How To Run A Virtual Team Meeting

When the great work-from-home experiment began in 2020, one of the biggest fears for newly remote leaders was running virtual meetings. In fact, “Virtual meetings don’t work” is the most common response I hear when speaking to leaders at all levels about remote teams. But let’s be fair: in-person meetings rarely ever worked, either.

There’s an entire research field of “meeting science” developing to study the effectiveness of organizational meetings, and the initial findings aren’t good. In one study, researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom conducted an international survey of more than a thousand employees at all levels of organizations to get their perception of how effective their meetings really were. The vast majority of respondents’ comments on meetings were negative. They cited poor planning, lack of an agenda, and other structural elements of the scheduled gathering people had to suffer through. The few comments that were positive primarily referred to the reasons for the meeting, like solving problems or helping shape culture. It’s clear that meetings aren’t going away any time soon-people see the value in holding them. It’s in the execution of the meeting that all that value seems to disappear.

In a virtual meeting, these positives and potential negatives are heightened. It might be the only time this week or month that you get your…