How to keep a remote team interested in meetings

Posted by Anna on May 28th, 2019

With the move in modern office thinking towards more people working from home and teams being spread out over several locations, the remote team meeting has become an essential part of the workflow; and in some cases, the only real way of communicating with your team. When your team is spread out how do you know if they are listening when you conduct a remote meeting? In short, you don’t really, but there are certainly some things that you can do to keep your team interested during your meetings which will ensure that you get the most from your team members. 

Parallel project training believe that the following tips can really help you to make your remote team meetings interesting for your employees.

Great Online meeting tools

Before you even begin your meetings, you want to ensure that you have the best online meetings tools available; you need to consider connection, collaboration and feedback. These are essentials that will help make your team members feel more engaged with the meeting's process and help to maintain the productivity of your meetings. 

Know your tools

Technical difficulties occur, but when they take place during a remote meeting  suddenly loosing your link to a meeting or being able to hear but not give your own feedback on issues can be incredibly frustrating and there is often no way that you can alert anyone to your issues. When this happens, it can seem like people are not listening when they are simply not able to take part. Ensure that you know all the tools you are working with so that hopefully there are less issues. 

Dial or login to the tools you plan to use a few minutes before a meeting to ensure that there are no glitches and if there are make sure that you have a plan B in place that you can use instead. 

Make an agenda and share it

Consider all the points that you want to raise at your meeting and ensure that you share it well in advance so that everyone has a good chance to look it over and bring some ideas they have prepared to the meeting. If you need to call a meeting at short notice, do make sure that you let everyone know what it is about so that they have some idea before they log in.  

Invite the right people

There really is nothing worse than setting time aside in your often-busy schedule to log into a remote meeting to then sit there wondering why you have been invited.

If you want to keep the people in your meeting interested, ensure that you know exactly who needs to be there and who doesn’t. This is where your project management skills come into their own. And in case some of the people you have invited have never spoken to each other before don’t forget to invite them. Speaking to strangers in a face-to-face meeting can be difficult - speaking to strangers remotely can be completely different.