Virtual meeting best practice – are we there yet?
It’s now four years since the world was plunged into enforced remote working by the COVID-19 pandemic. Virtual meeting platforms thrived during the height of the pandemic. Most employees were forced to quickly learn how to meet digitally. Four years down the track, what lessons have we learned about online meetings? What new work practices are working well for us, now we’re in a hybrid working environment? What hasn’t worked?
No doubt a lot has been learned over the past four years, though meeting stress and meeting overload are still regularly mentioned as creating workplace stress while working remotely. In this article we will take stock on where we are at with respect to virtual meeting best practices.
What are the emerging meeting practices?
A review of the relevant literature exposes four key themes:
Time management
This theme explores reducing the time commitment to meetings in general, either by doing less meetings overall, or simply making them shorter to free up time. The first type of meeting to consider deleting, or shortening, are those designed for status updates. Status updates are seen to be just as effective when shared asynchronously. Other recurring meetings may fall into the same category if they are seen by most participants to be time wasting.
A regular default meeting time of one hour is also being challenged. Recurring meetings rarely finish early, and meetings tend to continue for the full allotted time, even if it adds little value. This is not to say that recurring meetings are bad. In many contexts recurring meetings provide a regular rhythm for remote teams or groups, even if a principal purpose is socialisation. For Microsoft Teams users, features have been included in Outlook to reset the default settings for meetings.
SWOOP Analytics’ 2023 Microsoft Teams and M365 benchmarking study identified that the users of Microsoft Teams were indeed mostly using the meetings and chat features, with only 23% of employees using the asynchronous Microsoft Teams channels functions. If we aim to remove meetings or make them significantly shorter, it will be important that employes learn to use the asynchronous communication channels to ensure that less meeting time does not lead to lower productivity. Our M365 Asynchronous Working habit has been designed to monitor the synchronous/asynchronous working balance.
2. General meeting practices, whether digital or not
Pre-COVID-19 physical meeting practices like having agendas with a clear purpose, ensuring participants are given ample opportunity to contribute, ensuring the meeting closes with a clear summary on what was discussed and agreed on, and a statement of next steps are still relevant, whether a meeting is held physically or virtually.
In the physical world, meeting practices are unlikely to have varied much from even those from a pre-digital age. Meetings would have a nominated lead facilitator. There would be an agenda of items to be covered. And someone would have been nominated to take the meeting minutes to share with the participants. Digitisation has made some of the manual activities more efficient like establishing the meeting, booking a venue, and taking and sharing meeting minutes. But the people-to-people interactions inside the meeting are largely the same.
The people aspects are also largely unchanged. McKinsey, writing on “effective meetings”, emphasises purpose, preparation and presentation. Their surveys found 61% of executives said at least half the time they spend making decisions in meetings is ineffective. Like the previous point, McKinsey advises executives first identify whether a meeting is required at all. Once this has been achieved, they advise to tailor their meeting structures by purpose into “decision-making”, “creative solutions and co-ordination” and “information sharing”. This advice is independent of whether a meeting is in person or virtual.
SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking studies of digital teams has identified that teams will often adopt “team personas” not unlike the meeting categories posed by McKinsey. By analysing Microsoft Teams channels interactions, we have used AI machine learning techniques to classify teams as “Self-directed”, “Single leader”, “Communities” and “Forums” . A “Self-directed” team is the aspirational persona, more suited to collaborative decision-making. Teams identified as “Communities” can be used for co-ordination and “Forums” for creativity. “Single leader” teams can be used for leader-led decision-making and information sharing. The question, however, is do you want your teams to adopt a fixed purpose persona, or do we need to be more flexible and adaptive?
Virtual meetings bring new challenges and opportunities for which good practice is still emerging. We explore this in the next section.
3. Practices that are specific for virtual meetings
Virtual meetings add some specific challenges to how participants engage and interact. For larger or non-recurring meetings, the socialisation of participants that can happen at the start of a physical meeting are missing. This may require a specific period to be devoted for participants to introduce themselves and create space for developing psychological safety amongst participants.
The lack of the rich body language of a face-to-face meeting makes the video and audio channels even more important. Karin M. Reed, author of the 2021 book “Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work” concurs with the idea of making virtual meetings shorter; at 20 minutes with only two agenda items i.e. shorter and sharper.
Who should participate in a decision-making meeting? Reed suggests the sweet spot is five to seven people; which interestingly aligns well with our general advice on team sizes of less than 10, and ideally between four and six people. Like team sizes, decision-making meetings can suffer from too many participants. When these meetings are virtual, the engagement of a large number of participants can make the task even more difficult.
Reed advocates for “camera on” and good lighting, to better communicate body language through facial expressions. Being sure to sustain eye contact by looking at the camera, rather than the screen while conversing is also emphasised. One of our SWOOP Analytics for M365 digital habits is labelled “Camera Confident”, which identifies the proportion of time you have your camera on. We acknowledge though that 100% is not always the goal.
Finally, Reed addresses inclusion. This is where the meeting facilitator has to work a little harder in a virtual environment. Monitoring conversations, calling in people who have been a little too quiet and asking questions of individuals are all good ways of ensuring all participants are included.
Of course, virtual teaming, while amplified by the pandemic, is not new. Have a listen to our discussion with Jessica Lipnack, the author of the book on “Virtual Teams”, published in 1997! And guess what? A key message was around purpose, alignment and inclusion. Not much has changed in almost three decades, even if the technology has.
