Remote work has become commonplace in many businesses, but recent conversations are trending on the return to office for many workers. While the return to office is imminent for many workers, the resolution may be laced with hybrid expectations—like being in-office for a few days and working remotely for the others. Since this still requires businesses to run virtual meetings, consider the best way to supercharge them.
Virtual meetings—here to stay
Since 2020, many of us have had to adapt to virtual meetings. Then, we didn’t know how deep the impact of remote work and virtual meetings would be. We went from working every day in an office—business attire, in-person meetings, coffee breaks, and the dull-roar of phone calls—to working from the calm, coziness of our homes with the occasional hum of our refrigerators. (Note: some of us worked from a chaotic, noisy home with preschoolers running around with glue sticks stuck in their hair while attempting virtual school while demanding more goldfish. Man—it was a wild time.)
But hear this—a positive result of 2020 was showing the businesses that remote work is not only possible, but preferable in many instances. Remote work came with its challenges, though—the virtual meeting. With such a wide-variety of virtual meeting platforms—like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams—companies were faced with a difficult learning curve when it came to operating meetings.
Did you know? Bloom Growth has been fully-remote since its conception in 2014. We thought remote work was cool before it was considered cool.
Shortcomings of virtual meetings
Virtual meetings became the norm in an attempt to emulate an in-person meeting. Although they are an acceptable substitute for in-person meetings, issues commonly include:
- technical issues,
- lack of personal interaction,
- distractions,
- limited collaboration tools, and
- communication challenges.
Aside from the obvious issues, the biggest challenge for virtual meetings became exceedingly clear—a weak agenda. Businesses run better meetings when they have a strong agenda. Without it, teams tend to go on tangents, miss key points (like goals and metrics), and waste valuable time on topics that aren’t related to pressing issues.
Winning combination for virtual meetings
Many employees spend about 45% of their work-week in meetings, so it’s crucial to get your weekly meetings right. Virtual meeting platforms are generally robust with tools like screen sharing, chat, and endless integrations—all of which are important for helping get your meeting “right.” But the most valuable integration that you can implement is with Bloom’s meeting management software. Bloom supercharges your virtual meetings—no matter which platform your business runs meetings on—that’s an integration that you can take to the bank.
For many of the reasons that virtual meetings struggle, Bloom echoes a winning resolution. Weak agenda? → Implement a better meeting agenda to keep your team on-time and on-track. Never host an ineffective meeting again. Lack of personal interaction? → Start your meeting with an icebreaker to get people talking. We call these our check-in. Distractions? → A live agenda and collaboration tools (like Whiteboard) help keep the team engaged and on track. Tangents? → Exercise the tangent alert to get the team back on track. Missing key points? → Goals, metrics, to-dos, headlines, and issues are built-into your weekly meeting. Never miss a key point again! We love optimizing meetings because it helps create new possibilities for people.