Tips for Better Virtual Meetings

With more than two-thirds of business executives engaging in virtual work, virtual meetings are a standard feature of the business landscape. But of course that doesn't mean its easy to navigate through. 

I came across this great article from Harvard Business School on some great tips for better virtual meetings.

1) Be Very Interactive

One reason virtual meetings do not flow as naturally as in-person meetings is that establishing camaraderie at a distance is difficult. Yet it can be achieved if the meeting particpants make an effort to engage with their colleagues from afar.

2) Use Technology To Enhance Collaboration

Technology that enhances two-way communication and active collaboration can make virtual meetings almost like being there - one team at a Fortune 100 company experienced a stunning 90% drop in decision-making time in virtual meetings after it put technology to work. Useful high-tech tools include virtual rooms for attendees, white board functionality for note taking, voting tools for anonymous feedback, cameras so colleagues can see one another, collaborative online presentation capability, informal chat rooms for side discussions and the ability to raise your hand virtually and ask questions.

3) Reserve Meetings For Two-Way Communication

Have you ever attended meeting where all you did was listen? If one-way meetings are bad in person, they're deadly over the phone, especially when participants are scattered across the globe and it's the middle of the night for some.

4) Level Ths Playing Field

It is common in virtual meetings for some employees to particpate while sitting together in a conference room, while others are alone in their offices or other locations. Employees in the conference room have the benefit of side conversations with their colleagues and shared coffee breaks. The individuals not in the room may feel excluded and wonder whether their input is equally valued.

5) Establish A No E-Mail Or Instant Messaging Policy

This is obvious, but it's worth emphasizing: just as it's rude to have side conversations during a face-to-face meeting, it's rude to converse an email or instant messaging during virtual meetings. To encourage compliance, try what one team did: it decided that anyone who broke this rule would be assigned the next item. The prooved a highly effective deterrent!

What would you do when something negative is said about your brand?

It takes years to build your brand to what it is today. A lot of hard work but really it only requires one minor incident to bring it down. Similar to the notion of "trust". Trust takes a lot of time to build but when the trust is lost, it drops by leaps and bounds.

My view is though one may completely take control of its brands in the online space, one can minimise these negative effects, for example you can control the negative spread of viral marketing. Here are some of my tips:

1) Draft an internal social media plan for everyone in the company - this would signal to your team that your actions offline and online concerning your brand name is made answerable - of course most companies does not have a plan like this in place. But since the social media is growing at an exceptional rate don't we all need a plan like this? Ideally you should be on the online space listening to what's going on in the market place.

2) IF it does happen, you have to make sure we quickly respond to the problems. In the online word, speed is the most important:

- If you know the originator of the spread for example a blogger, you can perhaps contact the blogger to have a link back to our official response. Most readers/customers appreciate the other side of the story.

- If you don't know the originator (in most cases), you can draft a response on our website and submit that page to SEO. This would ensure that viewers/customers would be able to see your response on the first page of Google. 

- By using Twitter as an advantage. 

That’s all I can think of for now. But I am really interested to hear of what you would do or have done to control the negative bad mouthing of your brand name.

How to Rise Above Office Politics

Going to work in the morning can sometimes feel like walking on to the set of a soap opera aka the bold and the beautiful.... with intrigues, rivalries. Honestly it can be a nightmare to navigate through it all and actually get some work done! Throughout my career, I have never experience such an intense political environment to what I am experiencing now at my current work place. 

I have listed below some "tips" which might be able to smooth your path and make the office environment a much more pleasant place to be in.

1) Avoid office gossip

Gossip can also unfairly poison your opinions of your colleagues and influence your judgement if you have to take decisions which affect them. Participation in gossip is usually the fastest entry point into office politics – usually the person who is letting you in on the latest news is consciously or subconsciously trying to align you with their point of view, or negatively dispose you towards their ‘enemies’. Gossip is very often a two-edged sword: ‘whoever gossips to you will someday gossip about you’, so the Spanish proverb goes.

All of the above sounds like common sense; the chances are many of us realise the destructiveness of gossip and yet continue to indulge in it at the same time. Taking the decision to avoid gossip often requires overcoming your fear about standing out from the crowd. However, it might be possible to take that stand tactfully: one good trick is to deflect the conversation with a question about the gossiper’s own life – they will invariably relish the chance to talk about themselves!

2. Place long-term harmony above short-term gain
If you happen to disagree with a colleague over the best approach to an issue, try and take your own ego out of it and stand in their shoes for a moment. Office politics often tends to focus on the person rather than the idea, so try and detach one from the other in evaluating the competing approaches. In many cases, there may be little or no difference in the effectiveness of the two rival approaches, and it may be best to just go along with the other idea to keep harmony. A 90% perfect solution done in unison can often be better then the 100% perfect solution which was only achieved at the cost of civil war.

Whatever happens, don’t let a situation build up past the point of no return. It is very easy to hold a grudge against someone as a result of something that didn’t go your way; however these attitudes have a way of hardening into something permanent, to the stage where you feel totally unable to approach that person. Try to keep the lines of communication open to everyone, however slight.

3. Respect others’ territory
Often people regard their office competencies as their ‘territory’ and will jealously guard them against all-comers. They might feel they have absolute expertise in the area, and are seriously put out if people even question them about what they were doing. Often the best approach in this case is just to let them at it, and keep your own tendency to feel ‘you know how to do everyone’s job better than they do’ in check. But what if you genuinely do need to make a suggestion? One thing which has worked for me in the past is to draw the person concerned into a conversation on their area of expertise, and genuinely listen. Often this ‘territory’ attitude comes from a feeling of insecurity that no-one values their work, and listening in this way creates a space of trust where they feel you value their opinion, and helps to lower their barriers. It also helps if you aren’t defensive about your own territory, and judge any suggestion on its merits rather than by who said it.

4. Don’t get sucked into the promotion whirlpool
Of course, one of the main causes of office politics is because we are hoping to advance within the company, leading to the temptation to keep an eye on potential rivals for promotion. What we don’t realise is that all this worrying about others is essentially a lack of faith in ourselves, and that all the problems mentioned in the first three points – gossiping, territory etc. – are just ’shortcuts’ we take because we are afraid we won’t go places on our performance alone. But conversely, not indulging in these behaviours demonstrates strength, courage, tact and a feeling for managing people – qualities which many companies would kill for! You shouldn’t be afraid about standing out from the crowd for the right reasons – it could pay you back more handsomely than you think.

But now what happens if the gossip is about you? It happens that regardless of how well you have followed this advice (and I do as a rule in all aspects of my life) that one will become sucked into office politics as the object of said politics, i.e. people fight about you, because some dislike you and others don’t. That WILL happen, no matter how good you are at willingly avoiding getting into office politics, especially if you are put in a position of responsibility. Most people end up having some sort of responsability in an office at some point.

Well, it’s important to keep it all in mind. Let me know what your thoughts are in this?