How To Host An Inclusive Virtual Meeting, According To Hubspot’s Remote Work Manager

The outdoor team building challenge might be completing a certain workout every day or even achieving a specified fitness goal. As you all complete the challenges independently, you’ll know you’re not truly alone. Let your employees become brewers for the day in the comfort of their own home.

Use the tips below to get the most out of your one-to-one meetings. Your agenda should include key talking points, what everyone is responsible for preparing, and links to relevant documents. Make sure that the agenda is sent to everyone beforehand. Hopefully, participants will read it and then come to the meeting with relevant ideas.

You can also find a way of aligning your company values with employees’ values by selecting new employees based on your values as a company. The challenges discussed above do not provide an exhaustive list. However, they show that the manager of remote employees needs to be clear about the challenges they may meet. They also show that when employees move to remote work, it cannot just be business as usual. The differences between remote work and typical work imply that managers may need to start looking at how to hire employees effectively and how they onboard remote workers.

Step 3: Plan For Remote Team Meetings

Toggl helps overcome the productivity-draining impacts of having remote or disparate teams. Efficiently manage processes while also giving remote workers the flexibility they crave. They take care of all of the online team game design, logistics and planning and even provide the most fun and professional facilitators we have encountered. Developed by expert online team game designers and a team with 5+ years developing unique virtual group events.

Make sure that minutes and other relevant documents are properly filed away while they’re all in front of you. Meeting notes, jotting down questions that come up, and with timekeeping, to ensure that the meeting doesn’t overrun. A teleconference is typically an audio-only meeting, where remote teammates dial in and join a conference call. These are best suited to small group meetings where everyone is participating in the discussion. A virtual meeting is simply a meeting that happens online rather than physically with all the participants in the same meeting room.

For help with this, check out 5 ways to give effective feedback. This calls on you to be deliberate when it comes to providing feedback and provide it often and clearly. Guard against just telling team members what the goal is without providing them with an idea of how that task is to be accomplished. To make things easier for yourself, let the employees be responsible for creating the standard operating procedures for their roles.

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The Longest Word is a quick virtual activity you can do on video chats and conference calls. To play, arrange your people into teams and challenge them to spell a very long word. The Price is Almost Right is a digital team building activity where the host of a virtual conference call holds up household objects and other attendees shout out prices. The first person to guess within five cents of the actual retail price without going over gets 1 point for their team. If you guess over the retail price then you are out for that round, but your team members may continue.

If the team isn’t used to speaking up, try changing your approach. For example, encourage people to use the chat function to ask questions or rotate who leads the meeting. Use humor and informality to get people talking, but just like in-person meetings, don’t force anyone to speak or put anyone on the spot. Fostering psychological safety in the workplace is a great way to build trust.

However, video meetings can result in more technical issues and can cause more stress to participants compared to audio-only meetings. The agenda should assign roles like facilitator, timekeeper, and note-taker, as well as outline the topics that will be discussed, and the time needed to discuss them. Make sure to share the agenda with participants at least a day ahead of the meeting so that they can prepare. The job should require each person to contribute in real time and interact with the meeting and other team members. Not having a clear purpose for each attendee is the quickest way to kill team engagement. All the points we’ve covered—from scheduling to setting an agenda to practicing proper etiquette—are important in getting a digital meeting up and running.

Try a retrospective software like Neatro, or a simple virtual whiteboard. Not only is it a courteous gesture, but if you have people working in different time zones, it can help them know what they have to attend live and what they can catch up on later. A large percentage of the business world has gone fully or partially remote. And when your organization is scattered across a variety of locations, that means that when you need to schedule a meeting, it’s going to need to be virtual. Alignment Get your people in the same mindset with OKR goals and 1-on-1 meetings. Check in throughout the meeting to make sure you’re meeting the objectives and accomplishing what you set out to do.

To streamline communications, training should detail which tools will be used for what purposes. This will prevent the same information being sent via multiple mediums and keep work from falling through the cracks. Trending_up The Ultimate One-on-one Meeting We’ve surveyed over 500 people to generate a data-driven template to build a high performing team. Groups Team Meeting Templates Created by best in-class managers, for you to run your team like a pro.

Remote Team Meeting Agenda

As more teams include remote members, it’s critical that distributed teams are able to include participants from diverse locations into the retrospective process. Running effective retrospective meetings with remote attendees requires an understanding of how to overcome common retrospective issues and facilitate a positive outcome for all stakeholders. Research has proven that remote workers tend to be more productive, despite the lure of Netflix and laundry. But a key to productivity for any team, remote or co-located, is a manager that can properly protect and prioritize the work that comes to the team.

In order to have insightful discussions, the meeting participants must already have done some deep thinking around the meeting topics. Deep thinking is primarily a solo activity and should be done asynchronously, before the meeting. This allows the participants to bring well-thought-out ideas to the discussion and then discuss them thoroughly.

You can use it for presentations and virtual events, to collaborate on projects (e.g., through screen sharing and whiteboards), and to conduct training sessions. (Or just curious about what to look for?) Grab the free checklist to help you choose the right one for your team or business. This activity is excellent for virtual team bonding with remote workers. War of the Wizards is a simple storytelling game designed as a team building activity for conference calls. The background of this game is that a group of wizards have been at war since ages past, and at this point nobody quite remembers why.

