At Mark Dicus & Company, we are in the business of helping other businesses become a success. Through accounting, taxes, bookkeeping, and other such services, we are eager to assist you. In addition to the services we offer, we include business consulting that includes areas concerning as of financial management, operations, risk management, strategy and technology services. With this in mind, we would like to discuss the risk management element and offer tips to improve online meetings as they are likely being used heavily during this time of isolation as we endure the COVID 19 pandemic. Though there is a difference between a presence meeting, online meetings know that they can be inefficient and poorly executed.
How to Engage Remote Meeting Participants
Below are a few tips to help improve the online meetings.
1) Inspect the equipment. A remote meeting is not functioning with equipment that is not performing. Check communication software, collaboration tools, headsets, internet connection, and so forth.
2) Prepare an agenda. Agenda help make the remote meetings more effective. To prepare for themselves also encourage participants. Be sure to keep the agenda as short and concise as possible. Excessively long meeting can lose the participants.
3) Implement a timer. One of he most important elements to any meeting, but especially an online one, is timekeeping. Time can get easily lost, particularly due to the challenges in communication.
4) Video. Video can be helpful to make the meeting more productive, however, when the bandwidth is compromised and the video transmission disturbs more than it helps, do not use it.
5) Establish rules of the meeting. Muting the microphone when you are not speaking, allowing people speak, or how to deal with silence, and so forth needs to be established.
6) Directly speak to participants. Speaking directly to the participants regarding to questions and then waiting for someone to answer needs to be clear.
7) Note the silent participants. Silent participants quickly get lost during remote meetings and you need to address them directly when you notice those that are not contributing.
8) Avoid letting anyone, including you, talk for too much at one time. Dominant contributors lead to fundamental discussions, where the rest of the group starts to get bored. Break up the discussion by asking other to offer their thoughts.
9) Harmonize work together. For collaborative editing, use shared Onenote, Word documents, or Google Docs. Develop creative work without flipcharts and moderation cards to make it simple. There are many practical options that can help make the online meeting more productive, take advantage of these tools.
10) All remote or all physical meetings. For the time being, most businesses will rely on online meetings, but whether you can have physical gatherings, or expect to continue online meetings in the future when the coronavirus is no long an issue, be sure the meeting participants are either all online or all physical. Avoid splitting up the meetings and the participants as many points can be lost and not everyone will be on the same page.