Online board meetings can be a valuable source of effective decision-making. If they’re not well run, they can lead boredom and low levels of participation. To energize your virtual meetings take these easy steps to improve the quality of your discussions and boost your productivity.
Discuss the agenda with attendees before the meeting to ensure everyone is aware of what will be discussed. Also, think about asking your board members to tune in from a quiet space without distractions. Also, you can ask your participants to use your virtual meeting software’s «raise hand» function whenever they wish to speak, in order to avoid rambling and not getting the point.
Set a time limit for each topic to keep the discussion focused on the most important issues. This allows everyone to contribute and helps to avoid discussions going off-topic or distracting other participants. Encourage your board to mute their microphones when they are not speaking to block background noises such as pets, kids and coworkers.
Last but not least, try to end the meeting on time as this shows respect for your fellow board members’ time. It is also a good practice to send out the minutes at the time the meeting ends. Additionally, it can help to speed up the process of recording and disseminating meeting minutes using the built-in capabilities such as inline task delegation.
This will ensure that all board members are on the same page as to what happened during the meeting and what is required to be done between meetings.