In an agile retrospective with distributed teams, it’s critical that the scrum master or meeting facilitator works to make sure everyone’s included and actively engaged during the meeting. When half or more of your team is calling in through video, it’s easy to let the quieter team members contribute https://globalcloudteam.com/ too little, while the more outgoing voices come to dominate the conversation. This can lead to the wrong issues being focused on, problems being missed entirely, and the wrong solutions being prioritized. Retrospectives are a core component of agile operations, one of the five agile ceremonies.

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Objectives Stay on top of your team’s goals by clearly recording, defining, and tracking the progress of your OKRs in Fellow’s Objectives tool. ProductFeatures OverviewSee how high-performing teams are using Fellow to level-up their meeting and productivity habits. How can we prioritize our personal lives while excelling in our careers? Here’s where we explore the emerging conversations about Work 2.0. When my team did this, each person shared top three strengths, lowest-ranked strength, and something in our results that surprised us.

• Start with this Trello template for organizing incoming requests from cross-functional teams.
• Every event is customized based on your company culture.
• Try a retrospective software like Neatro, or a simple virtual whiteboard.
• Ask for feedback from your team on what’s working in the context of your meetings and what isn’t.
• Hackathons or productive work sessions provide the time your team needs to do a huge project in a collaborative atmosphere.
• While it is true that this section of the meeting shouldn’t take longer than 5-10 minutes, it’s important to include it in your weekly team meeting agenda.

Assign tasks with deadlines, collaborate with team members in real-time, track project progress, and stay in ultimate control of everything. When remote workers feel their excitement slipping, a virtual team building activity can help them rekindle their passion by exposing them to excited co-workers. These are some of our favorite virtual team building ideas (that aren’t boring!). But use your imagination too—just like with improv games, there are endless possibilities to invent and switch up these team building games and activities. Use this section of your remote team meeting to share company announcements, changes, and industry trends that everyone on the team should be aware of. While it is true that this section of the meeting shouldn’t take longer than 5-10 minutes, it’s important to include it in your weekly team meeting agenda.

Conduct A Meeting Audit

Use pre-designed templates to host brainstorms and meetings, collect votes, and more. Priority Experiences offers a comprehensive and unique set of virtual team building activities built around their collection of shippable experiences. A guide leads the virtual team building event, sharing fun trivia about the history of the ice cream float and keeping everyone hyped up with a playlist of popular music to shake along to.

Management Checklist For Designing & Supporting Virtual Teams

But what are some examples of conferencing technology? And what meeting management tools do you have available to you? Remote work can be difficult, and remote work during a pandemic How to run a successful remote meeting has its own set of needs. Ensure that your meetings are inclusive, effective, and well-run to reduce frustration and build team camaraderie during challenging times.

It also includes the simple problem of meeting organizers not actually including Zoom, Hangouts, or other Zoom alternative links in the invitation. If you can accept that the future of work will be partially remote, then you can prepare your business for the new challenges it will face. Among those challenges is the frustration caused by hybrid meetings. Simple tips to run an effective stand-up meeting with a remote team.

Virtual Coffee Breaks

Remote workers may choose different schedules for how they work from home—not to slack, but to fit when they’re most productive during the day. You need to know how to maintain employee engagement—no matter where they’re located. There are a few primary issues you may want to consider right at the start. Teams that spread across multiple time zones can easily fall into the trap of working long hours to accommodate one another’s schedules.

Virtual Team Building Bingo

Background noise is another common issue with virtual meetings. When this happens, the speaker screen changes and quickly becomes very distracting. Employees may not feel comfortable chiming in or asking questions during your meeting for fear of interrupting or talking over someone else. So after each talking point, leave space for team members to ask questions, give their input, or share ideas. The idea is to give your team a head’s up so they can prepare accordingly .

Our research has found that means you should aim for 5-9 members. Ensure that successes are visible and celebrated to help build team commitment and keep up morale. Organizations can help by providing training in technologies and tools. The longest-running leadership development program of its kind in the world, available in person or live online. Our research suggests steps to ensure your diversity and inclusion statement is authentic and aligned with actions that lead to sustained progress.

Chances are, everyone will walk away with a deeper sense of belonging and an understanding of the unique value they bring to the team. Choose a topic related to your work that you want to learn more about – anything from SQL to leadership styles to trends in recruiting practices – and find colleagues who share that interest. Each month, gather over video conference to discuss a book or article, or have someone in the group give a short presentation. The best part about learning circles is that you can extend them beyond your immediate team and connect with people across the entire organization. It’s easy to get so caught up in executing on your work that you forget to expand your horizons, especially when working from home with no office banter happening around you.

One way of encouraging employees to know each other and feel less socially isolated is for you, as the manager, to find opportunities for collaboration. Instead of having one employee work on one project on their own, determine ways to make remote workers accomplish projects in small teams. To ensure that everyone is clear about how communication will happen within the remote team, consider creating a communication strategy. This will determine the number of meetings you will have with your team. In the strategy, look at such issues as limiting noises in the background, decorum around what team members can have in their backgrounds during video calls, and the use of meeting templates.