Avoid online meeting fatigue: 5 top tips for productive online meetings

Planning and facilitating productive meetings can be challenging at the best of times – creating and sticking to an effective agenda whilst managing disruptions, different levels of engagement and personality traits. During the current time of lockdown and remote working, hundreds are finding that successfully facilitating meetings can be so much harder through a laptop camera, without the obvious visual cues and face to face team dynamics!

At Fearless Facilitation we want to support you in adapting to the current situation so that you can thrive in your job, despite the distance between you and your team and so we've created a new webinar: How to run productive and engaging meetings online.

Here we share a preview of 5 Top Tips you can uses for better online meetings. Join us on Tuesday 26 May, 10AM - 11AM, for an hour packed with insight and practical takeaways that will transform your online meetings.

Tip 1: Get everyone on the same page

Get set up for success by planning in advance and setting up clear objectives in advance of your meetings. We use a technique we call 'Ways of Working' and we use this as a tool to get people on the same page before the meeting starts - making people more conscious of what THEY need to do get more out of the meeting and planning for areas such as Technology, Engagement, Connectivity, Participation and Follow up.

Tip 2: Work as a Facilitation 'Team'

Bring on board colleagues that are willing to be co-facilitators and AGREE roles and responsibilities for a meeting so that everyone is clear about how time will be used, how information will be shared and how engagement will be created. Involve all facilitators in the meeting using a 'conversational style' so that the audience is not just looking at or listening to one 'Talking Head'.

Tip 3: Keeping the Meeting on Track

Despite the agenda, new issues and questions often crop up mid-meeting. We advise facilitators to set up a 'Car Park' to capture any issues or questions that people have outside of the meeting objectives. If people start going off at a tangent or dominate the meeting with an issues that is only relevant to them and not the rest of the group, ask them to capture this (in chat) and you will collate these issues and look at alternative ways of addressing them This 'acknowledges' that their issue is important to them, they see it is noted and you are more able to then maintain their engagement

Tip 4: Create Digital body language

Online meetings just don't have the same capacity to create the 'clues' facilitators need to understand their audiences, and help build engagement. Be more proactive about creating the digital body language needed to check understanding and assess levels of engagement. Ask questions that create 'manageable' feedback such as 'how experienced are you at doing this type of Project on a scale of 1-10, put a number in chat' or 'who has experience of working in this way ..put a 'thumbs up' if you have or a 'heart emoji' if you haven't', as well as using 'chat' to encourage people to ask their own questions.

Tip 5: Accommodate Different Styles of Learning

People take-in information in different ways and at different speeds. Once you have designed your meeting format, review by putting a 'filter on that format' to allow for timing and techniques to accommodate different learning styles including dedicated points to 'Create Participation' to get people involved, 'Relate' content to the expectations of the audience so they can see the WIIFM (What's in it for me) Factor and giving people time and space to 'Reflect' and 'Think'. This will help maintain interest as well as create more buy-in and commitment to actions agreed.

If you'd like to find out more, discover "tools for impact and engagement" and learn how to effectively facilitate your online meetings, be sure to book your place and join us for our insight-packed webinar How to run productive and engaging meetings online - Tuesday 26 May, 10AM - 11AM

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