Online board meetings are a valuable resource for effective decision-making. When they are not well run, they may result in boringness and low levels of engagement. To get your virtual meetings to be more engaging, follow these simple tips to improve the quality of your discussions and boost efficiency.
Discuss the agenda with attendees prior to the meeting, so that everyone has an understanding of what will be discussed. Consider asking your board members to attend at a distance without distractions. Ask participants to utilize the “raise hand function” of your virtual meeting software whenever they wish to speak, so that they don’t risk talking too much or losing the point.
Set a maximum duration for each topic to keep the discussion focused on important topics. This will allow everyone to participate and prevents discussions from going off-topic or distracting other attendees. Encourage your group to turn off their microphones when they’re not speaking to silence background noises such as kids, pets and coworkers.
Lastly, try to end the meeting at a reasonable time as this will show respect for the other board member’s time. It is also a good practice to release the minutes immediately after the meeting concludes. Additionally, it can help to streamline the process of recording and distributing minutes of meetings using your software for managing boards that has built-in capabilities like inline task delegation.
This will ensure that everyone is on the same page in regards to what happened at the meeting and what has to be done between meetings.