Setting up meaningful remote meetings with teammates and coworkers who work online adds a human touch to this type of cooperation, and connecting with confidence is vital when you can't meet in person.
Even if your coworkers are thousands of miles distant, these sessions provide a feeling of facetime and quality time, so make sure they are set up for success.
So how do you go about doing this? More importantly, how do you easily arrange a virtual meeting that produces the greatest results? We've done the research and identified the tiny, big, and everything in between factors that may make or ruin a remote meeting.
Here are our top obvious (and not-so-obvious) suggestions for effectively running one successfully:
1. Determine the optimum platform.
There are several trustworthy online platforms for hosting remote meetings, including Skype, GoToMeeting, UberConference, Zoom, join.me, and Google Hangouts, among others (Join.me is one of our favorites!). Many are free and offer video and audio capabilities, so conduct your research ahead of time to choose the ideal platform for your meeting.
2. Determine if the meeting will involve video or will be audio-only ahead of time.
Know what is expected of you in terms of attendance, especially if you are not hosting the meeting. This may influence your choice of what to wear or how formal to dress. Knowing what you're entering into will give you confidence.
3. Embrace it
Allow for some wiggle room in virtual meetings (or any other type of meeting). All of the characteristics of a virtual conference that make it handy - the wifi, the ability to connect with anyone anywhere in the globe, and so on - are also what might cause problems if things don't go as planned.
Make a backup plan to give yourself some piece of mind. If things aren't going well, a simple plan to check in through email shortly after the meeting is an easy way to keep in touch.