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4 tips to make your next virtual meeting more compelling
When I talk with clients, I often hear that the main reason they look forward to participating in regularly scheduled virtual meetings is because it’s the best time they have to catch up on their emails.
That’s a missed opportunity.
Reports can be emailed, updates can be left on voice mail, but conference calls are our opportunity to pool knowledge, build enthusiasm and move forward. Great conference calls are productive, interesting, and highly participative.
Want to make sure that your next virtual meeting is more than just a chance for people to catch up on their work? Begin with a compelling agenda. Here are four ways to get started.
- State your agenda items as questions. Change “Project Implementation Update” to What have we learned so far from the project implementation? or What is—and what is not—working in our implementation? A question stimulates thinking and prepares your participants to reflect and anticipate.
- Clearly state who is leading each agenda item. For example, “Fred facilitates brainstorming on the challenges we might face with this implementation. (10 minutes) Bring your ideas.” Be sure to include how long that item is expected to take and how meeting participants will be involved.
- Ensure your agenda addresses important issues that sound interesting and engaging. Instead of “Regional Updates” try, What are we doing that’s new? What new barriers are we discovering? Email the spreadsheet monthly reports later if necessary.
- Build continuous improvement into your meetings. End your meetings with a very quick poll. Go around the room (if using a seating chart) or call roll and ask each person for a few words of specific feedback on what went well or what the group could do better next time. Hold people accountable for providing specific feedback. Instead of “good meeting,” push for a specific comments like, “It was helpful to hear the perspectives from finance on our plan.” Letting people know they will be asked for feedback at the end encourages participants to pay attention, which improves interaction and ownership in the success of the meeting.
Conference calls and virtual meetings are how we build teams and accomplish work in the virtual world. Compelling agendas make the times that we work together more interesting and enjoyable. Use these four tips to get the most out of your next meeting. There will always be more emails to answer.
About the author
Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.
You Can’t Manage Virtual Workers and Teams with “Super-vision”
Most virtual leaders struggle with managing the performance of those they can’t see. Would they be more effective managers if they had “super-vision”? Some organizations install software so leaders can randomly check the screens of their employees. Some leaders even whisper that they want remote video cameras at employee’s desks.
Here’s the reality. If you need super-vision, you are not leading, you are babysitting.
How to really lead remote employees? Start by shifting your mindset.
- Know your role. You are not an Olympic judge holding up signs to rate a performance. Your job is to help employees contribute to your organization’s success today and develop them to contribute more tomorrow.
- Recognize that over monitoring leads to malicious compliance, not enthusiasm and extra effort.
Second, look for ways to improve the measurement and tracking of contributions.
- Make sure you are monitoring outcomes and results instead of activities.
- Consider setting targeted, shorter goals. Explore work planning concepts like Agile Strategy. Use two to four week goal sprints to provide prompt recognition and spur innovation to increase productivity and results.
- Seek out data sources where employees can monitor their own results. Try to model the automated school zone boards that report your speed as 34 in a 25 mph zone. Build in systems so both you and your employees receive automatic feedback for recognition and improvement. Don’t make them wait for their quarterly review to get feedback.
- Develop your measures collaboratively. Even if you previously performed an employee’s job, some aspects of the role have probably changed. Work together to identify what real success looks like. It builds commitment and increases the accuracy of performance measures.
Work—particularly virtual work—requires us to re-think our notion of leadership and re-imagine our performance management systems. None of the recommendations provided here are easy to implement. The alternative, though, is for our leaders to struggle and our employees to be hampered by that struggling. In the long run, relying on super-vision gets us nowhere.
About the author
Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.
3 Ways People Pretend to Work—at Home or the Office
Marissa Mayer’s decision to halt employee telecommuting at Yahoo has unleashed a torrent of controversy around telework, remote work, collaboration, and productivity.
For those of us who work at home or remotely, or even in an office, it’s a great time to refocus on what we do—consciously or subconsciously—that looks like work but often isn’t.
Here are three ways that people pretend to work.
Attend meetings
Our egos tell us that it is critical to stay fully informed on any project that has the potential to even slightly impact us. Even though meetings are largely ineffective, attending lots of them keeps you very busy. When you attend lots of meetings your calendar stays full—and yet you accomplish very little. This is perhaps the best way to pretend to work without really working.
Be hyper-responsive on emails and phone calls
Don’t read or think too much about each email, just respond quickly. In fact, responding to emails while passively attending a meeting can ensure that neither activity is truly productive. When you keep your email up all day and respond immediately, you can feel a great sense of “pretend” accomplishment. Since sending emails results in receiving more emails, you can honestly say, “I got 150+ emails today. I am exhausted!” This is probably very true.
