New Ways to Meet - Strategies For Virtual Teams and Alternatives to Face-To-Face Meetings

There is no doubt about it - meetings take up a good amount of our time on a weekly basis. Think back for a minute on all the time you spent in meetings this past year - whether they were one-on-one meetings or a group meeting in a conference room. WOW, that's a lot of time spent meeting! Was it all necessary? And how much time was spent traveling to and from those meetings? Would some of them have been just as effective without everyone in the same physical place?

Do all meetings need to be face-to-face meetings? That's a question people don't ask often enough. It's not as 'new' or radical a concept as it seems at first blush. Isn't a telephone call a type of virtual meeting? But we are so accustomed to meeting face-to-face that our natural reaction is to think it is necessary. But is it always necessary? And is there a better way to use both the time and money spent just getting to and from these meetings?

Now don't get me wrong; I am not suggesting that you use telephone conferences, web meetings, and video conferencing to fully replace face-to-face meetings. There are some times, and certain issues, that need to be discussed in person. I'm just urging you to think about alternatives and consider your options:

>>> CONFERENCE CALL

Ahhh - the good old conference call. How often people overlook this proven and tried method of meeting virtually. Oftentimes, someone will want to discuss a few issues about a project with me and they will want to meet, usually in the city. Now if you've commuted into a city, you know that you can easily lose 2 hours of your day right there. Most times these meetings can easily be held as a plain old conference call. They are affordable and easy to set up.

In fact, if you have 2 phone lines in your home office most phones today will let you quickly set up a conference call with 2 other people without needing an operator or service to set up the call.

>>> INSTANT MESSAGING

A free solution that allows real time text, voice, or video conferencing is instant messaging. Programs such as Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, or AOL Instant Messenger are popular and easy to learn how to use. All of these programs also provide the ability to share files and photos and require nothing more than a microphone and an inexpensive webcam.

>>> ONLINE CONFERENCING

There are a number of services that allow you to easily set up web-based conferencing. They offer online meeting space allowing you to share a slide show with the people you invite to the meeting.

Other features like real time polling for feedback and complete document sharing (any file on your system, not just slide shows) make this an ideal way to have a meeting and collaborate without travel time or expense.

Some of these services will also handle the voice portion of the meeting but I find this often degrades the quality of the meeting. I usually find it best to use a regular conference call to handle the voice portion and leave the document/slide show sharing and polling to the online meeting service. Some of these services charge on a per-user/per-minute basis (but are still typically cheaper then all the travel).

>>> VIDEO CONFERENCING

If you frequently need to meet with the same people in the same remote locations it might be worth investing in more hi-end video conferencing equipment. The quality of this equipment has really gone up the past few years while price of both the equipment and the bandwidth needed to use it has dropped.

You don't even need to dedicate a whole room to your video conferencing. Polycom makes a portable model that weighs less than 10 lbs and comes as an integrated, all-in-one unit that offers "go anywhere" convenience.

You can save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars by using video conferencing in place of face-to-face meetings on some occasions.

These are just a few simple, realistic alternatives to face-to-face meetings, there are many more. The key is to think about the type of things being discussed. If they are sensitive issues or it is the first meeting for a new team it is probably best to meet face-to-face, but if the point of the meeting is to brainstorm, discuss ideas, or work on and edit a group report or document, there are ways to do that without the wasted time and expense of everyone communing in a central location for the meeting.

So think about the type of meetings you usually have and consider whether some of them might not be just as effective using an alternative method of meeting across distance. Then think about how you'll spend the time you saved!