A Manager’s Guide to Make an Engaging Remote Meeting

Meetings always get a bad reputation – for a practical reason. Being in team-building meetings or innovation meetings, people never start on time. Discussions inexorably go off-track, and someone dominates the conversation continuously. And almost as always, people realize that the meeting could have possibly been an email. Online meetings might be a normal part of a team’s everyday workplace. But, how do you make a remote meeting maximally efficient and productive? Read on.

Running remote meetings can be quite challenging. However, it is one of the essential skills you can develop as a leader. On a remote team at the workplace, it is likely that the chance of having unproductive and ineffective meetings increases. As per the Remote Work Report, communication is the major problem faced by distributed and remote teams. The article below breaks down everything you need to know about remote meetings.

Some of the most common problems of remote meetings are:

1. A Poor Connection Breaks Up the Video and Audio

Did you ever have a meeting where your remote colleague’s face or your face froze on an unflattering angle? While you are trying badly to strategize about the budget, you might not be able to get through a sentence without your colleague’s connection cutting out. The best solution in such cases is to ensure all your team members have quality Wi-Fi and a good laptop.

2. Notifications Interrupt the Screen-Share

During a remote conference, you share your screen with people who are in-person and remote. Your laptop is projected in the meeting room or on the screens of the remote colleagues around the globe. For instance, you may suddenly get an iMessage from your colleague. In such situations, the ‘do not disturb’ mode for pop-up messages is a critical tool. Usually, you can set it for a specific amount of time.

3. A Technical Glitch Occurs

Whether you are attending a meeting remotely or in-person, technical difficulties can be very disruptive. Everyone hates their audio cutting out in mid-conversation if you have the proper equipment and ensure its good set-up for a splendid meeting experience. To avoid a technical glitch from occurring, ensure you check your technology before the meeting starts.

4. Attendees Are Unfocused

You are in a long meeting, and instead of paying attention to your speaker or taking active participation in the discussion, you are only thinking about the tasks that you have to do after the meeting. So, what should you do if you are running a meeting, and your meeting attendees aren’t focused at all? The perfect solution is creating a meeting agenda and appointing a meeting facilitator.

5. No Body Language Depicts Less Emotion for Memory Building

When people meet and speak face-to-face, they get most of the information about what they think or how they react from facial expressions and body language. However, body language even helps the brain remember such interaction by attaching emotions to them. In virtual settings, far less information is available. Therefore, a lot less emotion is generated so that the intent of others can be used.

6. Background Noise from Multiple Participants

Numerous virtual meetings are derailed by the background noise from every participant. Everyone has been the victim of someone’s inappropriate ringtone, someone’s lunch, or the excitable dog of the telecommuter. The ideal solution in such situations is having proper etiquettes and technical tools. Ensure everyone knows how to mute their lines if there is distracting noise in the background and instead continue participating with reaction icons and text. This way, you can also keep the video feed on.

Source: Remote Meeting

• Schedule Face-to-Face Meetings Daily

When one works remotely, falling into the trick of organizing unnecessary video conferences and making up for the lack of face time is easy. Naturally, people crave some socialization. So, it makes sense that you would want to see someone’s face when spending most of the day staring at your laptop’s screen and talking out loud to myself.

• Ensure You Start ,amp; End On Time

When a remote meeting starts, you can physically fetch an irregular colleague in the office. Also, there’s no physical cue of a meeting end, e.g., another person walking into the conference room for using it or just looking around the room for seeing if anyone else wants to say something. Making sure your video conference starts and ends on time is essential.

• Record The Remote Meeting

One of the greatest things about remote meetings is that they can be recorded quickly. If your team members are taking notes during the meeting, ensure you have them jot down the points often. This way, folks can fast forward the video to the spot where the relevant information is instead of watching the entire thing. You can also upload the video to a system that allows others to watch it at various speeds. Recording a remote meeting saves colleagues, the time to review sessions for catching up on things that they missed.

• Be Intentional About How You Communicate

Controlling a chatty person in a remote meeting is very easy since everyone is already in the room. To make the video conference interesting, communicating well is essential and so one must ensure using the best remote meeting software. Because of connectivity and delays issues, talking over one another remotely can be better.

• Decide Beforehand How You Want to Chat During the Call

Most video conferencing apps come with a chat option. It is the easiest way to have a conversation with your team members, regardless of their geographical location. This way, you do not have to clog your team chat with irrelevant content. Make sure you set some rules internally for how they will use the chat within your video tool for presentations.

• Go for A Mute/Unmute ,amp; Video/No Video Protocol

Within the best remote meeting software, users can mute the audio/video and choose if they should turn their webcam on and off. This makes it important for your team to decide early on whether you should enable the vide/simply mite.

• Ask For Feedback

When you get accustomed to running virtual meetings remotely, it is essential to know what’s working with your colleagues and what not! When you get accustomed to running remote meetings, knowing what’s more effective for your colleagues is crucial.

Edraw MindMaster is leading cross-platform mind-mapping software and a full-featured collaborative mind mapping tool. It is software with numerous advanced features, making it the ideal choice for a remote meeting. With MindMaster, users can share and work remotely on their mind maps with other team members and boost work efficiency.

Key Features of MindMaster:

• Brainstorming Tool
• Stunning presentation
• Effective Project management
• Dropbox Intergration
• Real-time cooperation
• Group Collaboration

Today, remote meetings have become an integral part of the workflow in businesses of all sizes. Conducting a successful conference requires adequate preparation, and using MindMaster - the best remote meeting software can be the key to keeping your remote team engaged throughout your virtual meeting. Time to ensure your remote meetings are as interactive and productive as possible to keep everyone engaged!