In the association world, virtual board meetings have become the norm, offering flexibility and convenience to members spread across different locations. However, running an effective virtual meeting comes with its own unique challenges, from keeping everyone engaged to ensuring productive discussions. With the right strategies in place, your association’s board meetings can be just as impactful online as they are in person. In this blog post, we’ll share seven key tips to help you run smooth, efficient, and effective virtual board meetings that keep your association moving forward.
Prepare Conscientiously
Planning and distributing a clear agenda well in advance ensures your meeting will run smoothly. This can be done by sending out needed materials, information, documents, and reports before the meeting. This will give board members the necessary preparation time so your team can get straight to business. Tech Check: Ensure that all participants have access to and are familiar with the virtual platform.
Choose a Fitting Platform
With seemingly unlimited platforms and ways to run virtual meetings, it’s easy to get lost navigating hosting. Use a reliable platform with support for your needed tools. Does your company need screen sharing, recording capabilities, or breakout rooms? Different platforms can better fit your specific needs. Lastly, make sure your platform is easily accessible to your board members. The platform must be easy to use for varying levels of tech proficiency.
Be Punctual
People have lots going on in their daily lives and have made time available to become a participant in your meeting. Having clear start and end times is the right thing to do. Respect your participants and their time. Following a clear agenda and creating time allotments will help your meeting run smoothly and end at the specified time. (We will touch on this more in #4) Longer meetings, including scheduled breaks, can reduce fatigue and keep people on track.
Time Management & Meeting Structure
Prepare for your meeting by creating a clear agenda with goals you want to achieve. For longer sessions, create a schedule to go from one subject to another without wasting time. As a meeting host, you are responsible for keeping track of time and gently nudging them in the right direction if discussions go off track. Summarize key points from your conversation, keeping notes of the decisions agreed upon. Assign action/responsibility for people so that as the meeting finishes, members can move forward and continue their work.
Encourage Active Engagement
Each member should feel like they have a use and responsibility. Everyone is part of the board for a reason, and as a host, your responsibility is to make them feel needed and essential. Encourage active participation by asking questions and inviting input from all members. Create an environment where everyone is eager to jump in and contribute. Assign roles for every member; this will help spread the workload from the host and create an engaging community in which everyone knows their purpose in the meeting. Breakout rooms are a great way to encourage collaboration between board members. They give people time to contribute and collaborate in a less high-stress environment.
Cultivate Connections
Part of running an effective virtual meeting is humanizing the process, Creating meaningful connections, and giving members a chance to discuss who they are. The meeting should focus primarily on business, but starting with some openers via icebreaker questions or quick check-in conversations can build a sense of community. This makes members feel more comfortable and open to engaging with one another. Virtual meetings already separate us from each other naturally and make it easy to disassociate. These quick things a host can do before the meeting can significantly increase morale and create a good beginning.
Evaluate and Improve
Lastly, ask members where you can improve as a host to improve meetings. Gather feedback from members after the meeting anonymously and adjust as needed. Follow up with essential action items after each meeting, ensuring members have clear expectations and know their tasks and guidelines. Regularly review the performance of the meeting and the sole individuals. Ensuring everyone is happy and engaged is crucial to running effective meetings. There is no end goal to improving; it is creating a meeting that suits everybody’s needs and a high-functioning community. Enhancing and evaluating is an ongoing process. Stay open to new ideas and practices; develop a culture of continuous improvement.
Refer to Diagram above “The Virtual Meeting Success Cycle” to see the ongoing step-by-step process of improving virtual meetings for maximum efficiency and engagement.
