Training is happening virtually these days. So the leaders must focus to have healthy communication between the team members in meetings. How can they focus on the following attributes to make remote communication successful?

Research has proved that the way team members behave with each other during interactions is important for employee satisfaction and the performance of the team as a whole. When the team members don’t have healthy relationships among them, it’s because some team members don’t want to bring forth their opinions because they are scared to get embarrassed. They don’t want someone to disagree with their views.

For all team members to voice their opinions in virtual meetings, they must have psychological safety.

There should be respect for each other’s opinions so that they are expressed freely. Due to being respected, the team members are frank about their opinions and contribute more to work. So the leaders have to establish psychological safety, to make sure that the team members contribute more. The following ways make sure that there is psychological safety:

• Favourable group norms:

Verifying assumptions so that you know what is desired by someone or what is implied by their actions and words
Having open communication about disagreements and tensions and whenever someone needs to be commended.
Accountability for all implies that rules apply to all team members even a leader.

• Practices to take turns

Making sure that there is the discipline in meetings so that all the team members have equal chances to speak

• Adjustment and empathy

These are important to make sure that team members must give attention to the way other team members are speaking, their facial expressions and other physical hints in a meeting.

Empathy is a key factor in ensuring that the team members work in cooperation with each other. So, it can be improved with the help of the practice of team members. A leader has to ensure that empathy is present in a virtual meeting also.

• Have meetings for improving productivity

Online meetings are important for team members to be more productive or lose all of it completely. These important factors can ensure that team meetings are successful

• Have Questions in advance

When right, use questions to make sure people have prepared for the meeting in advance. For people to come fresh to a meeting, they must be thoroughly prepared.

• Goals of the meeting

It’s also important to make sure that the goals of the meeting are clear. The meeting should have allotted time to speak for the team members. For this, it’s important that all these things are clear to the team members either in a group chat or when the invitation to the meeting has been sent to them.

The last and final tip is that the meeting must have a simple agenda. There must not be too many items on the agenda otherwise the team members can get confused. In a virtual meeting, you can use a thumb poll to get voting done on something.

• Time is of essence

Time is of importance in any meeting because the members have to return to work also. So, make sure that although the meeting members can share their views, they don’t start to share vague views about the topic. Only the experts must be allowed to speak about the topic in depth. The team members must only get allotted time to speak on a topic.

This is how leaders can ensure that virtual meetings happen successfully.