meetings are well structured, moderated and well communicated, online meetings can become not only an extremely effective platform for connecting your organisation stakeholders and employees, but they also can help you save time. To help you conduct more productive online meetings, here are some tips that can be implemented immediately.

1. The key to a good video call is the audio. Make sure all participants use headphones instead of their laptop’s mic to ensure clear communication and encourage participants to mute themselves when they are not speaking.

2. Minimize distractions. Distractions can easily cause miscommunication in online meetings. To avoid them, make sure all participants are sitting in a closed and quiet room.

3. Appoint a meeting moderator who can keep an eye on group dynamics and guide the conversation. This is particularly important in online meetings, since there’s a high chance of miscommunication due to internet connectivity and audio or video quality issues.

4. Set expectations. A meeting with a vague purpose often leads to confusion and a lot of wasted time. Never hold an online meeting without a clear agenda. To make things easy for everyone, prepare a formal agenda with all the key issues to be discussed in the meeting and sort them according to your business needs. Also clearly mention what role you expect from each participant in the meeting. Send this agenda at least 24 hours before the meeting, and seek acknowledgment from all the participants.

5. Shared note-taking. This is one of the areas where online meetings may actually have an advantage over in-person meetings. It feels natural to keep a browser window open for shared notes.

6. Share meeting notes. Once your online meeting concludes, make sure a summary of all the meeting notes is sent to the participants. List the action points identified for each agenda item along with the name of the person responsible for its delivery.

These are just some starting points which will help to keep your online meetings structured to avoid productivity delays.