Make virtual meetings less difficult to manage with these 3 tips

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Face-to-face meetings may be the longtime standard, but they’re not always practical. Virtual meetings are quickly becoming more popular, and they’re fairly easy to conduct. There are certain tips to keep in mind, however, when you’re conducting a virtual meeting.

Etiquette is the key to most meetings, and it’s no different with those of the virtual variety. This may seem somewhat obvious, but many people think they can be more casual during virtual meetings – and that isn’t always the case.

Here are a few more tips that can help your virtual meetings to be more effective and professional.

1. Be prepared

Preparedness is significant for any meeting, virtual or not. When you’re conducting a virtual meeting, it can be easy to forget who your audience is. You want to make sure that the information you’re presenting is appropriate for each participant.

Also, make sure that everybody invited to the meeting has the appropriate login information. If the invitees can’t actually access the meeting, the entire function is lost.

2. Engage participants

Virtual meetings can quickly become very stiff if you don’t have a relationship with the person on the other end of the meeting. Rather than just jumping right into the task at hand, try going around and allowing all of the meeting’s participants to introduce themselves.

Although it might feel like freshman orientation all over again, having everybody go around and share the highlight of his or her weekend or some other little tidbit, can serve as a huge icebreaker.

3. No side conversations

Side conversations can be incredibly distracting to all participants, even if you’re not on screen at the moment. Not only can side conversations grab the concentration of the presenter, it can distract other attendees and deter from the point of the meeting.

Virtual meetings are great assets and there are many ways to ensure that you are conducting them in a professional and interesting manner. If you’d like to take a look at more suggestions for conducting virtual meetings, check out this Inc. article.