Tips to Conduct Productive Web Meetings
As more companies employ a remote workforce, web meetings are the obvious choice to keep everyone on the same page. While your goal is to conduct effective, engaging and productive web meetings, your experience may have been the exact opposite.
At Power Presentations, we conduct A LOT of web meetings. In fact, for the better part of a decade the majority of our communications have been conducted online.
With all this experience, we’ve identified two REALLY SIMPLE things you can do to create successful online sessions:
1. Prepare properly
You’ve heard this before, right? Then why do so many of us hop on the meeting at the last second, and scramble to get everything sorted out and ready to go? This leaves your attendees waiting on you and allows them to multitask right from the start. Instead, schedule time on your calendar to log into your meeting at least 10 minutes before the scheduled time. This will give you time to test your audio connection, test your webcam, and open all of the documents or web pages you’ll need.
2. Ask Direct Questions
Never ask a group of people on a web meeting, “What do you think?” and leave it at that. One of two things will happen. Either you’ll get several different responses all at once and won’t be able to actually hear a single one, or no one will volunteer a response. Instead, say something like, “I’m going to ask a question then call on each one of you for your ideas. Jim, I’ll start with you…” Then ask the question. By doing this, you refocus the group, establish rules, and prevent people from talking over one another.
These two simple techniques will increase the effectiveness of your online meetings by making them more productive and engaging.