How to Overcome Virtual Meeting Challenges

When managing and working as a remote team, communication is critical and often comes in the form of virtual meetings. However, these virtual meetings bring challenges. Here are four common difficulties you may experience during remote meetings and what you can do about them:

Table of Contents

• Accessing Meetings
• Engaging Employees
• Saving Time
• Troubleshooting Tech Issues
• Our Remote Company
• Related Resources

Overcoming Virtual Meeting Challenges

Challenge #1: Accessing Meetings

Virtual meetings are often delayed due to employees having difficulty logging into and accessing the meetings. Whether your new system has a glitch or an employee’s computer doesn’t have the needed software, everyone’s time is wasted until the problems are resolved.

Solution:

Encourage all employees to log in to meetings at least five minutes prior to the start time. Also, aim to use the same platform for every meeting. This will help familiarize employees, and you will hopefully encounter fewer delays.

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Challenge #2: Engaging Employees

To ensure that everyone can hear, most employees mute their computer microphones. While this is a general courtesy, it also makes it hard for them to be engaged in the conversation. In addition, if you are on a large conference call rather than a video chat, you may not even know whether employees are still present and listening.

Solution:

Increase engagement by assigning various employees different topics to discuss during meetings. You may also want to give each employee two or three minutes after a certain topic or at the end of meetings to ask questions, voice concerns, etc.

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Challenge #3: Saving Time

During meetings, you may want to access unique features offered by the meeting software, such as screen-sharing capabilities. However, if the meeting facilitator is unfamiliar with how to use these features, he or she may waste everyone’s time while trying to learn.

Solution:

Encourage the facilitator to determine what features and capabilities he or she needs and spend time learning them prior to the meeting. This will make for a more streamlined, productive meeting.

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Challenge #4: Troubleshooting Tech Issues

Technology issues will arise, sometimes out of your control. You may have a meeting scheduled only to discover that your regular application is experiencing technical issues. When this happens, don’t fret. Be flexible and always have a “plan B.” For example, you may need to do an audio call rather than a video conference or reschedule the meeting. Become familiar with various meeting applications and options for when these tech issues occur — because they likely will.

Solution:

The perfect virtual meeting is hard to achieve. However, by being flexible, encouraging employees to become familiar with meeting applications, and finding ways to keep them engaged, you will have much more productive, beneficial, and efficient team meetings.

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Our Remote Company

HiringThing has been a fully remote company since 2012. We know a thing or two about virtual meetings. You can visit the HiringThing Remote Work Hub for all of our remote work insights OR check out our open positions if you feel remote work is in your future!

Related Resources

• Scheduling Your Remote Team
• Why HiringThing Loves Remote Work
• How to Convince Your Boss to Let You Work Remotely
• Remote Work Statistics Prove It's The Future of Work

About HiringThing

HiringThing is a modern recruiting platform as a service that creates seamless hiring experiences. Their private label applicant tracking system and open API enables technology and service providers to add hiring capabilities to their solution. Approachable and adaptable, their platform empowers anyone, anywhere, to hire their dream team.