How can I improve my phone meetings and look good?

I manage a team of over 20 people who are based nationally with some team members based in the Asia Pacific region. I am required to run telephone team meetings fortnightly and I have had feedback that the meetings are boring and that people lose interest. How can I improve my meetings and look good?

Telephone meetings/conferences can be tricky. How do you keep people engaged and focused on the meeting rather than their emails? To improve these meetings for yourself, others and get the results that you want to generate look at what’s currently not working as a place to begin. When given feedback about the meetings, what were the specifics?

• What was boring about them?
• Do the meetings run on for too long?
• Is it the content?
• Are the meetings boring from start to finish or do they start off well and lose momentum?
• Does one person do most of the talking?
• Thinking back over the last few meetings that you have led, can you pinpoint the moment that people start to loose interest/focus? This information could help you establish the timings for meetings. Generally, it is advised that telephone meetings are conducted quickly and anything over 40 minutes loses the audience.
• How do you prepare for the meetings?
• What is the purpose of the calls? Why are they run fortnightly?

There are some practical things to consider, and we will get to those. Firstly, what is it about you that’s unique? What’s your talent? Bring more of who you are into your meetings and have some fun. If you are a humour type, then add humour, make it quirky. If you have a gift for finding clarity, bring that clarity to the meetings and the content. If you are logical and known as an intelligent type then give your theory on the situation. Of course, keep to the purpose of the meetings and ensure that it is relevant to the outcomes you want.

Create the atmosphere you want the meeting to flow from. Atmosphere is important. Ever walked into a room when someone has just had an argument? Can you feel it? Absolutely! Not a good atmosphere to create from. The same goes for your meetings. Therefore, get conscious about the atmosphere you want to create so your meetings can begin productively and upbeat. Play with short ice breakers to make people laugh, get them present and engaged. Maybe asking a fun question and getting a few responses would work for you. This will come down to your individual style.

Set an intention for yourself, the participants on the call and the outcomes that you want. Setting intensions helps with creating the atmosphere as well as clarity which will help you to stay on topic and ensure that the calls end on time and don’t go off on a tangent.

Invite participation. How involved are the others on the call?

Monitor the atmosphere. Start to train yourself to read the atmosphere, to what’s not being said and name that. Use the atmosphere and what’s happening to direct your questions, give you a read on whether people are engaged and present or whether it’s time to cut the call because it has gone on for too long.

Preparation for the meetings is vital, clearly communicate outcomes for the call as well as send out an agenda in plenty of time for people to read.

To help you with some extra tips I spoke to a client of mine who regularly runs telephone meetings with up to 60 attendees dialling in globally and asked him how he managed these calls. Here’s what he said:

“I always imagine that I am in a large room with everyone on the call in the room with me. Then when I get a question I imagine that they are somewhere down the back. This helps me to really listen to what the person is saying and to also get a sense of what they may not be saying and what they may be missing.”

“I ensure that I allow time for questions so that it creates collaboration and involvement (and keeps everyone awake!). It’s important to give people on the call time and space to think and to come up with responses and questions. I need to remind myself not to always fill in the silences. When I don’t do this I miss out on important information and what’s really going on for people.”

Also, read the following article by Michael Pollitt for some useful tips.

Pollyanna Lenkic is the founder of Perspectives Coaching, an Australian based coaching and training company. She is an experienced facilitator, certified coach and a certified practitioner of NLP. In 1990 she co-founded a specialist IT recruitment consultancy in London, which grew to employ 18 people and turnover £11 million ($27 million). This blog is about the mistakes she made and the lessons she learned building a business the first time round and how to do it better second time round. For more information go to www.perspectivescoaching.com.au