Virtual Facilitation

23Virtual (Recurring) Meetings

In this deep dive we're going to explore recurring meetings, like stand-up meetings or steering committee meetings. These are meetings that you have regularly, usually with around ten people. They'll normally last between 20 minutes and 1.5 hours as an absolute maximum. This could also apply to departmental meetings where you have 15 to 20 participants.

One thing we often find with these kinds of meetings is that, over time, they can become boring. They need some extra energy or variation injected into them. This is something you need to consider in your planning, and it might be that you need to put a little additional energy in at that stage.

In general, we would say that recurring virtual meetings need to have quite a fast pace to ensure people value them and don't lose enthusiasm. These meetings need to be a place where people receive a very concrete output or alignment and are then able to move forwards. That means, when you go into these meetings, you need to be very clear about what you want to do and what output you're expecting to create.

What happens in recurring virtual meetings shouldn't be a surprise. You should have a very clear vision of how it will work and who will do what. It's particularly crucial that people know the structure and agenda before this kind of meeting. They should go into that meeting knowing exactly what items are on the agenda and what they can expect in terms of their involvement or the output. This can be ...