According to information provided by Future Workforce Report, more than 36 million Americans will work remotely by 2025. While the benefits of working from home, such as more productivity and improved employee morale, are known, the drawbacks aren’t talked about quite as often. Namely, it can be hard to hold a productive meeting when everyone is in his or her own environment and dealing with a variety of different background distractions. Learning how to host a productive work meeting on Zoom can help to ease some of the growing pains of a changing workforce.

Setting an Agenda & Goals

Just like a face-to-face meeting, it helps to determine what you need to talk about ahead of time. Create an outline of the most important things you need to discuss at the meeting along with a secondary list of things you’d like to bring up if time permits. Determine what your goals are ahead of time so that you don’t get off track.

Preparing Yourself for the Zoom Meeting

Whether you’ve used Zoom before or it’s your inaugural virtual meeting, it’s important to set everything up before it’s time for your meeting to start. Naturally, you’ll want to start by installing Zoom. This way, if you run into any issues, you’ll have plenty of time to work them out. This also gives you plenty of time to go through all of the features and determine which ones might be helpful for your meeting. Common examples include the ability to share your screen, change the name that shows up on your profile, set up reminders, and turn on your gallery view. Don’t forget that you’ll want an office background for Zoom as well. After all, it’s hard to run a meeting if your audience is more interested in your dog or your pile of laundry in the background. Of course, you are also going to want to make sure that your internet is going to be able to handle the demands of Zoom and, if you’re not confident about this, it may be wise to look into plans from providers like xfinity internet to see if you can upgrade your internet ready to host your meeting. 

How To Keep Employees Engaged

There are a variety of things you can do to help keep your audience engaged during your meeting. First, send them the agenda you created beforehand. This will help them to stay on track themselves and is likely to make the meeting run more smoothly. It also helps to give people specific tasks during the meeting. Have one person keep track of the time so that you don’t run over while another writes down the most important pieces of information from the meeting to send to anyone who couldn’t attend. Short games or small talk before the meeting officially begins can also help to keep people engaged.

Another thing you can do is to use Zoom immersive view templates during your meetings. The templates allow you to set up a design that makes it look as if you and your audience are all in the same room. It prevents the distraction of being able to see into everyone else’s home workspace while creating a fun little way for you to interact.  

By getting to know your program beforehand, including Zoom backgrounds Mac, setting up a list of goals beforehand, and working to include all of your members in the discussion, you are more likely to have a productive meeting. Just remember, no meeting is perfect, so don’t beat yourself up if things do get off track some!