I’d prepared detailed questions about the project, set a timer on my computer so I was ready to expect the call, and had my project notes handy. I was all ready to go. Unfortunately, the team wasn’t, and the meeting was almost a complete failure!

Here’s a quick refresher on the ingredients for a successful phone conference.

Timing

As I was readying myself for the call, the team leader sent me an SMS to let me know that the project manager was stuck in another meeting. That is understandable, but the problem was that I had another meeting immediately after the conference. I told the team leader this so that she knew, and she hurried the project manager straight into the teleconference when the other meeting ended.

These kinds of eventualities can’t always be avoided, but if you’ve scheduled a phone conference with someone, it’s important to be on time, especially when some (or all) attendees are working remotely, and there’s no face-to-face opportunities to appease them.

In my experience, if the person who called a phone conference is running late, people will drop out of the conference much more quickly than they’d drop out of an on-site meeting. If you want to run your meeting, be there and be punctual.

Technology

When the team leader called me, the PM by her side, we experienced some major connection issues, which were perpetrated by their speakerphone.

Sometimes, connectivity issues can be impossible to predict, but it’s a good idea to check out your equipment and make sure it works before you try to use it in a meeting. In the end, it took three calls and a switch of speakerphone for our teleconference to get under way.

Preparation

Once the meeting kicked off, I started working through each of the questions I had about the project. The more specific my questions grew, the more apparent it became that my team members didn’t have their project documentation in front of them. In the end, they asked me to wait while they grabbed it, so they could answer my questions.

I started to get the idea that this project wasn’t anywhere near the top of my team members’ priority lists, so I began to consider shifting it further down my own. But their lack of focus also reduced my faith in them, so in the end I decided to step through the entire project with them so that I could confirm all the details, rather than just those I’d been especially uncertain of.

It’s rarely sufficient to just roll up to a meeting with the documentation in hand. You need to have read it and understood it if your teleconference is going to be a success and the other attendees are to respect you — and the priority you’ve given to the issues under discussion.

Follow Up

I was so unconvinced by my teammates’ performance in the teleconference that when it was over, I wrote up the decisions we’d made in the meeting and sent them through for the team to approve. This way, I felt I’d at least covered all my bases: If the team decided later that they didn’t like where the project was heading, or they hadn’t considered all the information, at least I’d have this emailed agreement as a justification for more time or budget for the project.

I think it’s always a good idea to follow up any teleconference with minutes or contact notes, just so you can ensure everyone’s on the same page. But it’s imperative when decisions are hard to reach, the outcomes of the meeting aren’t clear, or team members want to make note of any reservations or conditions they tabled.

What’s your recipe for a successful phone conference?

But working with such a team can be maddening. How do you tame the time zone madness and plan your meetings as efficiently as possible? Give your team at least two options of meeting times to choose from. In one of the first virtual teams I worked with, our team leader would ask us if a specific conference time was okay for everyone. Naturally, there was never unanimous agreement. This led to several messages of, “When are you available, then?” sent back and forth to various members of the team. What a waste of time! By giving the team several choices, you’ll make it easier on yourself to set the meeting time. You could also use one of the many meeting scheduling tools that we’ve covered here on WWD. Good options to try are TimeBridge, When Is Good and MeetingMade.

Use a tool that automatically converts time zones for each participant. Automating this part prevents human error, which is likely to come when forgetting DST (Daylight Saving Time) rules or faulty counting. Tools such as The World Clock Meeting Planner and Google Calendar might help. You can also try Permatime, which Mike reviewed in a previous post. Some scheduling tools, like MeetingMade, also automatically handle timezones.

Rotate the “awkward” time slots. It’s possible that a few members of your team will have to wake up a little earlier or stay up later than usual just to participate. If this is the case, make sure that you rotate the people who receive awkward time slots. Don’t let one or two people frequently carry the burden of deviating from their regular body rhythms.

Have a clear agenda ahead. By writing down a specific agenda, you can pinpoint the reason why you’re having a meeting in the first place. Having an agenda also prevents you from wasting the time of the participants who aren’t essential to the meeting. If their input is hardly needed in the discussion, then their availability or promptness shouldn’t be a priority.