Focus on speed and quantity, not quality, of communication
The accepted best practice around emails is this: If the third email hasn’t clarified the issue—pick up the phone. Ignoring this rule means you can have long strings of emails that show activity without really accomplishing work. Make sure you have an email trail that recaps every action taken. This ensures that you can always justify your lack of productivity by pointing to a flaw in someone else’s email.
Have you been caught by any of these strategies? Although I don’t know anyone who deliberately uses these strategies to avoid work, I suspect we have all had extremely busy days when we questioned our productivity and accomplishments.
Just in case you want to be very productive (which you do), here are some tips:
- Carefully choose which meetings, and how much of each meeting, you will attend.
- Focus on the quality of your communication, including reflecting or researching before you respond.
- Let others know your priority to set aside times for focused concentration, professional development, process improvement, and idea generation. Let people know when you will and won’t be available to respond quickly.
Using these strategies will require less energy, less activity, and fewer emails, and therefore will result in higher productivity.
Well, okay … you can still pretend to be tired, even if you‘re not!
About the author
Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.
3 ways to succeed in your pajamas!
Telecommuting, virtual teams and remote work have many advantages for organizations and productivity. At the same time virtual workers often have concerns about their lack of recognition and visibility since they aren’t seen at the office every day.
What many don’t realize is fewer opportunities means more control over perceptions.
When you work in the office, people see you every day. They see you when you didn’t get much sleep, when you got stuck in traffic, and when you have a seasonal cold. They see you when sick, crabby, tired and anxious.
Wise virtual workers ensure that everyone who interacts with them stays positive about them and their work by controlling how they present themselves.
When you work virtually, you can show up in every interaction, positive and professional.
- On the phone: Before you answer the phone, take a minute to breathe, smile and choose a positive vocal tone.
- If you must have uncomfortable conversations over the phone, (better than via email!) you can prepare notes in advance scripting exactly how you want to communicate the message. And you can read those rehearsal notes while on the call.
- You can also listen and make notes while others are venting. Good notes mean you can reflect and show empathy toward their feelings and thoughts without eye contact or having your facial expressions and physical reactions give you away.
- Via email: Consider using the “delay delivery” setting rule on your emails for 10 minutes. This way, after you hit send you have one last chance to review or reword so you don’t regret later the tone your email communicated. (I am sure you didn’t mean it that way!)
- Video-conferences: This is my favorite. Go ahead and wear those pajama pants when telecommuting, just make sure you computer camera only shows how nice you look from the waist up.
It’s a rare gift to be able to show up with our best selves all the time. Consider telecommuting or virtual work a gift for your career and life.
About the author
Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.
3 Ways to Put Life Into Deadly Virtual Team Meetings
Ever had this experience as a virtual member of a face-to-face team meeting? You dial into a conference phone. You can’t hear what people are saying. You can’t see the documents, slides, or whiteboards people are referencing, and there is no easy way for you to get the group’s attention to ask a question or clarify a point.
As a virtual team member, unequal access to information and a feeling of being left out can erode your trust and lower your emotional commitment—two critical factors for overall team success.
Yet when you are a dial-in participant, pushing for inclusion without sounding like a whiner usually isn’t worth the effort. As a result, unless they are called on to participate, many virtual team members give up and simply listen to the meeting while they read and answer their email.
Don’t let this happen to the virtual members of your team. Here are three ways to keep your virtual teammates engaged:
- Go completely virtual. Meetings where everyone is virtual will force better habits such as “around the room” input and sending reports in advance so everyone has access. Make sure each meeting agenda deliberately includes time for everyone to participate in the lively chat necessary for this social team approach.
- Use a buddy system. If you must have some in the room and some out, assign every virtual team member a “buddy” in the room. Set up additional communication modes such as instant messaging or chatting between buddies. This way, the virtual team member can ask questions without disturbing the whole group and each person calling in has an advocate who can send last-minute documents, describe what is happening, or intervene when necessary for clarification.
- Consider creating a cardboard Carl/Caroline. One creative team leader I worked with created large, cardboard-backed photos of each virtual team member. The visibility of a cardboard Carl or Caroline in each meeting provided great humor and increased engagement. “Caroline looks like she has a question.” “Let’s ask Carl what he thinks!” These are fun and natural ways to ensure all team members stay visibly engaged and emotionally committed to the team. Other teams use an empty chair with a name, or a name tent—but there is something about a photo that adds life to the meeting. Be aware, though, that your virtual team member may ask for a cardboard photo of you and the rest of the team—that’s a good thing!
We all have attended deadly team meetings, and most of us probably have neglected a virtual team member, inadvertently, at least once. Keep your virtual team members engaged. Try one or more of these strategies and bring life and energy to your next virtual engagement!
About the author
Carmela Sperlazza Southers is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her posts on increasing organizational, team, and leader effectiveness in the virtual work world appear on the fourth Monday of every month.
