At oDesk, our in-house full-time employees work from home at least one day a week, and we’re regularly collaborating with a team of about 250 remote contractors who act as a crucial extension of our internal team. This has forced us to study how to make meetings work for all involved.

We’ve found there are three steps to a successful online meeting:

• Be sure you need a meeting to accomplish the desired result
• Establish topics and their time allocation, roles and processes (planning objectives, information sharing, problem solving, decision making, relationship building)
• Assess your meeting afterwards (results met, process adhered to, relationships strengthened)

We started by defining the roles involved in making a remote meeting work: the organizer, coordinator, presenter(s) and attendees. Each role has its responsibilities to the team, and by defining those roles, we’re able to ensure accountability for each meeting’s success and seek out ways to continually improve the remote meeting experience. Adopting these roles has allowed us to make sure members of a distributed team are as active, included, and productive during a meeting as those who are on-site.

Organizer: Setting the stage

Someone needs to make sure the meeting will accommodate all participants. The format of the meeting will largely depend on the needs of the group and the goals of the meeting. The meeting organizer works with the presenter to ensure that the right format is chosen and prepared ahead of time.

• Where will we hold the on-site meeting? Generally, this will be a conference room or office large enough to hold all the on-site attendees, with the technology necessary to accommodate remote attendees.
• What kind of access do remote attendees need? Is audio sufficient, or do they need video of the room? Do they need to be able to see slides or other materials?
• How will remote attendees “dial in”? This means choosing the platform of the meeting, which can include a bridge line, Skype, or a desktop sharing/presenting platform such as GoToMeeting.
• How will we communicate when and how to attend? Invitees need to know when, where and how to attend the meeting. If remote attendees need to have a login to register or to download and install a plugin, the organizer makes sure they are aware of this potential roadblock and are prepared in advance.
• Is everyone clear on the roles and their responsibilities? Make sure all attendees are aware of the presenters and meeting coordinator, and share the agenda and best practices with them.

Presenters: Adapting to the environment

Presenters must remember to take into account the remote participants. When you’re explaining concepts or an initiative to a distributed team, will there be visual aids? Do you intend to show something on a computer screen? Does it need to be seen live, as you manipulate it, or can you send a copy of the material, such as a PowerPoint presentation, to remote participants so they can follow along? Prior to the meeting, the presenter should work with the meeting organizer to make sure they—and the facility—are prepared technically to present via local projection and remote platforms.

During the meeting, presenters should:

• Log onto their presentation platform five minutes early to address any technical difficulties.
• Welcome everyone and ask remote attendees whether they can hear and see appropriately
• Make sure to verbalize throughout the meeting what attendees should be seeing (slide number, visual cues, etc.) to help flag sharing problems quickly.
• Ask whether the remote team has any questions. It can be hard for remote participants to interject or notify organizers of their desire to speak. Give them equal opportunity to contribute by offering them the floor at meeting/slide transitions.
• If a contributor is not near a microphone or speakerphone, repeat the statement or question yourself to ensure remote attendees can hear all conversations (since you’ll probably be best situated for microphone pickup).

Coordinators: Keeping everything on track

Identify a coordinator before the meeting. This person makes sure that the technical side runs smoothly and is prepared to respond to challenges as they arise. The meeting coordinator can also be the organizer, but should not be a presenter. If presentations are being made from more than one location, there should ideally be a coordinator in each place. Also, the coordinators should be members of the department presenting the meeting, to ensure that they’ll understand the material being presented, even if they’re distracted by the on-the-fly back-end management.

During the meeting, the coordinator:

• Facilitates an instant messaging group chat with remote team members, including updating the conversation regularly as problems are recognized and addressed. This IM session allows remote members to communicate technical difficulties or other distractions that need to be addressed without interrupting the meeting flow.
• Handles all troubleshooting requiring local action, such as adjusting microphones, encouraging speakers to talk louder, refreshing slide screens, etc.

Attendees: Ready to go

Attendees have a role to play in keeping the meeting running smoothly, as well. They’re responsible for:

• Logging onto the platform five minutes early to address any technical issues prior to the meeting.
• Communicating difficulties during the meeting to the coordinator via the chosen instant messaging channel.

