Hi welcome to tips for virtual meetings, a conversation between Seth Silver and
Tim Franz I'm Seth Silver I'm an organizational
consultant and also a part-time graduate level professor.
Tim tell us a little bit about yourself and your connection to teams.
Well I'm Tim Franz I've been working in the department of psychology at
St. John Fisher. This is my 21st year so I've been there a while
and I've got a few things coming up about teamwork, I have a
past textbook that's going into its second edition and of course
with you Seth I have a book on the workplace covenant
that should be done within the next few months. That's on
improving leadership and teamwork. And then third I have a book on
Amazon that just went live this week on making team projects better with
Lauren Vicker. So thanks for the interview and
let me know what questions you have for me.
That's great, that's great.
We're talking about virtual meetings. Tell us about the best Zoom
meeting that you've attended. What were some of the
characteristics of a great Zoom meeting? Well you know I've got a slide here that
explains that. Really I think the best meetings have
three things: they are run well, meaning the person who
called the meeting or the person who's facilitating the meeting (which may be
different) that person runs the meeting well.
They're engaging, meaning I'm there for a reason and I
want to be a part of the meeting. And then finally, they're effective which
means I'm getting something done and the group I'm with is getting
something done during the meeting. Great. It occurs to me these
characteristics would apply to any meeting, an in-person meeting
obviously as well as a Zoom meeting. So tell me how Zoom meetings and in-person
meetings are the same and also different.
Well, let me talk about how they're the same first. And really a zoom meeting is a meeting and
we have to think of all of our good meeting techniques and
I created a nice little top 10 list here for us to see about
how to run a meeting and so let me explain some of the ideas
about meetings. And four of the things on this list
are really about running a meeting in general
and number one is to assign pre-work if you're going to run a meeting well.
People should know what's coming and have read and prepared for that
meeting. Number two is to get that agenda at
least 48 hours ahead of time, so that people know what's coming and know what
they're there for in that meeting. Number three is to have a facilitator
who's skilled in running meetings, a facilitator who can keep the meeting
focused, avoid side conversations and keep it on task
and moving forward the whole time. And number four any meeting should
have somebody who's taking minutes and those minutes
should talk about what people wanted to get done, who's going to do it,
and when it's going to be done by. That is what indeed those are
those are the factors of a good meeting in person but what are some of the
differences Tim? Well some of the differences and now
we're into Zoom meetings so let me just talk about
a few of them. And this list on here has quite a few
today but number one is to test your technology ahead of time.
Here it is, we're on Zoom, we're having
our Zoom meeting, and I did actually step in here to my meeting room here
10 minutes ahead of time and made sure everything was working
for this meeting. And then number two is match the tool
to the task, which is really important because
certain things in meetings may require something simple and easy to get done
quickly. And other things may require that
face-to-face interaction even if it's over Zoom or
something like this. So make sure you're choosing the medium to
match what your need is. You could use just a simple
conference call if it's a straightforward meeting but if
you might have something that requires a lot of back and forth
a tool like this-Zoom- is a really good one.
Now some other things. In today's Zoom world make sure to
provide Zoom breaks because some of us are in meetings
I know I'm sure you've been on them I know I've been on them
for hours on end, there's been Zoom meetings and I get pretty burned out and
I lose my focus. For me, I get about half an hour, 45 minutes on a
Zoom meeting and then I'm going off on tangents somewhere in my head
so zoom breaks are really important. Get
something to drink, walk around, come back, you're refocused and you're
energized. Then really when you can
meet face to face sometimes, when possible, this is really important to
keep teams together, to keep them with that good sense of
teamwork. So if you can meet face to face in in
today's world it's tough but if you're local maybe have an outdoor
meeting once in a while where you can sit in a socially distant
place and have a quick meeting. And then finally the last real big tip
I would like to talk about is people tend to have a lot more distress today.
They're working more actually because of all of the online work. They're
spending days and nights, because work time and home time are now getting more
and more commingled. So people have this anxiety about all
the work they're doing. Some may have anxiety about what's
happening in the world. So check-in with them, check in with the
people you work with personally and professionally. We're
blurring those lines so continue to blur them because people
really want that personal touch when running a meeting. So yeah those are
my thoughts.
Great, so last question. Tell us
something we don't know. Tell us, you know, you're
right. We've all been Zooming for a while, we're getting more and more used to it
but what would be some some things that perhaps might not cross our radar in terms of what we
really should be doing when we run a Zoom meeting. So what would be a couple
of key recommendations that that are not obvious like technology and agenda?
Well I would give you three more recommendations. First of all
and this is a good meeting technique in general, but
don't invite people who don't need to be there, and
invite them maybe for only the time that they need to be there. If you have a good
agenda with times organized on it, only invite the people for when they need to be there.
Don't let them feel like they're excluded but make sure they know that they can come and go as need be.
The beauty of online meetings now
is that we can record them like we're doing here with our meeting today
and if somebody doesn't really need to be at the meeting, you record the meeting
and then they can play it at their leisure and skip through and just look
at the parts that are important for them. Number two, I find that sometimes I go to
meetings and there's a whole email that's been sent out.
And I get to the meeting and they're basically telling us everything that's in the email.
And people who have done their pre-work and read the email are head in hand
waiting for the meeting to end and off in a daydream somewhere.
And then the last one, which is
even easier in zoom meetings than in
face-to-face meetings, which is don't allow people on your team
to hijack the discussion. Keep it focused on that agenda.
Discussion items are important but make sure that it doesn't go off on
a tangent. So keep it focused on the important topics on your agenda.
So thanks for asking that.
Tim I've got one quick follow-up question. You're an
organizational psychologist. tell us about feed-not feedback, excuse
me, body language. In the absence of being in person and seeing each other face to face,
how does body language play a different
or perhaps a more enhanced role in a Zoom meeting?
Well in online meetings... let's step back. We have
both meetings where we can see some of the para language,
we can hear the tone, we can look at the pace,
and also we get some of the gestures like I'm doing purposefully now.
But that's really good in Zoom, we can get most of those. But in a lot of other
meetings, in a conference call, if we're having I know for sure meetings
with people on text, you can miss a lot of those other cues.
So visual cues are important, yeah very important. If you're not giving
video, if they're not using video, make sure to give more information
so people can get the other parts of it right.
So it highlights the head nodding, the thumbing up, these other things
which affirm the speaker and and effectively reinforces them.
Yeah, I think those take on more importance, absolutely.
Thank you so much for your wisdom and your insights today, Tim.
All the best, thank you.