How to improve your online meetings

As we are working from home for a while now, and since it looks like we will remain working from home for the near future we had to change how we do our team meetings. I am a Scrum Master at Coolblue for multiple teams where I facilitate the Scrum events and additional workshops or trainings and these are my learnings.

Time slot 📆
First and foremost, online meetings are way more tiresome than face to face meetings and therefore, when you have more topic heavy meetings, I would advise you to find a time slot in the morning. I have found out that, with the exception of trainings, the maximum time a person can spend discussing a detailed topic is about 2 hours.

Goal 🎯
To quote Simon Sinek here, Start with WHY, determine why you need to have this meeting, especially if it’s a meeting outside your standard Scrum Events. Ask yourself the question: What is the outcome I want to achieve? Communicate this goal clearly in the agenda and open your meeting with this goal.

Agenda 📃
Preparation is half the battle, not only for you as the facilitator but also as a participant. Create a clear agenda so people can prepare the meeting and that they understand WHY they are invited. Mention the to be discussed topics, maybe even include time slots if not in the invite than at least for yourself for good time management. Don’t forget to schedule at least a break halfway or ask the team when and how they would like to have a break.

Amount of people 🤼
Strongly consider the amount of people you want/need in a meeting, the more the merrier doesn’t apply for meetings. Ask yourself; Is this an informative meeting? than there is no real maximum amount of people, Is it an interactive session? Try to bring it down to the people who will add the most value or include a ‘representative’ of a certain role.

Visual guidance 🦮
First of all I love to use Google Meet on one screen, so I can see my colleagues in one overview. Google meet has an automatic grid-view which provides you with the capability to see all your colleagues in one view. On the other screen I like to use a visual guidance tool, see below, which increases collaboration.

Prepare some visualization 🖊
Since I really miss just talking with the team and drawing on a board to make my story stick or to spark conversation I tried out a couple of tools and below you will find an overview.

Retrium → Great for retrospectives/brainstorm meetings; it provides the option to use a pre-formatted retrospective but also gives you the opportunity to create your own format. The tool is ‘fool-proof’ and easy to use for everybody and comes with Think, Group, Vote and Discuss flow. I have more tips and tricks for using this tool which are too detailed to discuss here, but hit me up if you are curious.

Miro → Great for whiteboarding like story mapping, creating a clear visual overview when you are trying to gather input from multiple angles. It has all different kind of shapes and colors and arrows you can use, there are stickies which you can use and everybody can work in it at the same time. When you get a free account you get a maximum of 3 boards, but fear not, you can zoom out so far that you can use one board for multiple sessions.

Jamboard → It’s free, easy accessible and simple/limited in use. You can gather input on stickies from multiple people at the same time to create an overview.

Google Docs → This is of course an easy fallback where all the team members can collaborate together, you can add comments on each other’s work and you can tag people in certain comments.

Execution 🖼
The first people will drip in the Google meet; great now what’s next.

Opening: As mentioned before, start with the goal in mind, explain the group why you initiated this meeting and what you expect as an outcome (double check this with the expectations of the group). Explain where and how you would like to take breaks, but ask the group to help you out with that. Also explain how you would like the interaction to go (see mute/unmute), like a meeting etiquette.

When you are sharing your screen and you only have one screen you will lose sight of your colleagues, there are different ways to tackle that.

1. obviously, get two screens ;)
2. don’t share your screen but give everybody access to the document you want to work in, so you can minimize the group and the document so you can have them in one overview.

Mute/unmute: you have two camps with this one. Most people say; mute yourself unless you want to discuss something and raise your hand so the facilitator can see that you want to add/say something since background noise might be distracting to the group, other people say; keep everybody off mute to increase interaction since as a facilitator it might be a little awkward to not get any feedback: like an aha, uhu, hmm or just a laugh when you make a little joke. But for both, there is a short-cut for muting and unmuting in google meet which is : Ctrl + D so you don’t have to click the mute/unmute button which might result in you clicking the ‘hang-up’ button, yeap that happens a lot.

Breakout: ah wattuh? break-out rooms are other calls that a subgroup of a bigger group uses to execute an assignment to increase participation. For example; you are gathering input about 2 topics, you have 6 people in the call, you divide the group into 2x3 to discuss one topic, after a timebox, everybody comes back to the ‘main-meet’ and discusses their findings.

Keep in mind here that everybody mutes him/herself in the main-meet, so they can discuss the details in the other meet. You can create additional google meets by using meet.google.com

Pick and choose: Online interaction is more difficult than face to face meetings and to make sure that everybody has a chance to provide their input try to incorporate; What do you think about this? Does the rest of the group agree? Especially when you have people who more eager than others to provide their input.

Timeboxing: meeting are a lot more efficient when everybody knows what is expected from them. Plus to make sure that you are not running over time. Timeboxes are very useful for breakouts, breaks and gathering input on stickies. Google the word : timer and you will get a timer/stopwatch.

Reference 📂
At the end of the meeting communicate clearly what next steps will be, maybe you need a follow-up meeting or maybe the next step is somebody taking on an action item. Keep in mind here, like no other, create clear action items and link them to an action holder.

I usually create a screenshot of the tool we used and write a small recap of the meeting with the action point clearly stated, especially if not ‘everybody’ joined the meeting.

Of course, every topic here contains a detailed list of tips and tricks (like online meeting etiquette's) which are specific per situation. Interested in how I tackle those, don’t be shy, just sent me a message.