Technology Articles

By Thursday Bram

Being able to hold a meeting when the attendees are scattered all over the globe has changed the face of business. You can take on international clients or choose manufacturers in other countries with relative ease. You don’t even need to calculate the long-distance charges anymore: with cloud-based software, holding a meeting, even when you need to share large files, can be free.

But there are certain steps that you need to take to make sure that you have just as useful a meeting online as you would have if you were talking to the meeting attendees face to face. Cloud-based applications continue to evolve, as do the ways we use them, so you need to make sure that you’re up to date.

1. Test your technical solutions: Technology is wonderful and offers us a lot of easy solutions for holding meetings online — but it doesn’t always perform perfectly. Test the tools you plan to use in advance, preferably with a similar load to what you expect during your meeting. You may not need to conduct tests after you’ve ran a few meetings with a particular piece of technology, but keep an alternative ready, just in case a particular site goes down.
2. Write out directions for joining the meeting: If your tool of choice does not offer a step-by-step guide to joining a meeting that you can point attendees to, you need to create one of your own. There are a few exceptions: if you choose a solution that just requires attendees to open an app on their tablet or computer and then click the appropriate meeting, you may not need such detailed instructions. But the easier you can make it for attendees to join the meeting , the more likely you are to see things go off without a hitch. Your directions should also include other crucial details, like what time zone the meeting date is set in.
3. Keep your data under control: One of the benefits to a meeting where everyone shows up in person is that any information that isn’t intended to be made public is a little easier to control — the only potential problem was if someone chose to repeat it. But with many cloud-based technologies, once you share a document, it’s tough to get it back. Make sure you choose a tool like Anywhere Pad that describes its options for controlling access to documents and presentations clearly.
4. Set an agenda and stick to it: Some people have the bad habit of opening up their meeting in one window and working on something else in another window, so you need a way to keep everyone on track. Other potential issues, like people joining your meeting late or having a connection drop, make an agenda just as important as it was for in person meetings. The best practice is to write up the agenda and send it out in advance, as well as keep it up on the screen during your meeting when you’re not looking at other documents or a presentation. It’s worth sending out a follow up document, as well.
5. Offer a back channel for the meeting: With a distributed audience, it can be harder for your attendees to catch someone after the meeting to confirm details or ask questions. By offering a way to have private messages or chat while the presenter is speaking, the people attending your meeting can make sure they have all the information they need. You may see an increase in interactions in the meeting, as well.

The etiquette for managing an online meeting isn’t yet carved in stone. You can make the changes necessary to ensure that your meetings accomplish everything they need to. But you do need to take the constraints of operating in the cloud into account. These steps can help you make minor modifications that can have big impacts.

Thursday Bram is a writer for Anywhere Pad.

Image by Flickr user Jessica Mullen (Creative Commons)