4 Tips for Effective Online Meetings

If you or some of your co-workers occasionally work from home, you might find that more and more of your meetings are taking place online, rather than here in meatspace. (I use here somewhat ironically, since you're obviously reading this online.)

Not surprisingly, there are different best practices for conducting online meetings than their real-world equivalents. Do you know how to make your online meetings work?

Use e-mail as wrappers for your meeting. Be sure to send out an agenda for the meeting, along with detailed information about how to connect to the conference. If attendees need to install anything to join, make sure you put that at the very top of the e-mail, so no one overlooks that and ends up missing half the meeting while they install a program. Afterwards, send out a summary with complete action items.

Start with a clean PC. Reboot before the scheduled start time to make sure any glitch that was lurking in the background doesn't pop up in the middle of the meeting and cause your system to crash, or make the audio and video to hiccup or fail.

Don't run any other software. Don't try to run any programs you don't actually need for the conference at the same time. Anything you do to tax your PC just compounds the changes for a glitch that derails the entire meeting.

Don't wait till the last minute. Get our conference up and running 15-20 minutes early, so attendees can connect on time and you can solve any connectivity issues before show time.

Photo by GViciano