Virtual meetings – When to have them

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 overcome common virtual team connection and communication challenges. This month I’m sharing some tips related to virtual meetings – this is part 1 – more next month too.

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:

1. To make an important decision based on information you already have that needs opinion and buy-in from a select few attendees;
2. 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);
3. To develop options e.g. brainstorm solutions with a select group of people.
4. Because there is a need for warm, magical human contact:
   1. E.g. to build relationships which enable trust, and speed up productive collaboration for high performance and results,
   2. 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.