While participants should be asked to stay muted and unmute themselves when they have to speak, multiple people attempting to speak at the same time makes comprehension impossible. Appointing a Meeting Leader to direct the flow and who is speaking prevents participants attempting to speak over eachother. Maintaining order in a virtual meeting of more than a few participants requires discipline and order.
Assign a Meeting Leader and Administrator In Zoom, holding the space bar temporarily unmutes the speaker (like a walkie talkie), making it easy to jump into speak only when necessary. This practice encourages active attention and helps meeting facilitators gauge participant reaction and engagement.Ī corrolary of this is that participants should stay muted unless they are currently speaking. If meeting attendees experience the now commonplace childcare crisis, house emergency, or bathroom trip, they should turn off their video until they can return uniterrupted. A key exception is in the case of an interruption. The best way to encourage attentiveness during virtual meetings is to encourage all attendees to keep their video on at almost all times. Stay Muted Unless Speaking and (Almost) Always Keep Video On Let’s break down 9 key strategies for productive and efficient Zoom and Microsoft Teams meetings. While this means virtual meetings require new practices and procedures to stay efficient, it doesn’t mean your team cannot be just as productive, if not more so, while utilitizing video meeting functionality with Zoom or Microsoft Teams. To state the obvious, communicating with a screen is not the same as communicating with a person, no matter how high-def their webcam is. The good meeting practices developed in-person may not translate to meetings done over video. Teams spending hours in virtual meetings a day may find themselves more exhausted than after a day of in-person meetings.
With offices empty and travel limited, the age of the virtual meeting has begun in earnest.Īs companies adapt to exclusively virtual meetings, the overlooked benefits of in-person communication and the hidden shortcomings of virtual meetings become evident. An astonishing 51% of Fortune 500 CEOs say that business travel at their companies will never return to pre-pandemic levels, with an additional 30% expecting at least 18 months to return to previous levels. Even as businesses reopen office space, the future of the in-person meetings that existed pre-COVID is doutbtful.