How to run a meeting online: A beginner’s guide

Filed Under Business |

by Tyler Vaughn

Knowing how to run an online meeting is becoming more and more important in business. Top leaders are equally comfortable working online or face-to-face.

You’ve heard the hype. Web conferencing can save your travel budget, important in today’s expensive environment. Run them right and you’ll improve communication and save money at the same time. Nice. Here’s 8 tips to help you get started.

1. Have an agenda distributed ahead of time. This is even more important online than in “normal” meetings. Having the agenda in front of all the attendees — preferably

2. Practice with your web meeting software. As a leader, you should know how the features work. Planning to use the whiteboard? Figure out how to use it before the meeting. Only want to share one document from your desktop? Again, practice once and learn what to do. Few things are more irritating to meeting participants than waiting five minutes while the leader mumbles “hmm can you see this now?” in vain.

3. Make sure pre-work is done. If the participants need to prepare for the meeting, be sure they know it. One of the quirks of online meetings is that participants sometimes place them at a lower priority than face-to-face. As the meeting leader, take an extra few minutes to check in advance that the prep work is underway. A gentle “just checking in” reminder - preferably over the phone - works wonders.

4. Pay attention to your tone of voice. Your verbal tone almost always follows your face. It’s a subconscious reality. Call center trainers often give staff a mirror to hang on the wall of their cube as a reminder to smile. If you’re the leader you’ll want to aim for an expression of friendly confidence.

5. This should be obvious, but just in case: keep the noises out of the background. Have dogs? Put them in a different room. (Mine are guaranteed to bark at a car 5 minutes into a call.) Ask participants to turn their cell phones to vibrate. Don’t use a keyboard near the phone. No eating. You get the idea.

6. Don’t be the note-taker. Ask someone else to handle this responsibility. Managing a good online meeting requires your attention. Don’t distract yourself with the additional task of taking minutes.

7. Do participants understand (or agree on) the key points? We don’t have facial expressions to help us know if everyone’s in agreement. Instead, online meeting leaders have to ask specific questions after each major topic — use that feedback to gauge the participants’ understanding.

8. Manage the participants. Some online meetings tend to mushroom - people pull coworkers into the conference to listen in “just in case” and suddenly you have a lot of unexpected inputs. At the very least, you should know who’s participating. Start the meeting with a request to quickly list who’s in each location - your participants will appreciate knowing who’s hearing their input.

These guidelines should help you understand how to run a meeting online. If you’re still feeling undertain, I suggest you sign up for a free trial with a internet conference vendor (see resource box for helpful links). Take a few test runs with the software — hold a practice meeting with a friend and get comfortable. You’ll do fine.

About the Author:

Tyler worked often with web conference software while working as a traveling consultant. Learn more about getting web conference free trials at his website. Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service