Before COVID-19 the seemingly, always-too-long and dreaded meetings took place around a conference table with colleagues. Today, many businesses have adopted remote work because of COVID-19 pandemic, and for the most part, those meetings— have shifted to virtual video conferencing with popular platforms like; Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting and Zoom amoung others.
But can these constant video meetings become “excessive,” when for example, a telephone conference would suffice?
A recent blog by David Dye for SHRM titled, Too Many Meetings: How to Free Your Team to Build, Create, and Thrive offers a few tips that are worth considering when planning your next team meeting. These tips include:
“Make Every Meeting Count
If you’re having a meeting to discuss the meeting and then to follow up on the meeting, you can free up time by consolidating. Socialize ideas and provide people the information they need asynchronously. At the end of every meeting, take a few minutes to schedule the finish and ensure everyone knows who is doing what, and by when.
Engage your Team and Ask “How Can We…?”
You’ll find willing thought-partners when you ask your team for their ideas. Use your asynchronous channels to ask “How can we meet less?” (Please don’t have a meeting about meeting less—it’s unnecessary until you have some concrete ideas to discuss.)
Think First, Then Meet
This will help your introverts and cut down on the number of meetings and make the meetings you do have more productive. Solicit ideas ahead of time. Give people time to think about what might work. They’ll likely be more creative when on a walk than staring into a computer camera. Once you’ve collected ideas, establish your success criteria, and then meet to prioritize or make a decision”.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Gartner survey of 127 HR, legal and finance professionals said they “intend to permit remote working some of the time as employees return to the workplace. For many organizations with employees working both onsite and remotely, adapting to a new, more complex hybrid workforce is the challenge as how people work together to get their job done evolves”.
Bottomline: Some companies will do some sort of hybrid remote work after the coronavirus pandemic, while others may adopt it permanently. A virtual meeting via videoconferencing is a powerful way to make use of technology— and will likely become part of the future, but it should be used in appropriate doses. In fact, as a manager, try switching it up, by having a phone conference for your next meeting—and see how it impacts team engagement and morale. You might be pleasantly surprised.
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