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Running an Effective Teleconference or Virtual Meeting. Meetings are hard enough to run when the participants are all in the same room, fighting over the last chocolate doughnut. But any meeting you call, nowadays, probably has at least one person attending who works in a remote location. In some cases, everyone in the teleconference is dialing in.
You may be great at orchestrating an in- person meeting, but running an effective teleconference requires new skills. You still need to start the meeting on time, define the meeting objectives, invite the right people, etc. But if you don't have good in- person meeting skills, teleconferences will only make it worse. Management consultant Steven M. Smith says, . Gerry Mann, Web development manager at Unitrin Business Insurance, urges organizers to prepare ahead. Include an agenda (short and focused) and ground rules, such as when to use the Mute button, the keys this conference service uses to place the call on hold and so on.
Jim Coughlin, managing director of Foundation Systems, complains that people forget that they're not on an ordinary phone call. Most are not. An agenda isn't about your ability to lead a meeting; it is about the people at the distant end, says Daniel Mittleman, associate professor at the De. Paul University School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems, whose research focuses on group support systems and virtual meeting technologies. They will lose place, lose focus and lose attention to the meeting. So you have to be clearer—more explicit—the first time. The ground rules for your virtual meeting might include: Log on 1.
Be aware of background noise. State your name when you speak.
If you catch yourself multitasking, be responsible for your full participation. Turn off cell phones and PDAs. Stay out of your e- mail. Be Their Eyes. But online meetings are different in several ways. According to Ken Molay, president of Webinar Success, meeting organizers should distinguish between meetings with a local in- room audience and some remote attendees, and the meetings where everybody attends remotely.
When possible, he says, keep the local meetings local and the remote meetings separate; it is tricky to meet the needs of both audiences when they're combined. They also can't hear low- volume conversations. During a pause in the proceedings, for example, describe what is happening, so remote users understand the silence. Molay says, . She identifies six critical success factors for getting great results from virtual meetings: Planning a viable agenda or series of agendas.
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Effective use of technology. Preparing participants and prework. Keeping participants focused and engaged during a virtual meeting.
Building trust and social capital. Maintaining momentum between meetings. Encourage Participation. Common pet peeves among frequent online meeting participants reflect the tendency for people to become distracted from the matter at hand.
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It's easy for participants to pay attention to e- mail, chat or other things on their desktop and to lose focus on the meeting. Multitasking sounds good, but often it's not conducive to an effective meeting. Sometimes, people in the same building dial into a meeting so they can multitask, points out Kevin Mackie, director of software development at Oracle. But, he says, there's a false economy with multitasking. Watch out for questions like, .
Web conferencing software that includes polling features can help you solicit audience feedback. Construct an agenda that encourages participant input, says Settle- Murphy. Assume that participants will start to get distracted after 1. One trick Mittleman uses is to engage in dialogue with an individual at a distant end. He says that person asks the questions others are thinking of asking; he can read nonverbal responses from the individual to know if he is following the message; it is less boring to listen to dialogue than to a monologue; and that person can fill him in on how he's being received. Smith suggests that meeting leaders sequence the discussion, because teleconference participants don't know when it's their turn to talk. Smith goes around the virtual table; each participant is invited to speak for 3.
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But, he cautions, silence doesn't necessarily mean someone is finished. The result is that, with six teleconference participants, everyone says something at least every three minutes. Smith, too, assumes that participants will become distracted after the third presentation slide, and recommends interactive behavior such as asking questions, polls and pausing the presentation for a quick brainstorming activity. Mittleman also advises that it's important to get people to focus during transitions from one meeting part to another, or you'll lose them. Also, they should be able to see who is at the meeting.
People don't like to give up their favorite ideas. They like it even less virtually. Mittleman advises. It is not enough to lead a group through a vote; it is vital to lead them through buy- in to the results of that vote.
Buy- in requires a sense of being heard and a sense that one's interests have been accommodated—or at least understood. Most meeting participants wish others would press Mute on their phones to reduce background noise and to improve sound quality—but that opinion isn't universal. Settle- Murphy urges people to stay off mute.
Doing so, she says, allows people to readily participate in verbal conversation without a pause, and gives the meeting facilitator a greater sense of whether people are engaged and alert, she says. Sarah Churton, general manager of Sure. Slim, is among those who favor using Mute when the participant isn't speaking. Stay Conscious of Time Zones. Meeting participants aren't always in the same time zone; when you plan a meeting, take their time of day into account. Kevin Mackie, director of software development at Oracle, says a lack of colocation isn't nearly as important as the ability to meet during people's normal working hours. It isn't simply an issue of scheduling a conference call for 9: 0.
Mann advises meeting organizers to be aware of other time- of- day impacts, such as crossing over a lunch hour, keeping someone from leaving work on time or having to arrive extra early. Another option, says Howard Lichtman, president of The Human Productivity Lab and the author of Telepresence, Effective Visual Collaboration and the Future of Global Business at the Speed of Light, is to alternate who stays up late when meeting with people in distant lands. And be flexible. Technology Can Help. But Use It for Good, Not for Evil. You've undoubtedly discovered the myriad tools that can help moderate meetings and share materials. Choosing the right one for the task isn't necessarily easy.
Managers should be clear about what they're trying to accomplish in the meeting and how information may flow before deciding on the software to use, says Mittleman. For example: Live Meeting: Best for a presentation where one person will speak to a group with occasional participant questions. Group Support System (GSS): Best for problem solving or decision making where a team of people will work on a problem and come to resolution.
Collaborative Document- Building Tools: Tools such as Google Docs are best for a work product execution meeting where a team will work at developing a deliverable. Settle- Murphy agrees that technology must match the objectives. Design your agenda first. Post questions using the Web collaboration software.
Retrieve responses and questions from the Web collaboration software. Transfer control to another participant and get control back. Change the window being shown.