With 55 million meetings happening every week, virtual meetings are an excellent way to collaborate across distances. Like any other meeting, there are a few best practices to make them efficient and productive. From planning to execution to wrap up, check out the below virtual meeting best practices to make your next UCx with Webex meeting to run smoothly.
Virtual Meeting Best Practices
1. Download the UCx with Webex Apps
For accessible virtual meetings, the UCx with Webex apps make it easy to create and join meetings on mobile or desktop. This saves time and makes it feel effortless to quickly hop on a meeting regardless of where you’re joining from.
2. Utilize a Calendar Integration
Stop spending time going back and forth to find a time that works for everything. The easy to use calendar integration makes it easy to create meeting invites using your unique UCx with Webex meeting room URL.
3. Establish a Meeting Purpose
There’s nothing worse than a meeting with no purpose or agenda. Establish exactly how much time you need to cover several specific action items, create an agenda, and share it with participants ahead of the meeting so they know what to expect. Most importantly, make sure the length of your meeting is appropriate for the content you need to cover. If your meeting will only need 30 minutes, then don’t schedule one for an hour.
4. Moderate Effectively
When you’re the meeting host, it’s your job to keep the meeting on track and on schedule. Keep employees discussing only agenda items without going on tangents. Don’t be afraid to hop in if the conversation goes off-topic. If the topic needs to be discussed in more depth, creating a subsequent meeting could be in order.
5. Lock Your Meeting
It’s absolutely a virtual meeting best practice to lock your meeting after everyone has joined. By using the UCx with Webex lock your meeting feature, it prevents uninvited attendees from joining. Attendees are sent to a waiting room where you can decide if they’ll be let in. This helps keep confidential meetings secure.
6. Encourage Engagement
Face-to-face interaction encourages engagement, so turn on your video and motivate others to do the same. If you don’t want to turn on your video because of your surroundings, then use virtual backgrounds to minimize distractions in busy workplaces. UCx with Webex also has several features that make it easy to encourage engagement during meetings like using gestures and reaction buttons that allow participants to interact with one another without interrupting the speaker. And with intuitive collaboration tools like screen-sharing and whiteboarding, you can help ensure everyone feels involved in brainstorming.
7. Use Breakout Rooms
In large meetings, you might want the opportunity to segment into smaller groups for more intimate discussions. With breakout rooms, start your meeting with all attendees but then sort them into separate rooms in the click of a button. Participants will be broken out into smaller group sessions, but you can quickly and easily bring everyone back into the larger group for final remarks and wrap-up.
8. Record Meetings
Recordings allow for easy shareability and transparency across organizations and ensure critical communication isn’t missed just because someone couldn’t attend a meeting. Did you know that UCx with Webex also offers a transcription of your meeting? This allows attendees to hone in on a specific timestamp to quickly grab messaging or re-reference something important after the meeting has ended without having to watch the whole recording.
How UCx With Webex Helps Your Business
Unified cloud communications enable teams to collaborate effectively from everywhere. For dispersed teams, virtual meetings increase accessibility and flexibility and provide unique opportunities for collaboration. By setting agendas, utilizing engagement tools, recording meetings, and encouraging face-to-face interaction, a few best practices can set the tone for a highly effective meeting. Use these virtual meeting best practices alongside the industry-leading UCx with Webex communications systems. To learn more, contact us today.