Many of us have been thrust into the wonderful world online meetings. If you’re new to hosting online meetings, you might be eating into your time by helping people to connect to the audio, putting up with someone’s barking dog, or explaining how to do screen sharing, among other things. The pros have engineers and meeting support staff to take care of these nuisances. But you might have to do it all yourself while simultaneously emceeing the meeting. Fun, right?
Here are some tips that I’ve been gathering over the past few weeks that might help you to host better meetings. I’ve been using Zoom, but many of these tips could be adapted to your own meeting platform.
Use the mute button!
I’ve been discovering that the mute button can be a meeting host’s best friend.
- If you’re the presenter, mute everyone else until the time comes for discussion or questions.
- When it’s someone else’s turn to talk, mute everyone except that speaker.
- Sometimes you can’t mute everyone, or people can unmute themselves. As meeting host, encourage your audience to self-mute when they’re not speaking or if they’re typing.
Prevent screen sharing
This morning one of my meeting participants started randomly sharing his screen without realizing it during my presentation. In Zoom, a meeting host can prevent everybody else from sharing their screens by clicking on the newly-installed Security button. If your meeting platform doesn’t let you do that, then remind people not to share their screens unless it’s their turn to speak.
Provide testing opportunities
Set up test meetings so that people can practice screen sharing, determine ways to creatively use video, work with different backgrounds, try out new microphones or cameras, etc.
I’ve been doing this for my business meetings and it’s worked out very well. I’ve also been communicating regularly with some of our more technologically challenged teammates so that when the time comes for our meetings they can get more out of them and feel less intimidated.
Send files early and often
I host a weekly meeting where attendees are supposed to download a fillable PDF. I attach the file to the meeting invitation along with instructions on what to do with it. In addition to that, I put a link to the file on our organization’s website and I put the file into the group chat during the meeting. As with marketing, sometimes you have to deliver the same message multiple times in different ways for it to be received.
Discourage “awesome” virtual backgrounds
At this week’s virtual Boy Scout meeting, some of the lads were playing with their virtual backgrounds. They kept switching images and using video. It was verrrrry distracting, since we needed to talk about some important things. Try to get your participants to pick one background and stick with it.
Let people have some fun!
Do online meetings have to be boring? Heck no! Don’t forget to let people blow off some steam once in a while, especially in longer meetings.
- What I just said about backgrounds and video? Maybe schedule a 5-minute stupid background contest.
- A scavenger hunt encourages creativity and also gets chair-bound workers out of their seats and moving around.
- How about a game of Hangman using the whiteboard?
- Play a quick round of Two Truths and a Lie. That’s where the speaker states two facts and one plausible-sounding lie about themself and the other people have to guess which thing isn’t true.
Your turn
Whether you’re new to the whole online meeting thing or a seasoned pro, I’m sure you’ve come up with some good ideas and best practices. Please share them in the comments section!