4. AI and virtual meetings
AI is encroaching on many areas of our work and virtual meetings are no exception. Technology has not featured heavily so far in improving the effectiveness of our virtual meetings, but is this about to change?
Geekflare has posed nine areas where AI can improve your meetings. The first few relate to time management and the repetitive tasks. These include using AI to help schedule a meeting with the right people at a time that suits, along with sending reminders and follow-ups. Meeting minutes are a chore that AI can excel in, providing summaries and key actions that can be used, even my those not at the meeting. Another relates to AI generated timing prompts during a meeting.
AI translation facilities can become a real game changer. Imagine a global meeting with participants speaking in their native tongues and the translation engine working in real time. At the very least, meeting minutes can be provided in your language of choice.
AI meeting analytics can review your meetings and provide feedback my summarising the plethora of meeting signals available e.g. attendance, engagement, participation, sticking to the agenda, time management and more.
AI can monitor the health of the discussion. How inclusive is the discussion? What sentiments are being displayed. Are they constructive or toxic?
Remember walking into meetings with your large folder of papers you might be called on for? Not required now, if AI lets you search and/or summarise your whole digital file space to respond in real time. With these features available to all meeting participants, the time to reach “informed decisions” can be reduced substantially. AI will be there to take the notes for sharing with all stakeholders.
Workplace specialist Herrmann International provides similar insights. Additional insights though include the ability to use AI to safeguard privacy and data compliance requirements. Is data being shared in this meeting broaching security guidelines?
Agendas are designed to guide the meeting. But who comes up with the agenda? How can the agenda be used creatively to spark energy and action. Here is where generative AI can be used to spark ideas and possibilities for the convenors.
Herrmann completes its assessment by warning that AI is a tool meeting participants need to be comfortable with, and feel in control. For team meetings, we need to gain agreement on how AI will be used to help, rather than simply mandating a use.
It’s still early days yet for AI co-pilots. As the term suggests, AI is an assistant i.e. co-pilot, and therefore not in control. We are all seeing the vendor’s claims and now getting candid feedback from the early adopters. As you would expect, some features were amazingly good, while others were a great disappointment.
Generative AI has certainly raised our expectations. Overall though, we are in a far better place than before it arrived.
What have we learned that shouldn’t be done?
Remember when Microsoft was promoting the ability to identify people doing their email while attending an online meeting? Sounded like a cool idea to see who might not be paying attention. Well, features like this fall under the category of “employee monitoring” and are now somewhat frowned upon. If you want to generate mistrust with your employees you need only to install remote monitoring software, that can pretty much track what your employees are doing online, or not, for that matter.
Of course, there are pros and cons for employee monitoring software, but like any tool, it can be used for “good or evil”. We have written about workplace analytics and the need to balance insights with ethics. In essence, providing people with insights into their digital working habits, in order to improve, is good. Using monitoring software to infringe on an individual’s right to privacy is bad. The dividing line is not always crisp and may require judgment on a case-by-case basis. We are learning to be mindful of this balance and to err on the side of caution.
Digital Whiteboard company Miro has compiled a list of remote meeting “worst practice”, that hopefully we are now learning to avoid:
· Blindly scheduling online meetings because you are missing in-person interactions.
· Having so many meetings that you get “screen fatigue”.
· Meetings that provide no way to participate (think about the last time the boss called a meeting for a one-way information dump).
· Insisting on camera on always. The people you work with every day do not always need to see you.
I expect you may be guilty of at least some of these, but at least you now know!
If you are interested in reading a little more about “bad digital habits” we published this article on “The seven deadly sins of digital working” while we were all still immersed in remote working in 2021.
Are we there yet?
Unlike a physical destination, one could argue that we can never say we have arrived at “best practice”. However, some of you reading this article might propose that you’re pretty close; or more likely, can identify some in your organisation that are there; at least from your perspective.
Having done many workplace benchmarking studies over the past decade, we can comfortably say that most organisations will find examples of “best practice” within their own organisations. For some of the better ones, maybe up to 20% of staff provide examples of “best virtual meeting” practice.
But what about the other 80%+? What we can say with some confidence is that digital working (inclusive of virtual meeting) habits exhibit what we call a “long tail” distribution. In laymen’s terms, a small proportion (usually less than 10%) working at “best practice” levels, followed by a “long tail” of others exhibiting less or even non-existent habits.
Good habits are hard to form and sustain. It will be up to those in the top 10% to lead the way by setting an example. Sure, education and training can play a part, but nothing will beat the experience of a practiced virtual meeting facilitator leading your meeting. Train the trainer, or more likely “coach the coaches” programs, like this one from Nestle, is a good example of how knowledge of digital working can more rapidly propagate across large organisations.
At SWOOP Analytics, we have built digital habit monitoring right into your M365 usage. The habits that speak specifically to virtual meeting habits are the “Asynchronous Collaborator” habit which measures the balance between meeting and the use of alternate asynchronous channels; “Screen Sharer”, which measures the degree that you participate in sharing your screen during meetings; and “Camera Confidence”, which simply measures the percentage of time you have your camera on during meetings. Read more about SWOOP Analytics’ Seven Collaboration Habits here.
So, we’re yet to arrive at virtual meeting best practice - there are still some mountains to climb - but the sign posts are in place.
