Mastering Virtual Teams: Strategies, Tools, and Techniques That Succeed, Third Edition

Chapter Eight. Virtual Team Meetings

Knowing how to facilitate and lead meetings is an essential skill for anyone in business. All groups need to share information, coordinate, collaborate, discuss, make decisions, and produce products. Facilitating these processes to be effective and efficient is central to the success of high-performing virtual teams.

The right technical tools enhance our ability to share concepts, merge ideas, and use synergy to accomplish our goals. They also give us the option of interacting synchronously or asynchronously. Meetings can occur over a number of hours or days, and team members can attend the same meeting at different times. “Store and forward” technology allows us to hold a videoconference in China one day and ship the entire meeting, video and data, to Brazil in time for the next business day.

However, meetings will always be composed more of people than of technology. Virtual team leaders and members need to learn and use facilitation techniques that work for virtual teams. Technology cannot make up for poor planning or ill-conceived meetings. In fact, it can make the situation worse.^[1] Without proper facilitation, virtual teams that meet on an ad hoc or short-term basis, such as virtual network and parallel teams, exchange information much less effectively than face-to-face teams do.^[2] Functional virtual teams or long-standing project virtual teams have a better opportunity to create efficient and effective facilitated meetings over time than ...