A note on having a solid platform

Often a simple phone call and speakerphone is sufficient, but make sure any printed material, such as an agenda, is also shared with remote participants before the meeting. Depending on your presentation needs, more involved platform options include:

• Dial-in conference bridges or direct-dial phone calls
• Skype (video and voice chat)
• Shared documents (Google Docs)
• GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar
• WebEx

Whatever platform you choose, adapt your presentation to the platform’s strengths (don’t try to present a PowerPoint over a direct-dial phone call), and make sure that everyone is prepared. Check in with remote attendees afterward to make sure they had a positive experience, and work on ironing out wrinkles as they’re identified.

At oDesk, we’ve been refining our techniques for years, and we’re progressing toward meetings that are every bit as easy as having everyone under the same roof — sometimes even easier. More importantly, we’ve made sure that our remote workers are able to fully contribute to our success at least as well as if they were in our office. Which is the whole point of what we do, after all.

Gary Swart is CEO of oDesk. He has more than 17 years’ experience leading remote and local teams as an executive at Intellibank, IBM and Pure Software. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik

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My 10 tips cover three important dimensions: Technology settings and strategies, our developing calendaring etiquette and norms, and broader organizational practices.

Technology settings and strategies

1. Set up appointment slots. Many systems (I’m most familar with Tungle.me and Google Calendar) let you choose the times others can book you.
2. Make your wishes known. Many systems let you add comments on the page where people would schedule you, so use those comments to share your preferences for scheduling meetings. On my scheduling page I ask that people request at least three options, across multiple days.
3. Set your default meeting time to a smaller increment. This great tip comes from Thursday Bram. I just changed my default meeting time to 15 minutes. She also challenges us to:
4. Schedule your own time so you can get some work done. My own technique is to schedule my required events (with prep, travel, and assimilation time added on), block time for work, and then negotiate the shared aspect of my calendar. You may not have that kind of control, but as you’ll see in the the organizational practices category of tips, you won’t have this kind of control unless you ask.
5. Check the other person’s schedule first. Before asking someone if you can book some time (see next tip below), search the system for times that might work. You’ll get an better idea of the how busy the person is and be ready to book using their technology of choice.

Etiquette and norms

6. Get an OK before you set the meeting. Don’t book someone else without prior correspondence, unless it is standard operating practice, or the person’s scheduling page says you can.
7. Offer multiple options. If your calendar system allows it, suggest a few different meeting times, spread across multiple days — you never know where the person will be and whether or not they’ll have access to a computer, good wifi, or whatever else the event might need.
8. Don’t schedule back-to-back events. The person will be more likely to be on time and have your agenda in mind if you give them some breathing room. Try and schedule for an “odd” time so others are less likely to schedule immediately before or after your meeting.

Organizational practices

9. Talk about calendering and meeting ideals. Come to agreement around norms for booking each other, how personal time can be blocked, and assumptions about meetings. Agree on when it’s ok to say no to a meeting.
10. Enlist IT’s help. See if your information technology gurus can adjust the calendaring system to defaults of 15, 25, or 55 minutes, to help shorten meetings (or at least allow 5 minutes’ breathing room between them). If this isn’t a standard setting, see if IT can ask the vendor to implement it as a new feature.

Certainly, we’ve had shared calendars inside organizations for years. That doesn’t mean we’ve done calendaring well or that we’re prepared for public calendar sharing.

Would be great to know how these tips have worked out for you. Please share other tips you’ve found to be valuable.

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I’ve been having conference calls that end up resulting in additional conference calls to discuss the findings of the previous conference call, and then having more conference calls that are required with another group of people because some folks got left out of the loop either purposely or accidentally and then we have to entirely or partially re-cap them… with another conference call.

It doesn’t matter if 20 email chains go back and forth that summarize the calls, the conferences never seem to end. Effectively, each successive conference call turns into a partial repeat of the one before it, resulting in a vicious cycle of “Groundhog Day” all week long.

Do you know how I realize that conference calls are becoming a serious problem? I have three VOIP handsets that I have dedicated to my business line. It’s not unusual for me to completely chain-smoke the charging on all three handsets for a 10 or 12 hour workday, of which 70 to 80 percent of that day is dedicated to conference calls.

