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When you are dealing with a small team, it is easier for you to lead the team and coordinate all the activities of the team and each member of the team. But as the team starts to grow big, you have more on your hands to worry about and it becomes more complex to deal with the different characters that make up the team. While you might not need to hold scheduled remote team meetings when you have just two or three members in your team, you can’t say the same of a team with 10, 15 or more members.
As a business starts to grow, the need to have the different departments better-defined increases. This will lead to the employment of more staff and more people for the manager to work with. Holding remote team meetings are an important way to ensure that the goal of the business/brand as a whole or the department is communicated to every member. It is an avenue to enhance productivity by bringing together ideas from different team members for a progressive result.
But how do you make this happen? How do you ensure that remote team meetings are really positive and productive? Are our remote team meetings effective? These are all good questions that are summed up in holding positive and results-oriented team meetings. In order to answer these questions, we asked some of the more experienced managers and team leaders and we came up with these 5 secrets to lead remote team meetings in a productive way.
Have an agenda with few topics to discuss
Setting an agenda for remote team meetings is no longer a secret for many people. The importance of running a meeting with an agenda and the problems of not having an agenda is clear for all to see. However, many people create agenda for remote team meetings and end up having a long list of topics to discuss. Little do they know that the secret to holding productive remote team meetings is not in the lengthiness of the agenda but the shortness of it.
When you are working with a smaller team, you are able to better carry everyone along. It affords you the opportunity to take charge of what is happening around the meeting participants and also retain their attention. But with growth and an increased number, you begin to lose hold of this bit by bit. Your response should be to make your meeting shorter in order to be as productive as possible. This might make your team meetings more regular than before. But it is better to have regular short meetings that are productive than one long, boring, and meaningless meeting.
In order to achieve this, you can adopt the practice of rotating your topics in your meetings throughout a month. This means that if you used to hold one team meets monthly, you might make it two or three months. Then break the topics to fit in with the three meeting schedules depending on their order of importance. This allows you to have shorter and more productive remote team meetings.
Make sure everyone is carried along
This is where the true test of your leadership skills will come into play. The most productive way to hold remote team meetings is to ensure that you involve and carry along all members of your team.
Many people see meetings as very boring and evil that they can’t avoid at work. You have to change that point of view as a leader and make them look forward to the meetings. The most productive remote team meetings usually have the members contributing to the discussion and everyone bringing something to the table. The goal for you (as the leader) is to have an interactive meeting where teammates have a say. There might even be conflicting ideas and suggestions. Allowing both parties to make their point (argumentatively) would also add some spark to the meeting. These organic contributions are key to having productive meetings. You just have to ensure that no one is shut down, all suggestions are taken in, and everything is done in a friendly environment. When your teammates also see that previous suggestions are adopted and are being worked upon, they are more willing to involve themselves even better.
Link everything back to your company or department goals
Of course, the aim of having regular meetings is to work in line with your goals as a company or department and seek to achieve it. So, you must never forget this in your meetings.
As much as you are going to be dealing with real-time issues in your department and discussing the implementation of certain ideas and its impacts, you also want to ensure continuity. This means that the goal of every meeting is to move one step closer to achieving your strategic goals. While you handle short-term issues within your team and company, make sure you have one eye fixed on the bigger picture. Also, carry members of your team along with this by highlighting your goals at the start of the meeting. This makes it easy for them to raise suggestions in line with your department and company goal, therefore leading to increased productivity.
Discussions, not data sharing
Recent publications in the dissertation help of many writing services have stated the fact of meetings being more productive when more time is spent discussing the nitty-gritty of things than reading out or sharing data. We can confirm that this is very accurate.
If there are data that needs to be discussed during the meeting, it is better to pass them across before the meeting. These data can come with the email notification for the meeting. It is more effective this way for two reasons. One, it gives your team members time to go through the data, understand it, and discuss it better during the meeting. Two, it saves time during the meeting.
Since you are looking to have shorter and more productive remote team meetings, you have to provide teammates with all the necessary info before the meeting. This includes meeting agenda and data to be discussed. It is less effective and time-wasting to read out data during a meeting, especially a remote meeting.
Add some fun
Adding elements of fun to remote team meetings helps to increase productivity. It releases any tensions that may arise from the formalness of the meeting. This makes the participants free to express themselves in the best way that they can. It also makes the meeting less boring. In case you missed it, the moment your team members see your meetings as boring, the productivity and end result of the meeting starts to drop. So adding some fun things to your meeting is an important secret to maintain or increase the productivity of your meeting.
Conclusion
Team meetings are important for achieving the goals of an organization or department. But they are as good as nothing if they are not productive. In order to have more productive remote team meetings, these secrets are very important for you.Â
About the guest author:
Michael Gorman is a highly skilled freelance essay writer and proofreader providing essay service in the UK. Being interested in everyday development, he writes various blog posts and discovers new aspects of human existence every day.
