Whether you are a few weeks in to a new role or contemplating a move in the coming weeks, it will be important for you to be proactive in ensuring you set yourself up for success.
During Covid, managers that I’ve trained to ensure they build cohesive, high performing virtual teams have raised their concern about how to ensure their new starters are onboarded effectively without face to face interactions. It’s a mutual responsibility between organisation and new starter – of course the organisation must do their part as it can be hard for a new starter to onboard without any support but the new starter can take some proactive steps too.
If you read my January blog you’ll know that I’ve identified 6 areas where leaders and managers are finding challenges as they adjust to managing their teams virtually.
Last month I shared some tips to help you know when to have virtual meetings. This month I’m sharing some more tips related to virtual meetings; when I collated the information I had from 40 managers of their experience of managing virtual teams, their additional meeting challenges over and above when to have them included:
Meeting fatigue
Challenges with chairing meetings a) Not knowing who is speaking b) Speaking one at a time can be awkward c) Some people hogging all of the air time d) Chat functionality being a big distraction
In this blog I’ll address these, providing tips on how to design to avoid meeting fatigue as well as how to create an inclusive and effective virtual meeting space.
When I collated the information I had from 40 managers of their experience of managing virtual teams, their meeting challenges included:
(1) Having a constant stream of virtual meetings (2) When to hold a meeting in person and when virtually (where hybrid working is possible) (3) Meeting fatigue (4) Challenges with chairing meetings – Not knowing who is speaking – Speaking one at a time can be awkward – Some people hogging all of the air time – Chat functionality being a big distraction
In this blog I’ll address points 1 & 2 providing tips on how to determine whether to attend or host a meeting as well as your role as a manager in setting the expectations for team members.
(1) Having a constant stream of meetings:
There is a risk, particularly when we’re not able to interact more spontaneously because we’re not co-located, that our diaries become packed with scheduled meetings, sometimes back to back. Over recent months (in 2020 and early 2021) due to the Covid pandemic, more and more leaders and managers have found themselves drifting into a meeting habit which is not enabling them or their teams to be at their best. According to research from Hugo, the increase in internal meetings that has occurred during Covid-19 (an average in a week up from 12 to 17) has in many cases led to meeting fatigue and a decline in organisational meeting health – this is important as their research shows that an organisation’s meeting culture has a near perfect correlation with the strength of overall team culture- exceptional meetings have a sizeable impact on employee engagement.
It’s important as a manager to be particularly selective about the meetings you attend and host. Your time is precious. Some meetings are important (research shows this is usually only about 20% of the ones your invited to attend!). Many are not. As a manager it is also helpful if you can set an example for team members and role model that it is ok to say no to a meeting, particularly if that meeting doesn’t have a clear purpose or you can’t see how you can either give or receive value from attending it.
Sometimes a meeting isn’t necessary because there are other, better means to achieve what the meeting is intended to achieve. The following short check-list is a useful tool to help you decide whether a meeting is the right means.
Four good reasons to have a meeting:
To make an important decision based on information you already have that needs opinion and buy-in from a select few attendees;
To share or gather information that’s better communicated face-to-face and not over email for complex or emotionally charged issues (e.g. a pending company restructure or understanding a conflict situation);
To develop options e.g. brainstorm solutions with a select group of people.
Because there is a need for warm, magical human contact:
E.g. to build relationships which enable trust, and speed up productive collaboration for high performance and results,
E.g. to offer support for team members helping them cope with the challenges of the workplace and issues at home
Sometimes, even when there may on the surface be a good reason to have a meeting, there are times when we should probably decline, postpone, or seek amendments to how the meeting will be run or structured, to avoid overwhelm.
(2) How do you know if this meeting requires being physically face to face?
There is no right answer to this question although there are some considerations that can help to make a decision:
An in-person meeting is useful for brainstorming activities. While such activities can be completed in virtual meetings, it can be easier and flow more naturally when doing them in a room together.
