A meeting is an interesting moment to attend. Be it physical or remote, represents one of the most common ways to “work”. We discussed other times about the fact that this should be a moment of synthesis, to arrive to some conclusions.
The difficulties in a remote meeting
Things in the remote landscape have, in general a higher risk of derailing for many reasons:
A) people may not be used to work together because of lack of occasions
B) Inability to read signals from people allowing to steer the meeting (e.g. non verbal clues, reactions,..)
C) difficulty of establishing relationships and trust
D) conflict remains complex to handle, more than in person
E) Difficulty to arrive to an ending point
Rely on the process
So how can we work to address these risks?
By aligning information and working with a structured process.
First of all is important to maintain a schedule, the closer the better. A meeting here and there is perceived as a loss of time, a recurring one becomes part of a routine. And be sure to do this for homogeneous topics: handling performance management within the steering committee of your first line dealing with normal business updates is confusing and disperses the attention: better a separate meeting.
Second, if your organisation is big enough, let everyone come prepared by informing about who is attending. In many years in corporations, happens from time to time that you have no clue on who’s the person in front of you. You don’t need a full bio, just to know the role and what is the reason for attending the meeting. And by the way meetings need to be populated with all those that are meaningful, not just listeners for a matter of “being there”.
Third, claim for attention. We all do too many things during meetings, even more when we are in the remote space. If you want to be effective, claim their time and presence!
Fourth, establish ground rules for interactions. Not too much, but those that you perceive useful: for example there are teams where people discuss speaking one over the other which may not be useful to be effective and setting a rule where we speak once at a time simplifies the handling while maximising the order.
Fifth, set agendas for meetings and distribute them in advance: surprise topics or surprise meetings have the only target of setting another meeting to discuss the content.
Last but not least: speak as if the remote participants were in the room. Maybe strange and with slightly different rules but at the end we are only operating on a “wider” meeting room