10 Tips for Good Online Meeting Hygiene

If you can do it in a room, you can do it online. Here are some best practices for you and your participants to make virtual meetings flow easier.

1.  Show up 5 minutes early. That goes for everybody. Put this in your invites. The time is to make sure the audio-video is working, to install any surprise updates, to resolve tech challenges, to give participants a pause to orient themselves to the meeting about to happen, and to close out any loose ends that might prevent them from being present and engaged. And most importantly, it’s to test the virtual meeting platform.

2. Look at the camera lens. Even if you’re looking at shared content, if you’re not looking at someone in the eyes, you’re sending the subconscious message that you’re not listening. If you have two screens (like a laptop with a camera and a desktop monitor where you’re viewing content), this problem is compounded. If you can’t look at the camera lens, turn off the camera. Hint: I have googly eyes on my webcam to remind me of this. 

3. Use Chat for comments and questions. Interruptions are especially disruptive during virtual meetings. Use the Chat feature in your web conference software if you have something to say that won’t wait. That allows the presenter to address questions and comments during pauses that don’t disrupt the meeting's flow.

4. Practice the one-sip pause. This is something I learned from the godmother of virtual facilitation, @RachelSmith. After someone is done speaking, wait a beat before speaking yourself, about as long as it takes to take a sip of a warm beverage. This allows for lags in internet communications, which are longer than phone lags, to pass. The resulting pace is slower and more deliberate typical, energetic, in-the-room discussions. It takes some getting used to, but it creates meetings that have a calmer, measured atmosphere.

5. Stay on mute. Another piece of wisdom from @Rachel Smith: if you have any noise in your background, you will be the last person to hear it. As a rule, stay on mute unless you are speaking. And, bonus! The time it takes to unmute yourself is about as long as the one-sip pause.

6. Draw the line between presentation and participation. “Our people hate virtual meetings.” Actually, what they hate about virtual meetings is the same thing they hate about in-person meetings: being talked at and a slow death by PowerPoint. There’s a difference between presenting, which is sharing a screen, and participating, which is collaborating together in a way that participants can type, talk, or otherwise share their ideas as equals. If you must present, keep it short: 15 minutes or less. If you need to get more information across than that, don’t do it with PowerPoint. Put your content in a Word document or PDF and let people read it in their own time in advance of the meeting. Save the meeting time for discussion and participation.

7. Ask for engagement. That time when participants are joining a meeting is useful, even if not everyone is there yet. Use that time to have a written request for engagement on screen as the first thing your participants see. The request can be something like this: “Over the next 45 minutes, we’re going to discuss key actions that are important for our organization. I’m inviting you to be fully present and engaged.  Your attention and informed decision making is crucial to our success. Please be mindful of where you are focusing your attention during our time together so that we can be as effective as possible.”

8. Remove distractions. Another message participants might see as they join the meeting is an invitation to remove distractions. It might read, “Please remove anything that might distract you from being fully present and engaged over the next 45 minutes. This could mean closing a door, hanging a Do Not Disturb sign, turning off a phone, closing other windows, or shutting down email. Before we begin, take a moment and remove a distraction.” 

9. Body language can be deceiving. Most of our communication is nonverbal, transmitted via body language and facial expressions. If you’re not looking at me in the eyes, then you’re sending me the message that you’re not paying attention. And that can be a trigger for me, without me even knowing why. The problem is, your webcam and your screen are in two different places. You could be looking dead at me or what I’m showing you, and yet I’d still perceive you as looking away. This problem is exacerbated if you use two screens. Watch your reactions if you think people aren’t paying attention.

10. Use breakouts. Conversations between pairs or small groups to shift the energy away from the passive-receive mode that occurs in large groups are just as important in the virtual space as they are in the physical space. And it’s easy to quickly get people into small groups with many virtual meeting platforms. Here’s how to do it in Zoom.