5 Tips For More Professional Virtual Business Meetings
Effective communication needs to be the focus of virtual business meetings. Business owners and managers around the world have embraced virtual events more than ever before. From webinars, training events, to weekly team meetings and industry conferences, virtual interactions are the cost-effective and rapid-pace option that business owners now call a necessity. More businesses are being run and grown by virtual management, and online meetings are becoming an essential tool for conducting business, and for liaising with team members and clients. The key is to ensure that your virtual business meetings are being run professionally for maximum results. Here are five tips for ensuring that virtual business meetings are being run more professionally.
1: Learn the Platform
To run a virtual business meeting, you need to make sure that you’re using the right video platform. Do some research and choose the one that most suits your needs. It’s easy to fall into using Zoom or Skype simply because those are the names that people know. There are a range of alternatives that may suit your purposes more.
2: Source the Tech
There are lots of tech tools available that can streamline the running of your virtual business meetings and ensure that it is as professional as it can be. One of the most useful is integrating audio transcription services into your video conferencing platform of choice. This makes minute-keeping far easier and allows you to ensure that every participant gets a breakdown of the meeting’s content and discussion points.
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3: Mandatory Camera-On
The ideal virtual business meeting feels as close to an in-person meeting as possible. That means being able to see everyone that’s involved in the meeting. Communication is always going to be more effective and comfortable when you can pick up on visual cues from others. That means you need to adopt a policy of always ensuring that meeting attendees always have their cameras on and that they sit close to them.
4: Ban Multitasking
A business meeting, whether in person or online, needs to be focused on. Multitasking makes people inattentive, and their engagement will dramatically reduce. It can be very, very tempting to start doing little side tasks when you’re in a virtual business meeting, but it reduces the effectiveness of that meeting. Ensure a blanket-wide ban of multitasking when conducting a virtual business meeting.
5: Encouraging Engagement
Business meeting facilitators already know the value of ensuring that every participant gets involved in the conversation, which seems to have been forgotten in the move online. More dominating personalities will take over, and the more introverted members of the team (especially those uncomfortable on camera) will remain silent. Make sure that you:
- Ask specific people for opinions
- Ask for mission updates
- Request for any additional thoughts from quieter people
- Offer help as needed
The more engaged you can make your attendees, the more you will learn. That will make it more likely that your virtual business meeting is achieving its objectives.
Ensuring that a virtual business meeting is as professional as an in-person meeting in head office is much easier than many people assume. Using the right combination of cutting-edge tech and traditional meeting management techniques can streamline those meetings and ensure that you are getting the best of both worlds.
