Meetings are a useful means for brainstorming, planning, communicating, and coordinating activities. Pre COVID19 most meetings were conducted face-to-face in meeting rooms and were a means of bringing a team together to discuss important operational or project matters, often setting post-meeting tasks or follow-up. Holding meetings necessarily came with the requirement to schedule the meeting and book a room, plan the meeting and set a formal agenda, corral the participants, conduct the meeting, decide on and assign actions, set deadlines, take minutes, and socialise the outcomes. Meetings were used for discussions and decisions, and for planning and executing activities. After a meeting, teams would interact and discuss joint and individual activities creating an unseen extension of the meeting. Teams would, in effect, operate in ‘group silos’ performing both individual tasks and group activities requiring periods of isolated effort and team interaction. Tasks would be performed and would last until the activities were completed or the next meeting provided new or updated directions. Meetings took time and effort to set up and run and had a defined purpose.
Fast-forward to the 2020s where COVID19 has created a world where lockdowns and working from home are commonplace and meetings are conducted over the internet via videoconference. The ability for teams to socially interact during their workday has been eroded and the ability of team members to bond and create a unified team identity, a ‘tribe’ has been lost. This has negative implications for the team’s ability to complete their assigned duties in the effective and coordinated way they would if working together in a physical group environment. This social interaction is not only important from a humanistic and mental health perspective, it’s the way informal mentoring, problem solving, and innovation occurs. When individual members of a team work in isolation they are less likely to draw upon the diverse thinking that happens when a group of individuals interacts as a team. Under the constraints that COVID19 forces upon us, it’s important that teams take the time to connect in informal online meetings where formal agendas and meeting outcomes are not important and group discussion is the foremost purpose of the meeting.
As the leader or manager of the team, it’s important that you understand that your role in these meetings might be, to not be in these meetings. That’s right, your presence in these meetings may inhibit the natural flow of the meeting and morph its purpose from team interaction to planning, coordinating, deciding, and executing new activities. The purpose of these team interactive meetings is to allow your team to interact and discuss the activities already set, not to leave the meeting with a new set of activities, tasks, and deadlines. In the current paradigm, leaders and managers need to view online meetings in the same way as face-to-face meetings but must also realise that not every meeting is a formal meeting. Leaders and managers need to be clear with themselves about which meetings are for planning and assigning tasks and which meetings are just team interactions. Leaders and managers must ensure they do not dominate these meetings or assign new tasks. If you think about normal face-to-face meetings where the leader or manager needs to plan and set up the meeting and manage the outcomes, and then compare this to sending a meeting invitation to the team, ‘winging it’ and leaving the meeting with staff now having 15 or 20 new tasks, you run the risk of overloading staff with too much work.
Leaders and managers need to realise that their staff may not be comfortable taking the initiative and set up their own meetings or even understand the need or value in doing so. It’s important that you have a discussion with your team about the value of working together whilst in isolation.
Here are 10 ways you can hold better online meetings that help you lead or manage your team without overloading them and allow your team to interact, problem solve, be mentored, and be innovative.
- Distinguish between formal meetings and team interactions
- Conduct formal meetings as if they are face-to-face meetings
- Restrict formal meetings and task allocation to only when they are needed
- Develop a task register to track task allocation and progress and to allow task cross-leveling
- Start each week with a weekly planning meeting to understand and coordinate the weekly workload
- Make most meetings ‘catch ups’, progress updates, or information sessions
- Control your urge to end each meeting by assigning new tasks to staff
- Have a discussion with your staff about the importance of their own online interactions, mentoring, and group discussions
- Set up a reoccurring end of week meeting to wrap up the week and socialise before the weekend
- Don’t forget to have regular one-on-one ‘meetings’ with your staff to discuss their challenges and check on their welfare
COVID19 has been disrupting the way we live and work for over a year and a half now and will continue to challenge us for a long time to come. Ensuring the way we interact online is positive and effective and does not compound the stress staff already endure is critical in maintaining effective teams and reducing mental health issues. Holding effective, purposeful meetings is not only a critical leadership and management function, it’s now often the only interaction we have with our staff so its worthwhile making them as beneficial as possible.