Make sure that all participants can understand or access the tools you’ll be using. This may seem like simplistic advice, but some tech savvy web workers forget that not everyone knows how to use even the most common web apps. I once worked with a colleague who didn’t have a Skype account, so I had to walk him through signing up for one and testing his sound equipment.

To avoid wasting time, look for existing help pages, video instructions, and other resources that your colleagues can use in their own time. It usually helps to send these links to everyone involved, as a group, so that it doesn’t look like you’re singling anyone out. Ask for feedback. At the end of the first meeting, send out a short questionnaire to your team, asking for their feedback. Cover all the important bases from sound quality to the faithfulness of the meeting to the agenda. The comments and suggestions you’ll receive will come in handy when planning your next meeting.

Planning a meeting with your global team doesn’t have to be that hard. With the right tools and a fair, efficient approach, it might become as easy as planning a face-to-face meeting with colleagues from a nearby building.

If you’re looking for more meeting pointers, check out Simon’s post “7 Tips for More Efficient Meetings” — the guidelines in there apply to virtual meetings just as much as regular “in the flesh” meetings. How do you plan meetings with a global team? Share your tips in the comments.

Image by stock.xchng user g-point

Here’s a screencast showing MeetingMade being used to set up a meeting:

WWD Screencast: MeetingMade from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

The interface is very easy to use, which is important in a tool like this as there’s no point in sending out a meeting request using a scheduling tool only to get an email back when the recipient can’t figure out how to use it. Only the meeting organizer neds to have a MeetingMade account.

MeetingMade also distinguishes itself from the crowd of meeting scheduling apps by being able to handle partial availability and timezones. MeetingMade uses the iCalendar email standard so meeting requests from the app will work with most calendaring apps like Microsft Outlook, Google Calendar  and Apple iCal.

MeetingMade is free to use while it’s in beta (it will move to paid subscription at some point in the future), and is worth checking out if you’re looking for a meeting scheduler.

What meeting scheduling tool do you use?

As web workers, we probably have to endure meetings less often than our cube-dwelling counterparts. When you do hold a meeting with a client or with your teammates, either face-to-face or as a teleconference, you want to make it as effective as possible so you get the outcomes that you want, without wasting anyone’s time.

Here are some tips for making sure that your meetings are less of a chore, go smoothly and have outcomes that are favorable for everyone.

Decide if the meeting is required

My No. 1 meeting rule is not to waste anyone’s time. Companies hold too many meetings. Don’t hold the meeting if you don’t need to or just because you’ve held meetings for this purpose before. Can you achieve the same outcome via more efficient means instead; maybe through a phone call or email?

Decide what type of meeting you are holding

Seth Godin wrote this week that there are three types of meeting:

1. Information. This is a meeting where attendees are informed about what is happening (with or without their blessing). While there may be a facade of conversation, it’s primarily designed to inform.
2. Discussion. This is a meeting where the leader actually wants feedback or direction or connections. You can use this meeting to come up with an action plan, or develop a new idea, for example.
3. Permission. This is a meeting where the other side is supposed to say yes but has the power to say no.

There is a danger of meetings suddenly changing from one type to another, during the meeting, without everyone being aware of it. You need to decide what type of meeting you are holding and make sure everyone knows what it is beforehand.

Have an agenda and stick to it

Nothing is more frustrating than a meeting that has no clear purpose and meanders from topic to topic. All meetings should have an agenda distributed to all attendees beforehand so that you know what you’re going to be discussing and deciding upon. Everyone needs to be aware of what they should bring to the meeting so that they don’t feel ambushed on the day. Finally, an agenda is not clearly defined if it has “Any Other Business” on it.

Only invite people to the meeting who need to be there

People should only be invited to the meeting if they are required — if they will have important input or be involved in decision-making. Be rigorous when pruning the list of invitations: attendees who don’t feel like they are contributing or required will be bored, resentful and inattentive. It’s OK to have people only attend for the part of the meeting that they’re needed for.

Have someone chair the meeting

This may feel stuffy and formal, but with no chairperson, you’ll have a hard time making sure that the meeting sticks to to the agenda. The chairperson should also ensure that everyone contributes.

Start on time and do not overrun

People are giving up valuable time out of their working day for the meeting. Therefore it is vital that meetings start on time and do not overrun: this is the chairperson’s responsibility. If you cannot finish your meeting on time, you should schedule another.