In person meetings tend to create stronger bonds than virtual ones, unless virtual meetings are deliberately designed to enable greater relationship building. When in person, people tend to get to know each other and understand each other more, not just in the formal meeting, but also in breaks and lunches. Given this, if possible, it is helpful to have in-person meetings when onboarding a new team member, at least initially, or, if you become the manager of a team, for at least one whole team meeting initially where you are able to explore team purpose, ways of working, team charter etc. It can also be useful to deal with sensitive issues or conflict situations where this is possible.
In wrapping up this month’s blog, I’d like to issue a challenge to you: Review the meetings in your calendar for the coming 3-4 weeks against the ‘reasons to hold a meeting’ check list as well as asking if you are clear on their purpose and checking that you can receive or add value by attending/hosting. If you can’t match one of the reasons or don’t have clear purpose or value add, cancel your attendance, or even the meeting (if yours) or at least re-design it. Consider how you can help your team members protect their time too.
If you’ve been working virtually for a while you will likely have other tips that work for you in managing the demand for meetings. Do share them in the comments section for others to benefit from. I’ll share some tips for other virtual meeting challenges in a future blog.
Last month I shared some tips to help you build team cohesiveness and your team member’s sense of belonging. This month I’m exploring how you can overcome common virtual team connection and communication challenges.
If you read my January blog you’ll know that I’ve identified 6 areas where leaders and managers are finding challenges as they adjust to managing their teams virtually. These are in the areas of managing and measuring work, team cohesiveness and a sense of belonging, connection, relationships and communication, engagement, motivation and wellbeing, meeting effectiveness and technology.
Last month I shared some tips to help you support team member’s motivation and wellbeing remotely. This month I’m focusing on tips to enable you to build team cohesiveness and your team member’s sense of belonging.
If you read my last blog you’ll know that I’ve identified 6 areas where leaders and managers are finding challenges as they adjust to managing their teams virtually. These are in the areas of managing and measuring work, team cohesiveness and a sense of belonging, connection, relationships and communication, engagement, motivation and wellbeing, meeting effectiveness and technology.
Last month I shared some tips to help you ‘Manage and measure work’. This month I’m focusing on tips to enable you to support team members with motivation and wellbeing remotely.
Have you been getting used to managing your team virtually in recent months? You are not alone. Many managers who formerly managed their teams in person are now managing them virtually due to the restrictions arising from the pandemic. Some managers are managing people for the first time and having to do it virtually. I am fortunate to work with leaders and managers across sectors and geographies and have been in a privileged position to hear first-hand some of the challenges that they’ve been facing from managing virtually; they’ve shared with me how they have flexed their style or tried some things differently with their teams to ensure that team members remain engaged and that their team can perform well. Below I share the 6 key challenge areas that have arisen for managers over the last 9 months as well as some ideas to help for one of the challenge areas.
I always get a bit reflective at this time of year; it’s a chance to consider the year past, what’s gone well, what not so well, what you’ve learned and what it might mean for the year to come. This year, having been such an exceptional year through the impact of Covid, I’m offering 5 questions based on the letters that spell Covid so that some good can come out of it! If you’d like to take a positive look at the year with a view to it setting you up for 2021, read on… and I’ll share my answers to the questions too.
It’s that time of year when annual performance reviews tend to happen. As a manager, this can be a cause of anxiety when our thinking drags up concerns about how your team member might be viewing their performance compared to how you see it.
We can have the same types of worries through the year when we need to have a conversation about how work is going and know that some constructive feedback is in order; layer on what might be perceived as the additional complexity of now holding such conversations virtually when your used to having them face to face and before you know it you can be having a sleepless night.
But.. it doesn’t have to be this way. All it takes is focusing on the right foundations for your team, as a team and as individuals, in order to boost the prospect of an engaging, productive conversation.
If you’re managing a team with team members that have had to get used to home or remote working in the last few months you may have found a need to manage differently. As I’ve designed a virtual team management programme for an organisation in recent weeks, I’ve been looking into some of the context for team working and management and am sharing some of what I’ve found to help you think about what you may benefit from considering as a manager.
