With corona and remote work hype, we decided to share how we host our team meetings online. Remote work is nothing new for CorpoHub, we’ve been practicing since our beginnings – but we have for sure learned a few things about it in the last 3 years.
Guidelines for our online meetings
- Arrive 2 minutes before, check your video & sound quality
- Always use headphones – even if you are home alone in a quiet place, headphones reduce other noises significantly
- By default, mute yourself and unmute yourself only when you speak
- Turn your video ON – we like to see each other when having meetings, to increase engagement online as well
- Whenever possible, facilitator sends the agenda in advance so that we are efficient and focused
What we’ve learned so far
- Online meetings can’t be as long as live meetings: make a break after 45 minutes of screen time and keep your meetings maximum 90 minutes long
- Sharing facilitator’s screen with the agenda helps to maintain focus
- We sometimes experience that we have 3 people personally present in the office and 4 people online: in this case, only 1 person connects on a call from the office, we sit behind the same computer and use Jabra speaker to intensify the sound. We tried all connecting separately and there is too much noise and echo if we are all in the same space. In an ideal situation, each person would be in a separate quiet place
- It sometimes still happens that someone’s sound is off or internet connection is quite bad – with Zoom, we like the option to record the meeting
- A dedicated facilitator is even more important than in live meetings – someone that gives space to someone to speak (we wave our hand or write in chat when we have a comment)
- Everyone has to be fully present at the meeting, just like in-person – half presence with answering emails during the meeting is not an option
Tools we use for hosting online meetings
We’ve been using Google Hangouts and Zoom.
Google Hangouts:
- Pros: free tool (no limit on the number of participants, length of the meeting, etc.)
Zoom:
- Pros: Works really well and allows more complex meeting structures (split people into several breakout groups during a meeting, create a questionnaire, etc.)
- Cons: not a free tool (it is free only for 40 minutes for meetings with several people, host license for unlimited time costs 13 EUR / month) and the first time you have to download the program (it is easy and takes 2 minutes, but some people might still have an issue).
What works for you, how do you host your online team meetings? If you are struggling with the idea of an online meeting, dive deeper into Benefits of remote work blog. The whole world is doing it and so can you.
