I love meetings!

No one says that…..

This is my current Slack avatar

It is sarcastic, but it has helped reduce the number of meetings we have and productivity continues to increase.

Let’s get a few basics out of the way.

1. If you can get what you need from an email or Slack message, then there is no need to meet
2. No meetings during your team’s most productive time of the day
3. No meetings on your team’s most productive day. Probably Wednesdays…

If you have to have a meeting

1. Leave 5–15 minutes at the end of the meeting. No back to backs! This allows everyone to organize their notes and action items while allowing for a water and bio break
2. Start the meeting with some human conversation. Maybe something special someone has to share or something someone needs to vent about. Get to know each other for a few minutes before each meeting. This is analogous to the minutes you had in the office before and after each meeting. You can still do it remotely
3. Ask each person what concrete action can they commit to completing before the next meeting.
4. Ditch the PowerPoint

How do we prevent everyone sleeping during our Zoom meeting?

The biggest contributing factor to Zoom fatigue is that people need to feel involved and want to be engaged. With team members in the office and others working remotely we have introduced Zoom segregation. We need to include remote team just as we would our onsite team.

So how do we do this and decrease boredom?

Try an engaging social platform such as Mentimeter or Aha Slides.

Think of it as your boring PowerPoint presentation but everyone can interact with it. Instead of zoning out, attendees can scan the QR code on their smartphone and engage with voting, live charts, answering questions, reactions, games and more. The participation and attention help you understand what everyone is thinking and brings emotions into it.

It equalizes the experience for EVERYONE. Great for training and teaching. Since it can keep historic values of questions over time, it is great to start and end your sprint with as you can rate how you feel and you have this tangible data to reference and respond to over time. For sprint retrospectives, you can start with icebreakers such as what is everyone’s favorite dog or cat breed. Finally, you can ask your typical retrospective questions and get real-time anonymous data that is shared with the team. You can then discuss extreme anomalous scores right there as a team.

The possibilities are endless and these are just two companies that are helping hybrid and remote teams thrive and feel engaged and connected. There are others out there and I am positive more will emerge as we continue with our digital transformations.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.