My Findings on Effective Techniques for Hosting a Meeting in the New World

I work for a large SaaS firm. One of the tools that I’m responsible for keeping online is a virtual meeting and collaboration suite. As a result, a good many of my own meetings are virtual. The more immersed in the industry I get the more I find myself attending a meeting from a hotel room, a coffee shop, or some other generally non-traditional venue. As a result I’ve also started to realize the value in making the most of these virtual meetings. They were important enough that they couldn’t wait for me to get back to the office, so they’re important enough to do well. Bigger picture still is the value of supporting an employee diaspora. In the new era not all businesses can justify relocation and it seems to me that many employees don’t have the old values of a lifetime employer loyalty, but are more interested in finding work where they want to live. Meeting in the middle can be a significant benefit to all parties.

With the increased frequency of on-line meetings, and the cost to business of having all your resources stopping “productivity” to meet, it’s vital that the value of those meetings is not lost to the burdens of the new medium. I’ve tried to take note on a few rants and a few raves of things I find useful in any meeting, but especially things pertaining to the on-line forum.

• In this world market we all have different linguistic foundations. Whether it’s a regional accent or the local language is not your native tongue it really doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you need to learn to communicate effectively with all members of your team. This is even more challenging with a telecommunication tool separating you from your team; the quality of audio when it’s passing through 6 compression algorithms and 3000 miles of fiber cable means it’s pretty quickly going to lose the sharpness of a face to face. It’s the responsibility of all players on a team to make sure that they’re well understood. Speak slower, enunciate; make sure that you use full sentences, and don’t rely on slang or acronyms to highlight the truly vital message. I’m especially sensitive to this because I’m prone to speaking very quickly and letting thoughts run together.

• Master the use of the mute button. If you’re the organize, familiarize yourself with the interface so you can quickly mute/unmute attendees to help ensure that the flow of the meeting is maintained. If you’re not talking and don’t plan to; mute yourself. There are few things more disruptive to a meeting than the sounds of an attendee who’s neither contributing, nor even paying attention. Please don’t breath, drink, type, or background chat into the Mic.

• Speakerphone is a dangerous thing. Be mindful of cross talk and side conversations. If the people near the phone are having side conversations, it can make it totally impossible to understand the speaker.

• Understand your environment
  • Mics pick up very well, you might not know you’re on a busy street, but *I* do
  • Where is the Mic? Is it anywhere near your mouth? Is it too close to your mouth? It’s infuriating when I can only catch half of an epiphany form someone who was muffled by a mic placed somewhere below their chin.
  • How does your audio device respond. Is the mic close to the speakers? Creating a feedback loop is agonizing
• How much do you rely on visual queues? If you’re not using a web cam then you can’t share a hand gesture or white boards as easily with remote attendees.

• Find out what’s needed for you and your attendees to pay attention. If you’re not attending in person, you will tend to give it less than your full attention. If you’re able to engage the audience effectively, you’ll keep the value high

• People won’t walk in on a full meeting room but I often get interrupted when I’m on a call. Find out what you need to do to convey the value of your full attention; be it a sticky note on the door, or simply locking your office.

• Plan ahead to involve the audience, and how to work with them. Cross talk kills a meeting if you don’t know how to schedule each person’s chance to talk.

• If you provide prework for a group before a meeting make certain to give them time to do it.

Building a Foundation

After several iterations through various CMS solutions, I thought I’d found a solid base with Joomla!, but decided that it was likely overkill for this site.  From there I also installed drupal and MoveableType. They all seemed a bit heavy by comparison, and likely just way more than I needed.  Part of it was likely the classic mistake of looking for the solution before identifying the problem set.  Once I realized that this site is very likely going to be nothing more than a glorified blog it made my expectations much more clear.

I haven’t gotten a chance to put it fully to the test, but worst case I can work around any issues I think I might encounter; or better yet, maybe cook up a solution I could share with others.  In the mean time I hope that this gives me a chance to really start rolling with the idea.  I don’t do a lot of work in my day job that would be acceptable to share publicly per se, but I definitely have some inspirations for smaller projects and other items that I’d like to try to revive and share.

Be advised, warned even, I am likely going to take time here to also share some of my insights in the general world of the computer industry at large.  As my own path grows and changes I’m finding worlds opening in front of me, and I’d like to share some of my own experiences from the trenches.