Do your virtual team meetings need more focus? More engagement? Better results? In this “Virtual Meetings That Don’t Suck” video series, visual facilitator and engagement specialist Carolyn Ellis of BrillianceMastery.com shares her tips to help you create conversations that count!

TIP #3: Virtual Meetings That Don’t Suck – Engage at the Start

Transcript of Video

Hi, everyone! It’s Carolyn Ellis from Brilliance Mastery. Thank you for joining me today for this short video tip.

I’m doing a series called Virtual Meetings that Don’t Suck. I want to give you a new tip this week on helping you have better virtual meetings with your team with your clients and how you manage this virtual working environment that we are now in.

This week’s tip is about Engage from the Start. Seriously, how you start a meeting is so important! It really sets an energetic tone and a space for the entire conversation, which is so critical. I think it’s an area where I’ve been noticing a lot of people are just blowing by how we start a meeting and often not doing it as well as we could.

When we got together in person in physical rooms, the focus was not just about what we were talking about. It was also about the chance to meet other people connect and network. Remember you’d get to the meeting a few minutes early, grab a coffee. You’d have a chat with somebody over a doughnut and there’d be a little bit of catching up over what did you do on the weekend. Then we would sit down and get the work done.

But now that we’re in virtual rooms, we don’t really have that same opportunity for that kind of spontaneous human connection and conversations. This is something I think is really important. But when we think about how are we going to start this meeting, we’ve got amazing technology that allows us to do great work together when we’re working in different locations. But we don’t want our reliance on that technology to have us forget the need for that human touch, that human connection.

Let me just give you a little example. Recently, I attended my high school reunion (it was a significant number of years since I’ve graduated from high school). It’s something that we always look forward to every five years with people coming in from all over the world. Of course, this year, that wasn’t able to happen. The school put on a virtual reunion, which was it was wonderful, because it’s also was a chance for us to see some of the other graduating classes that are five years either side of us.

We arrived in this virtual space. We were met with a slide show – a full screen share, full virtual real estate was dedicated to showing old historical photos, which are definitely cool to see. It was a great thought. Unfortunately, it was all of the computer screen real estate. As people were coming in, we were just showing up a little tiny gallery view. Very quickly the energy of excitement and enthusiasm about getting to see everybody started to go drop. We couldn’t readily find our classmates. We couldn’t see those people from other years around us that we wanted to at least wave to or send a quick chat to, and appreciate that these people were there after all this time after high school graduation.

So I made a suggestion and asked if it be possible while we’re coming on to the call to  please stop sharing the screen so we can have a full gallery view of everybody. Of course, I have to speak up! What happened was a huge and immediate uptick in the energy in the room. People got excited again. They were having cross talk, and spontaneous shout outs and greetings as we welcomed each other.  It really helped to foster that human connection.

That is just one little example of choosing how we’re going to start our meetings and engage people right from the beginning. Here are some simple things that you could do. Have people listen to music when they’re arriving, and welcome them as they get on. There’s nothing worse than coming into a meeting and you’re met with a flat “Oh, hi!” and then silence until the meeting officially starts. That is very off putting and deflating. Use the chat function. Ask a question in the chat and have people chime in with answers to “Where are you calling from?”, “How are you feeling today?” or “What’s the best show you’ve seen lately?” Give them a simple activity. Maybe they need to reflect on the minutes or the materials that were sent out in advance of the meeting. There’s something that you can do to get them out of the starting blocks in that meeting in a great way that will give you momentum and carry you through the entire discussion.

So, engage at the start! Plan for that we can do better at our virtual meetings. I hope this has been a helpful tip for you. Thank you for listening and watching and I’ll be back with another one shortly. Have a great day!

Missed a tip? You can check out other “Virtual Meetings that Don’t Suck” video tips by clicking below:

Tip 1 – Start with the End in Mind
Tip 2 – Less is More
Tip 4 – Wisdom is in the Room
Tip 5 – Dynamic Game Plan
Tip 6 – Watch Your Costs
Tip 7 – Digestion Time
Tip 8 – Leading Through Connecting