What I’ve Learned About Virtual Meetings

After studying virtual meetings for weeks here's what I've learned in one sentence:

A virtual meeting is a meeting. Period. End of story.

The same crap that makes meetings crappy in person make them virtually crappy, too.

The same engagement techniques that work in person make them virtually engaging, too.

There is no magic bullet to make virtual meetings better — except the same stuff that make all meetings better.

This crisis has just proven how good or bad our meetings really are because we now see them through a new lens called Zoom.

Zoom (or whatever platform you use) is like an x-ray machine that tells you instantly if your meetings have cancer. If they do, that cancer was there long before COVID.

Many teams have started treating their cancer-ridden meetings with better organization, better focus, better facilitation, and more engagement.

The best teams will learn from this new lens and apply their improvements to face-to-face meetings as well as virtual ones in the future.

You'll know the ones who did because they'll be the ones who don't complain about how crappy and worthless their meetings are anymore.