Knowing how to conduct a successful virtual meeting is critical regardless of how your team operates. Doesn’t matter whether you prefer weekly meetings, daily meetings or heck – even monthly meetings. You still need to understand the basics of creating a meaningful and effective virtual meeting to be successful.
Common Problems with Virtual Meetings
- Lack of structure – without a structure, a virtual meeting is just a messy, unproductive get-together that usually is not valuable.
- Waste of Time – Without a concrete timeframe, meetings often go over time and distract team members from their other responsibilities.
- Ineffective note taking – It is a hassle to write down notes during a virtual meeting. You either need to switch tabs away from the meeting software or look down at your notebook.
Top 4 Tips for Better Virtual Meetings
1. Structure Your Meetings with PPP
PPP (Plans, Progress, Problems) structure is a weekly team performance tracker and the best way to make meetings more structured, purposeful, and effective. During a meeting, you first go over the last weeks plans one by one, then review the problems, and finally create new plans for the next week.
Weekdone is a good solution for optimizing that process and making it interactive. With a fillable and customizable PPP dashboard (Weekly Check-Ins) for each team, everyone always has the contents for the upcoming team meeting and a place to write down next week’s plans.
2. Write Down Your Notes With Ease
Making sure that notes and action-points from the weekly meetings actually get implemented is critical. Implementing a tool that makes it easier and less random is a great start to solving that issue.
This ties into the previous part. With Weekdone, the note taking is seamless. When you need to write down a task you need to get done for the week, just enter it into the Plans section of your weekly check-in and it’s done. This is visible to everyone in your team and company. BUT, there’s also an option to write notes for your private use should you need it.
Another useful feature are the engagement and feedback templates to be customized by managers. These show up in the Weekly Check-In’s section under PPP’s.
Use these templates and consider talking points that occur during your meetings. Did you discuss something that may be useful for next quarter? Note it in the “future thoughts” section. Our team also has team improvement ideas and interesting materials which further team collaboration.
3. Use Progress Reports For Meetings
At the start of every successful meeting, there is a time dedicated for the team manager to go over everything before each team member takes a turn to talk. At this time, the team manager should go over the team’s progress as a whole and it is much easier to do it with a team report.
A good way to acquire an automated progress report is through Weekdone. The system automatically creates a report every week based on data input into the software over the week, and sends it out to everyone on Friday. Using this as a springboard into your weekly team meeting sets you up for a well-planned and purposeful meeting.
4. Weekdone’s 5 Step Virtual Meeting Process
Conclusion
As you saw, implementing a tool like Weekdone not only helps you conduct better meetings but also helps you effectively manage your team. This can tremendously increase your teams overall work performance.