Remote work has been there for a long time, but Covid-19 speeds up remote work in the corporate world. One of the most significant changes since last year for many workforces is that employees start to work from home.
Unfortunately, many managers use the regular meeting in the wrong way to foster a relationship between team members, which result in employees burnout in a remote meeting. It’s necessary to have an excellent strategy to prevent remote meeting burnout, which affects employees’ productivity and morale.
Send meeting agenda to your team
In a remote working environment, some managers may scare of losing control of the work progress. So they schedule twice meetings for their teams daily. Even though managers may think all the remote meetings they plan are crucial to track progress, it’s critical to develop a good meeting routine.
Planning a meeting agenda can ensure the meeting makes fair use of everybody’s time. If you don’t make your remote meeting productive, it will add further challenges to support your employees during remote work.
Practice Results-driven meeting structure
According to Christina R. Wodtke, the author of Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results, a useful meeting framework can guide the team to achieve its goal productively. She suggests that every meeting’s time can be divided into four quadrants.
The first quadrant is Objective progress discussion, which shows the most critical goals the team needs to achieve. This can enable the manager to navigate the team’s performance quickly: are we getting closer to our objective, or are we off the track?
The second quadrant of the meeting is called Health Metrics discussion, which means those routines we have to perform to keep business running.
The third quadrant of the meeting time is called Plans of This Week, in which you can discuss three to five key things you will do this week to contribute to your team’s objective.
The fourth quadrant is called the Next Four Weeks Plan. The reason to keep reviewing the next four weeks’ plan to prevent “set the goal, forget the goal.”
Having a results-driven meeting structure ensures that all your employees are actively involved in the journey to achieve your team’s goal.
Don’t mix team-building meetings with check-in meeting.
Managers think it is an excellent opportunity to do some relationship building by having casual chatting during check-in meetings when everyone is there. The opposite is true.
First, the span of attention is short for adults, especially in a virtual environment. Your employees will be very tiring and lose focus if they are glued in front of the computer for more than 1 hour. So a laser-focus meeting will work better to retain your employee’s attention.
Secondly, your employees are not the same. Some of them have children. They are interested in sharing their tips in teaching their kids or improving their cooking. Some other team members are young and single. They may lose their interest to join those conversations.
What’s worse, if wrong “social conversation” is chosen, individual team members may become disengaged from the team. If managers really want to improve team bonding, there are many other useful ways, such as Friday celebration meetings or one-to-one coaching.
When implementing remote work effectively, it can bring considerable benefits to both employers and employees. Perhaps at the initial stage of remote working, as a manager, you are frustrated. Use three tips to help you get the best from your remote team meeting and improve your confidence to combat employees’ burnout in a remote meeting.