5 Tips for Productive Remote Meetings

With the explosion of remote working and in order to keep an eye on collective objectives, organizing and participating in meetings has become more important than ever. But how do you make sure meetings run smoothly when you're away from home? Here are 5 tips for effective remote meetings!

The covid-19 crisis is forcing many companies to adapt to the challenges of remote work. Whether on-site or remote, a company is still an organization with predefined goals. In order to achieve them, meetings are essential, as they allow to define a strategy, to analyze its mistakes as well as its successes or simply to gather the team in order to federate around a project. But with the explosion of remote working, how to organize efficient meetings?

There is plenty of digital tools available. Today, holding a remote meeting is relatively easy. However, not all the employees of a company are equal when it comes to technology. Similarly, a meeting held remotely, via video cameras, may be less formal and less well received. That's why we will study in this article, the 5 tips to follow in order to make sure that your meetings are always as efficient as possible, even when you are remote.

Organize a Remote Meeting: Use Date Polling

In remote work, many things are different, starting with the schedule and the way of managing. It is therefore important to be flexible. So, instead of imposing a schedule on all your employees, why not opt for a solution that suits everyone? In this way, it can be interesting to set up a date survey system. This way, you allow your team to define the most convenient time.

Take the example of remote work during the pandemic. Team members may have their children at home. Imposing a meeting at lunchtime or homework time would not make sense, as the person concerned would not necessarily be focused on the subject. Similarly, in the context of remote work, outside the pandemic, certain schedules can be adjusted to allow a person to start later or even earlier. So there are several variables to take into account.

By opting for a date polling tool, the management empowers the teams, who will then discuss and agree on a day and a precise time when everyone will be present and operational. This way of doing things avoids delays and inconveniences linked to the absence of one or more employees. Finally, it sends a positive signal to the teams, who realize that the challenges of telework are well understood and assimilated by the managers.

Setting Up a Professional Environment

Organizing a remote working meeting is one thing, but participating fully in it, in an appropriate environment, is another. In order to be focused on your subject, it is useful to create an adequate working space. The sofa should be avoided in favor of a real desk, a quality chair or good lighting. In the same way, in the context of a meeting, you should be provided with a functional microphone, a good quality camera as well as earphones or headphones allowing you to isolate yourself for a few dozen minutes.

It is important to remind all your teams of the rules and professional codes. If meetings are held at home, it is important to keep this professional mindset in order to stay focused on your objectives. Indeed, if a company opts for an operating model mainly based on remote work, the company is still a business and must therefore remain strict and generate revenue.

Organize your Meetings by Remote Working, by Videoconference

Today, many tools allow you to conduct your meetings from home, starting with videoconferencing. No more meetings by phone. Indeed, video conferencing has become the new standard. It is therefore useful to turn to such a tool. They allow you to exchange live, face to face, with all your collaborators. They also allow you to share your screen, make presentations and many other things, all as relevant.

But be careful. Again, not all employees are equal when it comes to accessing technology. Some people may be less comfortable with these tools, while others may be located in areas where internet access may be more limited. These are some of the things to consider when optimizing your remote meetings. Finally, it is possible to optimize your meetings by videoconference by imposing some rules like wearing a headset or earphones, in order to have an optimal audio quality.

Stimulate your Employees: Ideation at the Heart of your Remote Working Meetings

In teleworking, it can be complicated to hear or have input from all members of a team. However, it is important to make sure that everyone is involved. For this, ideation appears to be a simple and effective answer.

A simple concept, ideation designates the process thanks to which everyone can and must find ideas, with the aim of being creative, in order to bring solutions. To do this, it is necessary to put in place certain animations to stimulate all of its employees. One of the best known is the cause and effect diagram, also known as the Ishikawa diagram.

It is also important to allow for mistakes. This gives you the opportunity to be a force of proposition and to develop the commitment of the members of your team. In short, it is important to stimulate the entrepreneurial spirit within the team, to allow for the study of the sector and to stimulate innovation.

Don't Forget to write a Report

In person (in the offices), reports are often produced at the end of each meeting. This is a way for teams to have a written record of what was said and the main points to focus on. These report also allow all your remote employees to have a quick access to what was said, which is important since direct communication is inevitably less efficient at a distance than side by side.

In any case, this document provides all the people present that day a tool to rely on in order to continue moving forward. A team member can be chosen beforehand to work on the report and send it to all the employees in the days following the end of the digital meeting.

Why is Jamespot the right solution?

Jamespot is a SaaS collaborative tool that redefines the standards of collaborative (tele)work for organizations. Customizable according to the needs and desires of the organization that deploys it, the Jamespot solution has more than a hundred business applications designed to optimize communication, collaboration and business processes of each person.

Among all the proposed applications, some precisely meet the challenges we listed earlier, allowing all the employees of the same organization to keep the link and to actively participate in each meeting. The "Poll of dates" application, for example, allows you to involve each of your employees in the choice of the date of the meeting and thus avoid organizational problems. Each employee chooses the date that suits them best from the different dates proposed. It is then up to the organizer to decide according to the votes cast.

As we have seen previously, video conferencing has replaced the telephone as the standard to conduct remote meetings. In the Jamespot solution, you have 2 choices to join your collaborators in video conference. You can create a videoconference room directly via the Jamespot Messenger, regardless of the audience you are meeting with, or you can use the "Jitsi for Jamespot" application directly. This application allows you to create a room in a few clicks and invite one or more collaborators. The application also has several features to maximize the comfort of your meetings: a chat to send messages, links and discussions or the blurring of the background, ideal to create a fully professional space even in video conference.

Meetings are essential, as they allow to define a strategy, to analyze its mistakes as well as its successes or simply to gather the team in order to federate around a project.

Finally, the "Innovation idea" and "Article" applications are designed for idea generation and report writing. The first one allows each employee to deposit their ideas in the Jamespot solution by specifying the audience that will be informed (users or groups) and the target for which the idea is intended (partners, customers ...). You can invite each of your employees to express their creativity and participate in a real collective ideation process. Article, finally, is the perfect application to write reports without wasting time: the application allows you to write a text of the length of your choice directly in your Jamespot platform and then customize its layout as you wish.

To Conclude

With the explosion of teleworking, new management methods must be put in place, starting with how to organize and optimize meetings. Today, it seems that flexibility is the most important quality required to successfully complete a project. By allowing teams to meet from time to time, at a time that suits everyone, employees are more focused. Similarly, certain practices tend to become normalized, such as the establishment of a supportive work environment. Finally, management must ensure that its teams remain active by introducing a range of techniques to stimulate everyone's desire and imagination. In the end, it is possible to make remote working meetings more relevant and efficient by implementing some basic techniques, adapted to the new way of working in companies.

And if you want to learn more about the Jamespot solution and its features, you can get a personalized demonstration or a free 30-day trial.