6 tips for effective remote meetings

Meetings are essential for communication, decision-making and team-building within an organization. At the same time meetings are one of the biggest time-eaters in the workday. In the U.S., an average of more than 55 million meetings are held every day. With remote and hybrid work environments on the rise since the start of the pandemic, many people are faced with the challenge of making remote meetings effective and successful.

When you meet via a video conferencing app instead of face-to-face different factors must be taken into consideration. Luckily, with the right tools you can easily improve your remote meetings and make them into a positive experience for everybody.

Tip 1: Use a virtual shared space

One of the main challenges of remote meetings is to keep people engaged and on the same page. That’s where collaboration tools, such as ALEAS Board, come in. Our virtual workspace allows you to keep all relevant information in one place and visualize important talking points, accessible by everyone from everywhere. Changes are visible in real-time, participants can quickly add notes using the pen tool and you can easily assign activities to team members and track the progress, so things are getting done. A shared virtual space helps to create transparency for everyone involved.

Tip 2: Turn on the camera

How can you conduct a successful brainstorming session or workshop without face-to-face conversation? Remote meetings are more or less the same as in-person meetings without the ability to hear and see everyone else without impediments. An easy solution: Use a video conferencing tool and turn on your cameras! After all you usually can see someone’s emotional reactions but won’t be able to hear them. This also helps to keep people from getting distracted by other tasks and thus makes the meeting shorter. We recommend to always have the cameras on during meetings.

Tip 3: Prepare a detailed agenda

The attention span of participants in online meetings is lower than during face-to-face meetings. A detailed agenda with time slots for each topic is therefore key to keep everybody focused. Ideally, there should be some change of action at least every 15 to 20 minutes. Visually striking out completed items helps to achieve a sense of accomplishment. We use an agenda template from the ALEAS Board library, so every participant can see the the current discussion point and what has been completed already.

Tip 4: Ask for expectations

Collect the participants’ expectations at the beginning of a workshop or meeting. This will allow you to evaluate if the planned agenda meets the expectations and whether it is clear to everyone what can and cannot be accomplished during the workshop or meeting. During and after the workshop or meeting you can review the points mentioned in order to make sure the most common expectations have been addressed. Just like with the agenda points, visually checking off completed items usually helps to boost the team’s spirit.

Tip 5: Implement the time-boxing method

To prevent the dreaded all-day meeting use the time-boxing method. Especially in recurrent meetings, such as the Daily Scrum, time-boxing is very valuable and helps to ensure, that everyone gets to speak without exceeding the allocated time frame. In meetings with many participants, it might be a tool to invite less-talkative participants into the decisions. ALEAS Board includes a presentation mode with a built-in Scrum Clock, which has been specifically designed for remote teams.

Tip 6: Include a feedback session at the end

A feedback round is a great opportunity to gather feedback and identify action steps to make the next meeting even better. Feedback sessions can be a fun activity to sum up the meeting and to end on a (hopefully) positive note. Since all participants are invited to participate it will also help to bring back the attention of everyone for the conclusion of the meeting. There are lots of different feedback and retrospective templates available in the ALEAS Board template manager.

Hopefully these tips will help you make your next remote meeting more effective and engaging! Do you have any questions or feedback? We look forward to hearing from you!