Powerful Tips to Hold Interesting & Productive Online Meetings

Business meetings are an inseparable part of any organization’s everyday schedule. The Harvard Business Review further adds that senior executives spend more than 60% of their time meeting with multiple functional heads to find updates on work progress. And anyone who has to spend their time in a corporate setting knows that these meetings can take a lot of time as well.

This becomes even truer when you hold an online meeting and all the members are found in different locations. Regardless of technological developments, conducting a productive online meeting is still a gigantic task because members can experience internet problems and communications delays.

For all these reasons and to help you hold more interesting and productive meetings, here are four essential tips that you can apply to your sessions immediately.

Set a Time Limit

Setting a particular time for your meetings can significantly enhance the productivity of your arrangement and will help you get more out in a limited time. For instance, you have set the meeting duration for 45 minutes and have assigned 10 minutes for every agenda point in a meeting. This will help the meeting stay on track and won’t let the participants distract from the main agendas of the meeting.

Have Your System Ready in Advance

Request all the participants of the meetings to turn their systems up and running at least 20 minutes before the session starts. Don’t forget to check if your camera and microphone are working correctly and that your meeting platform supports multiple members.

If you are holding meetings over voice, make sure all participants are using phones equipped with features such as IP voice telephony, integrated WiFi connectivity, cordless voice receivers, Bluetooth support, and SIP accounts. For this reason, business meetings could rely on Grandstream ip phones to hold successful remote voice meetings. They have several features that the conference moderator might need during the session. Therefore being ready with your equipment should be the first thing you’ll need to hold a productive meeting.

Remove Distractions

Distractions are the greatest enemy of an online meeting. To avoid this from happening, request the participants to sit in a private and well-lit room. It is better if they have a proper sitting arrangement in the room, such as a table and a chair, where they feel comfortable. Also, you can encourage them to use headphones and a collar microphone instead of their laptop’s speaker and microphone. It will provide all participants with better voice clarity, making it easier to conduct a more productive meeting.

End Meetings With Specific Action Items

Most of the time, a meeting ends with vague assurances and promises from the meeting members. Therefore, it becomes the moderator’s responsibility to determine all the action items during the session and make sure that the participants acknowledge them. The solution is to create an action item, assign it to multiple participants or individuals, and set a deadline. Without these three basic needs, you can trace no action item effectively.

Therefore, make sure you make deadlines after every meeting you conduct and check the results of the previous meeting if the assigned duties had been fulfilled or not.

To Sum it Up

Online meetings are not only convenient, but they can also save you a lot of time and effort, but the catch is first, you’ll need to set a few parameters that’ll help you achieve this goal. The tips mentioned above will help you achieve this goal while at the same time making your online meetings more productive.