Editor’s note: Things are getting a little crazy right now with the rapid spread of COVID-19 (aka coronavirus). Companies across the globe are encouraging their employees to work from home and self-isolate. We strongly agree with these measures! We want to help you figure out the best ways to communicate and connect remotely. A big part of that is keeping your usual meeting rhythms. Read on to learn some tips on how to run effective remote team meetings and how Tadum can help.
All meetings have a three-part life-cycle:
Before: Meeting preparation. Included preparing and sending out an agenda and establishing and enforcing meeting guidelines.
During: The meeting itself. Includes keeping your team engaged and keeping a history of the discussion and decisions with meeting minutes.
After: Follow-up practices. Includes establishing when the next meeting is and ensuring accountability between meetings.
Within this life-cycle, remote meetings present their own set of challenges:
The guide below will give you some best practices and tools to help overcome these challenges.
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Your meeting guidelines give your team everything they need to know about how to manage and communicate in a virtual space. Guidelines include:
Meeting preparation is important for all meetings but even more so for remote meetings where communication breakdowns are even easier. The best way you and your team can prepare for your meeting is to create and send out an agenda at least 24 hours before your meeting. Your agenda should:
Engagement in meetings is hard enough in-person. Engagement in remote meetings is even harder as you work to overcome the barriers of not being in the same physical space. Some ways to help encourage engagement include:
No one will remember what decisions were made or the relevant parts of a discussion from a meeting that happened 3 weeks ago. They also won't likely remember who said they would do what, and when.
Meeting minutes provide you with a history of your meetings for future reference and also encourage accountability following the meeting (more on this below) by tracking todos.
It is easy to leave a meeting and immediately forget your todos. It is even easier to forget when you are remote. You are not interacting with people and getting reminders in the same as you would in-person.
To ensure that everyone stays accountable for their todos, you should:
In these uncertain times, it’s important to find ways to connect and engage with your team. As more and more people shift to working remotely it helps to set them up for success by keeping your regular meeting rhythms, setting guidelines for how to run remote meetings, and using tools like Tadum to support all phases of the meeting cycle.
Try using Tadum today, you'll be glad you did :)
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We’ve rolled out a big update today that cuts the load speed on large agendas by up to 70%!
Guess what!! We added reactions to the Tadum interface so you can show how you feel about different agenda items, confirm you read something, or just show a little support. Learn more and start using reactions on your agenda today!
We are through the initial shock of the Covid-19 pandemic and have adjusted to working remotely and communicating digitally via tools like Zoom and Slack. Virtual communication is now expected but many companies haven’t had time, (or taken time), to think about their digital organizational processes. In particular, many meetings have lost what little structure they had to begin with. It isn’t as simple as hopping on a call. Learn three mistakes that most companies are making with their Zoom meetings and how to avoid them.