How To Run A Successful Virtual Meeting

How to Run a Successful Virtual Meeting

Increase Engagement from the Unofficial Start to the Purposeful End of Your Session

This chapter is based on my 50th video tutorial focusing on how to make virtual engagement and connection easy for leaders and educators. By the end, you should have a whole mountain of strategies for running a successful virtual meeting. 

Recently, I led a very fun virtual kickoff connection session at the Global Youth Entrepreneurship Festival. What I want to do is walk you through what that virtual conference session was like. That way you can ruthlessly reinterpret and steal all the tips, ideas and strategies that made this session so successful. We’re going to focus particularly on back-end facilitator strategies. These are the strategies you as a leader or educator will want to keep in mind to run a successful virtual meeting. 

In the connection lab at the Global Youth Entrepreneurship Festival, I wanted to first understand what the group knew really well. I explored this during our unofficial start to the session. The unofficial start is one of my favorite ideas or concepts. As I discuss in other chapters, this begins a few minutes before the scheduled start of a meeting, and is a way to engage people before a meeting officially gets underway. It continues a little bit after the official start to respect people who might show up late because of Wi-Fi issues, hungry kids, barking dogs or other remote obstacles. 

The unofficial start is a brilliant way to kick off a session, and the easiest way to execute it is by asking a question. Check out the first chapter of the book for even more depth on the idea. I picked up the concept from a brilliant facilitator in Melbourne named Mark Collard. He’s the founder of playmeo.com, the world’s largest database of interactive, collaborative group activities. 

When I’m working with a group, my perspective is always that the group is collectively far smarter than I am. On this call, there were 150-plus people from all around the world. We had a lot of brain power at our disposal—about 450 pounds of brain actually, considering each adult brain weighs around three pounds. To access everyone’s expertise, I love starting off with a question like: What is something you know really well? In this case, I added a little to the question: What is something you know really well that’s not related to your work? 

There’s value in seeing how people answer questions like this. Your team members can share their answers in chat and connect with each other as they read the responses.

If you’ve read any other chapters or watched my YouTube tutorials, you know that I’m a huge believer in the power of having participants connect before jumping right into a meeting’s agenda. I would argue that this is even more important virtually because of how much organic connection we lose when we don’t meet in person. We don’t get the informal time before a meeting begins. That’s why we have to be intentional about creating that connection before content.

You can use virtual backgrounds and analog visuals to connect with your group. For the Virtual Connection Lab, I put on my son Otto’s hat, and I encouraged others to wear my 1-year-old’s hat as well. I put up a virtual background with a photo of Otto, wearing the exact same hat I had on—although, with his giant, toothless smile, he won a lot more points with the group than I did. 

The photo of Otto that I shared was taken just a couple seconds after I showed him a plastic potato. It was from this little kitchen set we had. That giant, toothless grin was sparked by…a plastic potato! I told the group I wanted them to wear his hat so they could experience the kind of joy and love he had for learning. 

The second hat I invited people to wear was a pirate hat, using a Zoom filter. This went with another theme: my encouragement to the group to “ruthlessly steal and reinterpret everything I said and did, and apply it to your own context.” I find that phrase to be really useful, since each person knows best what their needs are for their work.

An Aside on Group Size

Make sure to keep group size in mind when you do a breakout at your next meeting. I used to work with a creativity and innovation researcher at Penn State University, Dr. Sam Hunter. One of the things that he found was that the ideal group size for a creative brainstorming conversation is between four and seven people. 

For breakouts on any digital platform, if you have three people or less, this could be a challenge. Not only is there not enough diversity of perspectives, but somebody’s mic might be broken. Then you’re down to a pair. If two people are having tech issues, forget it. You’ll be down to one person meditating by themselves, frustrated that they can’t talk to everybody else. Having four to seven people is ideal for breakouts, and I usually stick to four or five people per small group.

3 Quick Tips for Sparking Virtual Connection

Now, let’s just do a lightning round. Here are three quick tips for sparking virtual connection in your organization.

1. Share highlights with each other.

There’s so much value in sharing what is working well. That’s especially true if there’s a lot of change going on in the organization.

2. Use “teleporting” as a virtual concept.

I love talking about this idea. When we click a video conference link, we are teleporting to a completely new world. We’re transported virtually along with everyone else who’s meeting, and there’s something really cool about having the ability to do that. 

However, I would argue that teleporting actually takes a little bit longer than clicking a link to join a meeting. I’ve estimated that true teleportation takes about 60 seconds. We need a moment to connect with others and be present. To accommodate that, I’d suggest starting your meetings with 60 seconds of total silence like Will Wise and I usually do.

We shut off our videos, and we’re just present. We don’t do anything. We don’t check our email. We don’t swipe some feed. We do absolutely nothing, and let our minds wander. 

It’s amazing how, in that minute, your brain catches up to your body. Your body may have teleported virtually to another meeting, but your brain is still in the last meeting. It’s still in the argument that you just had with your daughter. It’s still at lunch or whatever was going on before the meeting.

This quick minute of quiet can be incredibly valuable, and it can greatly increase meeting productivity.

3. Don’t let efficiency get in the way of connection.

It’s easy for us to jump right into the content when we start a virtual meeting. If we’re in person, that might still happen. But oftentimes we’d have some side chat in the hallway on the way to the meeting. Virtually, you don’t have that kind of organic connection.

When meeting remotely, it’s not only valuable but necessary to carve out time for your team to connect at the beginning of most meetings. If you’re an intact team that’s worked together for 15 years, that connection before content might look a little bit different. It might be more task-focused than it would be for a new group that’s just meeting for the very first time.

