Quick tips for chairing remote meetings

There’s a growing set of useful resources and guidance to help people run better remote meetings. I’ve been compiling a list to a few. At the risk of repeating other, better advice, I’m going to write down some brief tips for running remote meetings.

For a year or so I was chairing fortnightly meetings of the OpenActive standards group. Those meetings were an opportunity to share updates with a community of collaborators, get feedback on working documents and have debates and discussion around a range of topics. So I had to get better at doing it. Not sure whether I did, but here’s a few things I learned.

I’ll skip over general good meeting etiquette (e.g. around circulating an agenda and working documents in advance), to focus on the remote bits.

Give people time to arrive. Just because everyone is attending remotely doesn’t mean that everyone will be able to arrive promptly. They may be working through technical difficulties, for example. Build in a bit of deliberate slack time at the start of the meeting. I usually gave it around 5-10 minutes. As people arrive, greet them and let them know this is happening. You can then either chat as a group or people can switch to emails, etc while waiting for things to start.
Call the meeting to order. Make it clear when the meeting is formally starting and you’ve switched from general chat and waiting for late arrivals. This will help ensure you have people’s attention.
Use the tools you have as a chair. Monitor side chat. Monitor the video feeds to check to see if people look like they have something to say. And, most importantly, mute people that aren’t speaking but are typing or have lots of background noise. You can usually avoid the polite dance around asking people to do that, or suffering in silence, by using option to mute people. Just tell them you’ve done that. I usually had Zoom meetings set up so that people were muted on entry.
Do a roll call. Ask everyone to introduce themselves at the start. Don’t just ask everyone to do that, as they’ll talk over each other. Go through people individually as ask them to say hello or do an introduction. This helps with putting voices to names (if not everyone is on video), ensures that everyone knows how to mute/unmute and puts some structure to the meeting.
Be aware of when people are connecting in different ways. Some software, like Zoom, allow people to join in several ways. Be aware of when you have people on phone and video, especially if you’re presenting material. Try to circulate links either before or during meeting so they can see them
Use slides to help structure the meeting. I found that doing a screenshare of a set of slides for the agenda and key talking points helps to give people a sense of where you’re at in the meeting. So, for example if you have four items on your agenda, have a slide for each topic item. With key questions or decision points. It can help to focus discussion, keeps people’s attention on the meeting (rather than a separate doc) and gives people a sense of where you are. The latter is especially helpful if people are joining late.
Don’t be afraid of a quick recap. If people join a few minutes late in the meeting, give them a quick recap of where you’re at, ask them to introduce themselves. I often did this if people joined a few minutes late, but not if they dropped in 30 minutes into a 1 hour meeting.
Don’t be afraid of silence or directly asking people questions. Chairing remote meetings can be stressful and awkward for everyone. It can be particularly awkward to ask questions and then sit in silence. Often this is because people are worried about talking over each other. Or they just need time to think. Don’t be afraid of a bit of silence. Doing a roll call to ask everyone individually for feedback can be helpful if you want to make decisions. Check in on people who have not said anything for a while. It’s slow, but provides some order for everyone
Keep to time. I tried very hard not to let meetings over-run even if we didn’t cover everything. People have other events in their calendars. Video and phone calls can be tiring. It’s better to wrap up at a suitable point and follow up on things you didn’t get to cover than to have half the meeting drop out at the end.
Follow-up afterwards. Make sure to follow up afterwards. Especially if not everyone was able to attend. For OpenActive we video the calls and share those as well as a summary of discussion points.