Virtual board meetings have become very popular over the past few years. This is due both to the pandemic and the need to make the work of managers more and more effective.
Meetings in a virtual format have several tangible advantages: the ability not to leave your location, urgently discuss any issues, and so on.
Benefits of Virtual Board Meetings
In addition to those listed above, virtual board meetings have several other benefits.
Everyone has a chance to speak
Sometimes it happens that one person or several speak constantly, and all the others cannot insert a word. During an online meeting, a moderator is constantly working, who decides who will speak and for how long.
Ability to build trust
For example, if you need to discuss the pros and cons, then you can suggest that the session be held according to the principles of brainstorming. This will help to avoid criticism and collect results with attention to all ideas. Such an offer will motivate you to share. You can add a small trust-building exercise at the beginning of the meeting, such as small talks if they have not been adopted by the company.
Flexibility of audio rules
So no one will be disturbed by background sounds and several people will not speak at the same time. There may be times when several participants turn on the microphone and interrupt each other, but it is the cameras that are turned on to help monitor this and teach attention to others.
There is also an alternative opinion: microphones should be turned on for everyone (if this is a meeting in a small group) throughout the meeting. This can be a guarantee that a person is fully immersed in the discussion of the issue and is not engaged in other tasks at the same time.
Effective problem solving
Virtual meetings allow for a relatively short period to find a solution to a complex organizational problem. Such meetings use the intellectual potential and diversified knowledge of the participants, as well as provide deep analysis and understanding of the problem situation, motivate the participants to implement the decisions made, and help strengthen the team.
A few tips for a productive meeting
To host an effective virtual board meeting, follow these guidelines:
- Take 10 minutes to draw up at least a sketchy plan for the upcoming meeting. Outline who in what order to give the floor, what to pay special attention to those present and what you need to achieve from them.
- Learn to highlight the main idea in each speech. Abstract from the “verbal noise”, which is inherent in many specialists who sincerely believe that it is simply not respectable to briefly express their opinion or proposal, and therefore try to fully occupy the time allotted to them according to the regulations.
- Suppress any emotional outbursts during the meeting. Remember that emotions drastically reduce the effectiveness of the exchange of views, but they greatly increase the duration of meetings.
- Immediately stop the attempts of individual specialists to confuse the rest of the audience, using for this purpose extremely specific terminology, understandable only to them.
- Try until the very last time to hide from the meeting participants (if they are your subordinates) the personal opinion with which you came to this meeting.