Follow up afterwards

It’s important to follow up afterwards. Thank everyone for their time, distribute outcomes and action points as appropriate.

These tips should also work well for teleconferences. For some teleconference-specific pointers, check out 27 Tips for Teleconferencing.

What tips do you use for holding an effective meeting?

Image by lusi from sxc.hu

As an IT teleworker for a large company over the past 10 years, I’ve spent my share of time on conference calls. The other day, in fact, I set a personal record with 11.5 hours of them in a single work day (and I had the sore headphone ear and hoarse voice that came along with that feat). Despite this meeting load, I still had to respond to IM’s, reply to a multitude of emails, prepare slides early in the day for a presentation later on, and a host of other tasks. That begs the question:

How do you effectively multitask in meetings in a way that lets you get work done?

When you can and when you can’t

First, you have to recognize where the multitasking opportunities are. Obviously, when you are presenting a set of slides or walking through some code to an audience, doing anything else is next to impossible. On the other end of the spectrum, if you were invited to provide details that might not even get covered to a broad group, there’s a decent chance you won’t say anything beyond introducing yourself at the top of the meeting.

Pay particular attention to the agenda shown at the beginning of the meeting. If you don’t have a copy of it, take a quick screen shot of it when it flashes by on whatever desktop sharing mechanism you are using if you can, as that will be your roadmap to multitasking potential. Take note not only of the segments where your opinion might possibly come up, but also be sure to mentally check back into the meeting every 2-3 minutes so you can assess where in the agenda things stand. That decreases the chances you’ll be caught off guard by a question when you weren’t paying attention because you were doing something else.

Short Tasks

David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to task management is ideal for meeting multitasking since it breaks things down into short time segments. In using this method, whenever something comes into your inbox you assess whether or not it is something you need to keep for reference, something you can delete, something you can delegate to someone else, something you can take care of in less than 2 minutes, or something that needs a longer period of your time. Everything except that last category can be processed in the 2-3 minute time slice you create for yourself during portions of your meeting that aren’t as relevant to you as other segments.

Whatever task management tactics you use, there are always quick hitting items that need attention. Taking care of them while on a meeting where you can multitask keeps them from intimidatingly piling up.

Stop and Start Tasks

Some longer tasks lend themselves to being stopped and started in manageable intervals that can match up with those 2-3 minute segments you’ve carved out for yourself while the meeting is going on. Maybe you have some long technical article to read through that lends itself to stopping every few paragraphs to check back in with your teleconference. When a slide presentation needs to be prepared for later in the day, stopping after each slide is done so you can assess how far the meeting has progressed is another example.

Small Physical Tasks

Paper filing, desk cleaning, reloading your beverage if you have a wireless phone — these things are primarily physical rather than mental, and lend themselves to being done while you listen to your meeting. That’s not to say you should go dig the ditch for a new sprinkler line in your back yard while on the phone, but smaller things around the desk are ripe for multitasking.

What to do when you get caught

Make no mistake, if you frequently try to multitask during meetings you will eventually get caught. Someone will ask you a question and, because you were off multitasking, you won’t know what that question was. There are good and bad ways to recover from this situation.

Some will tell you to feign ignorance (“I don’t quite understand what you mean, can you rephrase the question?”). Others will tell you to pass the buck to someone else on the call (“I’m not quite the expert on that topic that Anakin is, what do you think Ani?”) However, the best way is to simply cop to it, but be careful about how you choose your words. There is a big difference between:

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention, can you repeat that?”

and

“I’m afraid you caught me multitasking on something else for a meeting with my boss later today, can you repeat that?”

Both make you look bad, but the latter makes you look less bad. And that’s the risk you run when trying to multitask: the possibility you could look bad on your current meeting weighed against the cost of not getting as many things done throughout your business day. If you approach multitasking opportunities with a plan, though, you can mitigate that risk and be more productive.

Pete Johnson created one of the first web applications ever built inside Hewlett Packard during the mid 1990’s and has had the good fortune to work with over 400 engineers all over the world, write articles for a variety of publications, and present topics at trade shows. He served as the HP.com Chief Architect for two and a half years before a reorganization brought him his present responsibilities as the Marketing and Internet Platform Services IT, Portals and Applications Chief Architect (try fitting that on a business card). He blogs about how improved non-technical skills can accelerate technical careers at http://nerdguru.net.