With the explosion of office workers logging in remotelyOpens a new window as countries around the world adopt various degreesOpens a new window of social distancing policies to help throttle the spread of coronavirus,Opens a new window  virtual meetings have become the new normal.
Zoom, the popular digital conference platform, has been promoted to a verb. Online meeting aren’t just for the workplace, either. As more people are confined to their homes, they’re relying on such platforms to retain social connections from afar, hosting happy hoursOpens a new window and reconnecting with friends.
Despite their proliferation, however, digital meetings often still suffer from a stilted quality. And they tend to be more difficult to concentrateOpens a new window on than live meetings, leading to the widespread impression that digital meetings are awkward snoozefests.
To some degree, that impression isn’t too far off. It’s much easier to miss the social cues that allow people to avoid awkward moments when everyone’s in the same room. There’s also a dissonance between the sense of strained formality on digital meeting platforms and the casualness of the fact that everyone is logging in from their homes.
Yet…it doesn’t have to be this way. Digital-meeting veterans (and I’m one of them; in my global company, we’ve been living on video conferencing for many years) — have some good tips for making them as engaging and comfortable as possible. Some of that comes with experience, which you may well get for weeks and months. But some tactics can be implemented right away:
Check in
Intentional or not, meetings are where people congregate and have casual conversations with each other during breaks or before the meeting starts. On the surface, these kinds of informal conversationsOpens a new window that have little to do with work might seem like a waste of time but they actually provide an invaluable opportunity for teammates to get to know each other better, especially in these unprecedented times of intense physical, emotional and mental stress.
That kind of interaction can lead to more collaboration and clearer communication. Set aside a time at the beginning of the digital meeting for an ice breaker that allows everyone to begin contributing in a casual way.
Engage with space
One great way to break the ice and incorporate people’s at-home work into a broader collegial office feeling is to ask individual meeting participants to give a little “tour†of their working space. That will relax the folks who are giving the tour as it breaks them out of the constrictive digital meeting form. And it will set everyone else at ease by getting a chance to connect informally. Just give a heads-up beforehand so that coworkers know to tidy up a bit.
Share strategies
It’s perfectly fine to have wide-ranging conversations about work, especially when everyone is adapting to a new set of challenges. Ask people what’s working for themOpens a new window in their new work-from-home realities. What strategies have helped them focus? What kind of special difficulties are they facing — children at home, loud neighbors — and what they have done to overcome them. The benefit of sharing these strategies reinforces the fact that everyone is in this together and allows people potentially to pick up new tricks to apply to their own office-in-the-house situations.
Direct traffic
To a greater degree than necessary in live meetings, digital meetings really benefit from a host who can direct the conversation. If four people start speaking at once, ask them to speak in a certain order. If it seems that no one has anything to say on an important topic, call on a participant to weigh in to get the ball rolling.
It may seem a little university-esque, but ultimately coworkers will be grateful for being in a meeting where someone is responsible for resolving awkward silences and outbursts.
Make an agenda
Even if you don’t usually make meeting agendas, they’re particularly helpful for setting the pacing of digital meetings where unspoken cues are more difficult to pick up on. If you have a sense of who might have a view on which items, include that name on the agenda so that she or he can be prepared if you turn that way during the meeting.
Try to share the agenda before the meeting begins so that people can add items they want to discuss or suggest amendments. And don’t forget to include a non-scheduled time for people to bring up whatever else is one their mind.