Remote Meetings: How To Work Remotely Effectively

Effective Remote Meetings are a challenging goal. Most of the time, meetings don't bear fruit effectively. You may find someone controling the conversation or talking a lot. Some meeting participants are late for the meeting. Some team members may be distracted by side things and side conversations. All of these negatives happen a lot in face-to-face meetings in the same room. However, effective remote meetings are supposed to be more functional and productive.

Remote work and working from home require more discipline and organization to function. In addition, remote work requires thinking about building good working relationships with remote teams and how to collaborate effectively. Engaging remote meetings is one of the good practices for managing your remote work.

Paying attention to some of the best practices is the key to having a successful remote meeting. So, Kapsys will show some strategies to have a healthy remote environment and effective remote meetings:

Decide If You Need A Virtual Meeting At All

How often have you asked yourself in the remote meetings, Did we actually need a meeting for this discussion? When you spend most of the day staring at your computer screen and talking out loud to yourself, it makes sense you would like to have more remote meetings. Remote working lures some people to hold unnecessary remote meetings because of the lack of socializing and face-to-face interaction. Don't fall into that trap! Here are some things you shouldn't hold remote meetings for:

• Standups don't need to be discussed in team meetings; however, you can follow your passion for team meetings and have a team meeting for brainstorming and you will have effective remote meetings.
• Quick notes shouldn't be discussed in meetings; emails may do the trick.
• Getting boring is not enough reason to hold remote meetings, but you can allocate social time on your remote team and have small talk in a video call.

Start And End The Remote Meetings On Time

Remote meetings and video calls could be easily ignored when someone is focused on work. To ensure all team members attend the remote meetings, you need to start and end the meeting on time. Being punctual in online meetings will encourage people to quickly get into the conference room because they already know when the meeting will end. Here are some tips to make sure your remote meetings start and end on time:

• Send an apology message if you might be late for a remote meeting, at least for one person who will be there to inform the rest of your team. It is an excellent way to avoid awkwardness, mainly because your video conferencing app will probably make some noise when you arrive late.
• If you are responsible for managing the team meeting, and you'll be late or have more meetings, you can delegate a trusted teammate to inform your remote meeting members and run the meeting until you are back.
• Google calendar is an excellent option for scheduling a meeting. However, you can automate meeting reminders beyond the calendar invite using many apps like Slack, Tandem or any other chat app about upcoming meetings.

Note: Make a pre-planned meeting agenda to avoid getting off the track in the online meetings. Stick to the time limit and reduce the meeting length as possible. Highlight the key points to focus on during the discussion with meeting attendees in remote meetings.

Record To Have Effective Remote Meetings

Sometimes when you have more than a meeting a day or overworking, you might forget some important things or notes about the meeting. The good news is you can record the meeting without being unethical or feeling creepy. Someone of the remote workers must take the meeting notes. However, it might take some time to ensure the whole team has access to these notes. As a result, you may face some severe issues. So, it would be best if you recorded the meeting so that they can fast-forward the video call to the spot where the relevant info is instead of watching the whole thing.

Be Intentional About Your Communication

During the meetings, you might face some unique challenges like; misunderstanding, a chatty person, and an unfocused audience—all these issues you can control in an in-person meeting. However, the challenges are different in an online meeting; you may face connection issues or confusing interactions. Here are some tips to overcome the online meetings' challenges:

Leave space for silence:

Speechlessness moments are essential in a remote meeting. For example, you may notice delays and connectivity issues while talking to someone in the video room. It would be better to leave a couple of seconds of silence to give people room to answer before moving on.

Watch for nonverbal responses for effective remote meetings:

Getting nods, facial reactions, and confused-overwhelmed looks is very common in a remote meeting, especially when the microphone is turned off. To avoid nonverbal responses, make sure you get a clear answer from the person you are talking to that they understand what you mean. Remember that: that's not an in-person meeting, so you can't read body language clearly or get live interactions. So, make it easier for yourself by asking them directly.

Call people by name:

In remote meetings, you can't use eye contact with your team to get someone's attention. Instead, you can call people by their names. Speak in person to grab their attention and ensure they're focused and know you're talking to them, especially if your meeting involves some round-robin sharing.

Have an exit phrase:

Sometimes not all team members agree on the same opinion. In this case, you can use an exit phrase like let's discuss this in another one-on-one meeting room. This will give the rest of your team a chance to move forward with their work. You can then send a follow-up message to the other team members to let them know the updates from the zoom meeting. See 7 Surprising Facts About Remote Work

Summaries And Feedback

When the meeting is about to end, ask everyone to summarize the work items they are responsible for. As a meeting leader for effective remote meetings, email the final summary of the meeting and assignment of tasks to all participants and make sure everyone involved has access to it. This can be another great way to create a common understanding of the talking points, who is responsible for each task and what needs to be followed up in future, and you can use the available application Skype, Asana, Trello or Slack, etc.  It would help if you also asked your remote employees to leave their feedback about the meeting. For example, ask them if they have any questions or doubts. Suggestions and new ideas are a good practice to work growth; you should encourage your team members to give some notes or suggestions before leaving your conference room for the next virtual meetings. See 10 Benefits of Remote Work Sharing feedback is a good way to improve your remote meetings and keep participants engaged. 

In-person meetings:

In-person meetings are essential to save the meeting time. Suppose a team member has a particular concern or a personal inquiry that does not matter to the rest of the team members. You can ask them to speak in an individual meeting to discuss their concerns and queries. The point of remote meetings is not to waste time. There is no need to waste the entire team's time answering a question that concerns only one person on the team. A one-to-one meeting can effectively overcome time-wasting problems for a growing team.

How Would Kapsys Help You To Have An Effective Remote Meeting?

Kapsys could provide you with custom software to block out the background noise. You can hire the best custom software development company to provide custom software development or automate the entire meeting process and never lose a meeting action item and have better remote meetings. If you are running a startup, you need to custom software development for small business, which is what Kapsys' software developers do. Kapsys is fluent in custom enterprise software development with a reasonable custom software development cost.

Conclusion

Ensure you get to the meeting 10 minutes early to ensure your communication tools are working effectively. Ask your team to test the speakers and camera, and internet speed. Then, choose the proper location away from the noise and distractions that could hinder the meeting. Avoid side conversations, general discussions, or notes that can be sent by mail to have fewer meetings. Informal communication, adding some fun and flexibility to the atmosphere of the meeting, increases the team's positive energy. Be prepared to manage any heated discussion among your team members wisely and fairly. Sent follow-up messages after the meeting. Custom software development companies are an excellent choice to manage your run effective remote meetings.