Refer to the first chapter in this book for a deep dive on connection before content, as it’s the third essential ingredient we recommend for high-engagement gatherings. 

Changing Your Group’s State of Mind

State of mind matters more than script or your agenda for a meeting. This is true for in-person meetings, too, but virtually it matters way more. It’s one of the reasons why I take 60 seconds of silence, and why I emphasize connection before content. Both create a shared experience for everyone and a chance to shift your state. 

In any group larger than six people, I like to start with at least one breakout. It generally shifts the focus from “me” to “we.” And just about every virtual meeting starts out with a bunch of people thinking about themselves. Your team members may be thinking about how much they have to get done, what’s happening around them or how stressed they are. A quick conversation with others pulls people out of the “me me me” wormhole a bit. 

No matter what my agenda is, when people change their state, they completely shift the outcome of the meeting. 

Yes, Body Language Still Matters in Virtual Meetings

When we meet virtually, we miss many nonverbal cues and body language we rely on in person. Still, if you’re presenting or running a virtual meeting, you should be aware of your own body language. Try to be a little more physically dynamic in the way you express yourself. Get your hands up into the virtual window. Also, invite the group to shift their body language.

Recently, in a workshop with the University of California, I experimented with something new. I told the group that one of the best leadership tips I’ve ever received was to try to share my own failures and other people’s successes. I asked others to think about that idea, and visually express how that approach made them feel. It could be an uncomfortable facial expression communicating, “I don’t know if I could do that.” Or they might smile while giving it the thumbs up.

I simply invited people to change their nonverbals and it had an amazing effect. In gallery view, we could see the dramatic shift from the standard Zoom face—that vacant look we all seem to have when we passively meet online—to something animated. Everyone was expressing their emotion. So much was communicated without saying a word.

It’s a nuanced idea, but a pretty cool way to help people really teleport through the screen.

Share Highlights, Lowlights and Insights

When you’re sharing with the group, there’s magic in covering highlights, lowlights and insights. It’s cool if you just share one. There’s so much value in talking about what is working well, for example. 

But if somebody’s really struggling at that moment, it’s tough to just put on a smile and share a highlight. Opening it up for the group to share not only highlights, but lowlights and insights can have a big impact. It acknowledges the full spectrum of life, so people feel more comfortable sharing what they’re experiencing.

End the Party While It’s Still Fun

Keep things moving. Don’t wait until there’s a lull. When everybody comes back from breakouts, I love to encourage people to quickly share—or “popcorn out”—what they learn.

Oftentimes that sparks a ton of fast-paced engagement. Five to ten people might share highlights and snippets in two to three minutes. But I don’t want to go until it’s crickets and people are just waiting awkwardly for the next person to share. With microwave popcorn, once it begins popping it goes fast. If you wait until there are long pauses between pops, your popcorn will burn. That’s why facilitator 101 is to always end the party while it’s still fun. Don’t let the popcorn burn.

End the Meeting Intentionally

Just as you don’t want to let a party go on too long, you want to plan ahead for the end of a meeting. Often, we just cut things off when we run out of time.

But we need to meet with purpose and intention from the beginning of the meeting through the end.

Group Anthem Closing Exercise

One of my all-time favorite closing exercises comes from a wonderful facilitator in New Hampshire named Nate Folan. The exercise is called Group Anthem. The idea is to have group members check out at the end of a meeting using a statement that begins with one of three phrases: “I am, I believe or I will.” This encourages people to share something meaningful. 

No matter your group size, you can invite people to popcorn out their responses to this prompt. It’s a really uplifting way to end a meeting. 

Other Intentional Ways to Close a Meeting

Whether you do this or something else, you want to close the meeting in a purposeful way. What you don’t want to do is frantically try to schedule the next meeting at the last minute. Don’t try to squeeze in just a little more even when people are already late for their next meeting.

I often set a timer on my Google Home to go off five to ten minutes before the end of a meeting or session. This is to remind me and the rest of the group that it’s time to pause and end the meeting intentionally. 

This could be as simple as coming up with the next action steps and sharing those in chat to make sure that’s clear. You could also have participants jot down action steps on sticky notes and hold those up to the camera.

3 Really Practical Zoom Tips

• Use chat as a way to engage introverts.

Introverts may not want to unmute. But they may be perfectly happy typing something really brilliant in the chat. Inviting people to tune in that way can be a game-changer for the entire group, not just introverts.

• Direct the energy of multitasking toward connection.

I often invite people on Zoom to talk while I’m talking. If we met in person, people probably wouldn’t do this. It might seem impolite. They would probably just let me talk, and they wouldn’t have any side conversations. In Zoom or any other platform, however, people can talk while I’m talking without it being too disruptive.

I give meeting participants instructions on how to multitask. For example, I might say I’m going to share three minutes of content, and invite people to share live what I’m saying in the chat. If anybody missed what I said, they can catch it in the chat. It’s multitasking, but it’s helping people to connect with each other and ideas.

• Use visual cues and breaks to hold participants’ attention.

In videos, there are lots of attention resets. The same goes for the best books and movies. But when we hop on a virtual meeting, it’s just one long, continuous thread that might last an hour or two.

Understanding this, I try to engage people by changing things up about every seven to 15 minutes. That might involve inviting people to contribute or shut off their video and go stretch. I might also show the group something visual and ask them to read or digest it and share their thoughts through chat. 

To run a successful virtual meeting, you want to invite contribution rather than just consumption. When we meet, we want to engage and connect. We want to pay attention to our state of mind, not just the agenda. We want to remember our purpose and intention, from the unofficial start to when we end our virtual time together.