5 Best practices for good online meetings
Voice conversation is a necessity and often the best solution to cut through the clutter of endless email / message iterations.
Voice conversation is a necessity and often the best solution to cut through the clutter of endless email / message iterations.
Yet most people come away from meetings with a fuzzy idea of what was discussed. Now during Covid so many of us are participating in large Zoom and Webex gatherings where important knowledge is exchanged, but some of it may not be pertinent right away — and it is easy to forget it once the meeting is over.
As an organizer or even as a participant, what can you do to make the most of the touch point opportunity that meetings and discussions represent ?
- Attendees: Tailor your meeting audience to your meeting’s interaction goals. For example if your objective is to share knowledge from a set of experts into the general audience you can use Zoom, Webex, and similar apps to invite thousands of attendees. On the other hand for a discovery session or project meeting it is best to limit participants to 8–10 to avoid cognitive overload — you can schedule multiple sessions if you have a large number of participants
- Introductions: Consider starting off with introductions so that people have a good idea of who the participants are, and what they bring to the table. People are much more likely to come away with tangible takeaways if they feel they “got to know” the other attendees and remember what they said. If the participants already know each other, this can be a segment where they briefly state what they are expecting to discuss in the meeting
- Agenda: Lay out the agenda for the meeting. Keep in mind that while you want to make sure the meeting does not run off course, you don’t want to choregraph the meeting into an overly strict agenda-participants should feel free to bring their perspective to the table as long as they don’t hijack the overall theme or impinge on others’ time
- Participation: Actively give opportunity for everyone to participate. This not only makes participants feel valued but ensures that attendees are more actively engaged in the proceedings. In case there is a participant whose role is purely that of a “listener”, you can call on them to discuss their takeaways / what they found most interesting in the discussion
- Notes: Towards the end of the meeting, share information about the next touch point or when and where notes will be available, and how participants can get access to them. Depending on the type of meeting you may want to organize the notes by topics, people, or entities. Be sure to include links or documents discussed, include follow up action items
Here are some additional articles that discuss best practices for meetings:
Client review meetings
https://www.fa-mag.com/news/best-practices-for-client-review-meetings-53648.html
Marketing meetings
Investor relations meetings
Investment research meetings
Mentorship meetings
You can find this article on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-best-practices-good-meetings-ritu-malhotra
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