Pilar Orti - Online Meetings that Matter. a Guide for Managers of Remote Teams

Communicating with team members through technology is no longer the domain of employees working in global teams in multinationals. As people choose to work from home (or as companies decide that their employees should work from home) or from locations that dont involve a commute, we are spending less and less time in the same physical space as our team members. Gathering talent from across the country or the world is possible, even for those businesses with limited budgets.

As we get used to interacting with our colleagues through technology, it is only natural that we should have more conversations online, and begin to hold meetings in the online space. In one way, online meetings are no different to in the flesh meetings those we are used to holding in the office with our colocated colleagues, and which have gained a bad reputation in the workplace. But in another way, online meetings are events of a different kind.

I hadnt realised the importance of online meetings in creating a more flexible work set-up until I talked to my friend, Sue. Sue is in charge of operations and facilities at a traditional organisation that recently moved into a new building. Given that they needed to move to new premises, they had to change how they were working as an organisation. The new building was designed as an activity-based workplace, giving people the option to work from wherever in the building suited their task or activity best: quiet areas for high-focus tasks, collaborative areas for interactive tasks, and so on. In addition, the company started to enable people to work from home.

When I mentioned to Sue that I was writing a book about online meetings, she said: We most definitely need that! The other day I was talking to one of our directors, whose biggest worry was that if people started to work from home, they could never find the time to meet as a team.

By moving team meetings online, we can get rid of many concerns and objections to going remote, such as Well never be able to arrange a meeting. This concern, together with loss of team spirit, makes many managers and business leaders nervous about freeing people up to work from wherever they work best. Its a concern which can be easily addressed.

While online meetings can work, it is hard to pretend that attending them is the same as meeting with people in a room. Even when we are on video and can see all of our team members, we interact in two dimensions, not three. Our world suddenly becomes flat. We see our colleagues in front of us on a flat screen, sitting symmetrically next to each other in little boxes. Our necks become stiff, as there is no need to move our heads from side-to-side to look at the different people around us. We become talking heads rather than people.

Some ways in which we build rapport with each other, such as sharing a quick glance, are lost. Sometimes they are replaced by typing in the chat box, or commenting on what someone is saying by making some larger-than-life gesture. And if we are unlucky, one of us will have a bad internet connection that creates unnatural gaps in our conversation.

Yes, online meetings take some getting used to, but their essence is no different to that of those we hold when we are in the same space.

We meet to:

• discuss our work
• share information
• support one another
• challenge one another
• generate ideas
• troubleshoot
• speed up a decision-making process
• review our progress
• learn.

On top of all that, in the online world meetings take on another, important function: socialising.

In the colocated workplace (that is, where we share the same location), socialising takes place spontaneously in corridors, during coffee breaks, at lunchtime, when you walk past someones desk on the way to the toilet, or outside on the way home from the office. This means that when we take time out from our day-to-day tasks to attend a meeting, we want to get down to business straightaway.

In the online world, although there are ways of nurturing these social interactions, meetings can be key to increasing connection and decreasing isolation, especially when team members are working from home. In virtual teams where employees are located in different company offices, it is easy for people to feel less connected to their virtual colleagues than to those they see in the office every day.

Even though meetings often have a terrible reputation in the workplace, this is why they are worth transferring to the online space as long as we run them mindfully, with a purpose in mind, and periodically review the value they bring to our team.

There is also a highly practical aspect to getting used to meeting online: we become comfortable using technology and having conversations with others in this way. We might take this for granted when everything is going well in our team, when we are completely in sync with each other and when no external forces disrupt our work. But when things go wrong, there are signs of miscommunication or we fall behind with our work, it is valuable to know that we can easily hop on a video call to:

• Talk to each other
• Make sure we arent misinterpreting those messages posted in the middle of the night
• Make sure that miscommunication around tasks doesnt result in breakdown of relationships.

Nowadays, it isnt uncommon for the first interview with a new candidate, potential client or current customer to take place over video. What better way to be always prepared for high-stakes meetings than to be at ease with talking online with your team members?

Of course, many global corporations have been running virtual meetings since the 1990s. These meetings mostly took the form of audio conferences, and many still do. The transition within those companies to video has been slow, and frequently included the use of high-end technology such as Cisco Telepresence or other screens to give a feeling of being surrounded by others, instead of the more affordable and accessible combination of headsetwebcam, and free or low-cost meeting platforms, that small businesses and start-ups have embraced.

The arguments for meeting in-person such as the fact that body language is important in communication, or that its easier to create a healthy meeting rhythm if we see each other does not always hold when we consider that some of our non-verbal communication comes from tone of voice, and that video can help us pick up a great deal of visual information.

Even though I was tempted to focus the book on video meetings and address audio meetings only in a dedicated chapter, the above facts (together with feedback from readers) pushed me to cover both audio-only and video calls. Personal preferences and poor access to stable technology also mean that the audio-only experience still has a place in a book talking about team online meetings.

Having said that, I still believe that as an increasing number of organisations talk about having a mobile workforce, and as more telecommunication companies make widely available fibre broadband a priority, video meetings will become more common. The main barrier to great video meetings is not a bad hair day, or people wanting to hide that they are carrying out email correspondence as you talk; its an unstable internet connection a hurdle we might overcome soon.