VIDEO: Deal with Virtual Meeting Fatigue by having MORE meetings (seriously)
We have all had enough of virtual meetings that drain our energy and slowly suck out our souls. There are many ways to improve virtual meetings, but probably the easiest is to have more of them. I’m not joking.
Have more meetings, but make each meeting shorter and more to the point. Only have the people who need to deal with that specific meeting in the session. Keep them short, keep them focused, and keep them action-oriented (i.e. if it’s only about sharing information, record a video and send an email).
Shorter, sharper meetings more often, with breaks in between will dramatically improve your virtual meeting fatigue.
Video Transcript
We’re all facing virtual meeting fatigue, aren’t we? As you stare at that little green dot and you see the 40 faces staring back at you from your team, it can be exhausting. We need to learn better ways of engaging with virtual meetings in 2021. One of the cleverest things that you can do is have more meetings, wait for it, more meetings, each one of them much shorter than before. A lot of people think that the best way to get our team working is to have these long extended meetings
And maybe you’re trying to have the same type of meetings that you would have had as a team when you were face to face in the office. That just doesn’t work in a virtual environment, have a lot more shorter meetings, preferably get your meetings down to 15 or 20 minutes, chunking them up, inviting only the people that really need to be at each part of the meeting, releasing other people and shifting the energy and dynamics completely each time.
Of course, all the normal meeting etiquette still apply in terms of making sure that everybody knows what the meeting is for, making sure that everybody does all the pre work that they need in order to make the meeting effective, making sure that you keep good timing and that you focus your meeting on outputs and action. If you start a meeting and you’re not sure what the action output is going to be, then rather just send an email, because what you’re probably doing is giving information you don’t really want to wear people out on the screen.
So more meetings, but much shorter in time. Each one of them, only the people who need to be there focused on a particular topic each time. Seriously, it’ll make all the difference in the world to you.
Author of today’s tip, Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognized futurist, specializing in the future of work. He helps organizations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.