With the advent of increasingly virtual workspaces, taking advantage of them is becoming increasingly important. Team leaders need to know how to establish productive communication with remote colleagues.

Make Sure that Everyone Attends Your Online Meeting

The online meeting space is an essential new work environment. As a team leader, you should know how to get everyone to your meeting and make it run as smoothly as possible.

Just because your colleagues are scattered doesn’t mean that their work has to be disorganized due to a lack of participation in team meetings. Here’s some advice on how to make sure your colleagues attend your online meetings. Also, we will talk about how to make those meetings as informative and productive as possible.

Select the best meeting tool for your needs

The first thing that any team leader should do to jumpstart a productive remote collaboration is to choose a meeting tool, This tool should work for everyone and match your work’s needs.

For instance, why would you use video conference software if your remote team is a marketing or sales team and you’re working on a new pitch or collaborating on a press release? You would all be talking to each other face-to-face on the internet but not engaging with your work. Instead, opt for Google Docs or another document sharing program.

Or maybe you need to collaborate verbally and observe your team’s reactions to your proposals. In that case, video conferencing software is a better bet.

Knowing and using the tools will help convince everyone to attend your meetings, prepare appropriately, and make them productive.

Plan ahead

Setting a plan is the most critical thing that a team leader can do. By helping your colleagues come to meetings prepared, they are more likely to feel understood by their team leader and responsive to the content you have proposed for that particular meeting.

The agendas that set the priorities and delegated the responsibilities of each meeting were instrumental to their productivity. An agenda can make or break an online meeting by informing people about each session’s responsibilities.

If your colleagues know the agenda, they’ll know how to prepare.

Utilize trending e-learning techniques

Not only has the meeting space migrated to the internet. People also use their phones more and more for their work — the technology is essentially the new conference room. Knowing some of the newest e-learning trends can help you, as a team leader, stay on top of your colleague’s capabilities and expectations.

Understanding how collaboration differs when performed through technology will help you better prepare your team for productive meetings. Look at the online meeting tools available and select one that utilizes techniques to help a team learn and grow together with technology.

For instance, you need to assess certain features’ usefulness to choose the right tools to equip your team. You may need screen-sharing to keep your project flowing. Or maybe you will need the ability to record parts of the meeting for later reference by your fellow remote workers.

Whatever the needs of your team, you have to know them. This is why the abundance of e-learning knowledge and the right online meeting tools can ensure that everyone attends your meetings, is prepared for the work, and is ready to collaborate.

Connect your team members

One of the biggest challenges facing a remote team leader is distance. When your team is dispersed over a large area (sometimes thousands of miles), it cannot be easy to make them feel comfortable enough with each other to share their ideas.

Why is this important? A research study for Harvard Business Review found that team members were 26% more likely to share ideas in a meeting when they had previously shared a funny story about themselves with the same team.

This familiarity is a byproduct of real interaction that you don’t have in a remote workspace. This is why creating a digital space to serve as a “water cooler” for your team members will make them more receptive to meetings and productive during them.

Setting up a team break space in Slack can go a long way towards meeting attendance and efficiency.

The Takeaway

It can be not easy to coordinate the digital workspace when your colleagues are miles apart from each other. Getting them all to the same meeting is half the battle. You also need to ensure that you’re using the right software with the right capabilities for your needs. Allowing your team to collaborate personally beforehand is a great way to make them think as a team and achieve better results.

Whatever your techniques, acknowledging the benefits and limitations of the online work environment is the first step to using it to your advantage, getting everyone to your meetings, and making them productive.