3 Areas To Focus On For A More Successful Online Meeting
Don’t you hate those meetings that seem to take forever? They can eat up several hours of your working day that you could have otherwise spent focusing on more important tasks. In fact, according to The Atlantic, you could end up spending at least 40 percent of your working hours on meetings, in addition to other distracting activities.
Luckily, with a bit of preparation, not only can you make your meetings shorter, but you can also get more important decisions made during that time. Here are three simple ways to make those online meetings a lot more productive:
Set Up Your Equipment Ahead of Time
There’s nothing worse than starting a meeting on the dot, only to find out that the person you’re trying to start a conversation with can’t see or hear you because of technical difficulties on your end. Make things easier for everybody by checking all of your equipment before your meeting begins. You might even want to hold a mandatory training session in advance of the meeting for all of the participants, so that their knowledge of the equipment is ensured by the time of the meeting, thus letting everything run as planned.
Ideally, you should be checking your computer, microphone, webcam, and programs for any errors at least a few days before your important conference. If you really have no time to spare, then doing these checks at least the day before would give you enough time to repair your computer or bring it to a technical expert. You won’t have to bear the embarrassment of eating up the other person’s time by fiddling with your settings with unsuccessful results.
At the very least, try to set aside at least 15 minutes before the designated time to give your computer enough time to boot up. This is also enough wiggle room for you to configure your microphone, webcam and conference program. Prepare everything early so that you can start right on time without any further complications.
Plan An Agenda In Advance
Whether you create one before or after setting a date, write up a list of all the things you would like to discuss with the other party in order of the most important to the least important. This agenda will serve as an outline that you can reference to keep you from straying too far from the subject at hand. Write down the most important items to discuss first, as this will probably eat up most of your time. You can then decide to discuss the less important items on your list by breezing through them or by discussing them outside of the conference.
To make the meeting go even faster, try to put together all of your reference materials and email them to the people you’ll be talking with, as recommended. If possible, prepare them in a way that will make it easier for the other party to digest. That way, they’ll have enough time to review the relevant documents and can go straight to the meat of the discussion, instead of causing dead time by having to read them during the meeting itself.
Give Yourself A Time Limit, And Stick To It
If you aren’t careful, you can end up spending three to four hours in a meeting without achieving anything substantial. Though most people automatically book meetings as if they’re meant to run for an hour or more, this doesn’t have to be the case. Often, only an hour is booked in case a discussion might go on longer than intended, which is exactly what you’re trying to avoid. To make it worse, people often start off with five to ten minutes of small talk, when these pleasantries can be confined to a quick sentence or two.
According to OpenSource, 30 minute meetings are entirely possible. In fact, you might even be able to finish earlier if you spend your time wisely. If your equipment and agenda have been set up in advance, then you should have no problem quickly tackling each topic for discussion. If you’re still not done by the time your 30 minutes are up, then propose to discuss other items on your list outside of the conference either through instant messaging or email.
It’s Time Make Your Meetings More Meaningful
Meetings don’t have to be something you dread every day. All you have to do to make a meeting more productive is to invest enough time in preparing for it. After all, an online conference is meant to make it easier for people to coordinate in realtime no matter where they are.
Take advantage of this online medium and use the time you’ve saved by not having to travel, and by preparing everything ahead of time. Check your equipment, create your agenda, and stick to your time limit. Before you know it, you’ll master the art of the short and productive meeting and be getting more done.