And it’s not just Perlow who is experiencing conference call issues. As director of business development at the Acumen Fund, Sacha Dichter is pretty far removed from the world of IT, but he has a similar complaint to Perlow — conference calls can really suck. Dichter diagnosis many of his calls as suffering from “telephonitis,” which he described as “the process whereby otherwise conversant, engaged, active people become silent in the face of a group conference call.” To fight the dread condition, Dichter offers a number of tips including:

When silence starts to set in, start cold calling people. This has two effects: making sure you’re hearing from people, and creating an incentive (for those who don’t like being called on) for people to speak up when they have something to say.

Never equate silence with agreement. It’s bad enough to do this in person. Worse still on the phone.

Marketing guru and author Seth Godin has experienced the telephonitis phenomenon as well, but he offers a different solution –- using chat in parallel with voice calls (he recommends Campfire), which he says offers three advantages:

When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen. The first is that everyone participates. If you don’t, it’s noticeable and you won’t be invited back.

Second, the voice part of the call acts as a narrative for the chat part, allowing people to highlight or respond to what’s being said.

Most of all, it creates organized, trackable chaos, which was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

In a previous WebWorkerDaily Tales from the Trenches posts, Orange Business Services’ Mark Fitzpatrick said his team had great success with Godin’s parallel chat technique. Keeping a chat log of calls and reactions to what’s been said is also one possible solution to Perlow’s complaint about time-wasting “catch-up” conference calls, allowing those that missed earlier information to read up on what they missed rather than being told over yet another call.

How does your team battle telephonitis and conference call overload?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Editor B, CC 2.0.

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The key to remaining productive is to not let distractions sidetrack you from your primary job. Here are a few tips for taking charge of your day and kicking a few of the most common distractions to the curb.

1. Social media. Turn it off when you need to focus. Seriously. Shut down your Twitter client and log out of Facebook and other services for at least part of the day when you really need to focus on your work. If you can’t turn them off, you can still disable notifications so that you aren’t having them pop into view constantly. This doesn’t mean that you can’t check social media while you work, but you can minimize the impact by only checking in periodically. Maybe you look at Twitter and Facebook once per hour, or when you finish one task and are moving to the next. But really, if you are checking Twitter every few minutes, are you really going to get as much work done as you would if you weren’t checking it?
2. Visitors. Whether you work in an office or at home, people will drop in and distract you. I’ll admit it, I often listen to music or put my headphones in just to signal to people that I am not available. If people see that you have headphones in, they will at least think twice about bothering you. Leaving your phone headset on can also work. You might try “do not disturb” signs or shutting your office door, if you are lucky enough to have one. I’ve even had pretty good luck with hiding and working in a super secret location until I finished a piece of work that needed focused concentration.
3. Unnecessary or unproductive meetings. I’m a big fan of not attending meetings that aren’t valuable in some way. Now, this probably doesn’t mean that you can blow off your manager’s staff meeting or important meetings with clients, but you can probably skip a few meetings. I’ll often look at the agenda for a meeting, and if there isn’t anything particularly relevant for me, I’ll send the organizer an email to let them know that I won’t be attending. On the flip side, you should be considerate when scheduling your own meetings. Cancel them if you don’t have anything important for the meeting, and always send an agenda in advance to let people know whether or not they need to attend.
4. Email. Most of us get more email than what we can possibly read anyway, and it just keeps coming in! You could probably spend all day just responding to email, but then you would never get any work done. The first thing to do is turn off any pop-up notifications that you get every time someone sends you an email. Next, set up some filters and color code email from important people to help you notice the ones you care about while ignoring the rest. Now, the hard part. You have to actually ignore your email and focus on other work without that distraction. You can occasionally glance at your email on a regular schedule or between tasks and look for anything critical. If it’s not critical, ignore it for a bit until you are ready to spend a little chunk of time focused on doing email.
5. Instant messages. For really serious work, you might think about logging completely out of your instant messaging client. For most of us, we can use custom status messages to signal to people how urgent their request should be before they interrupt you. I recently set my status to “cranky, interrupt at your own risk”, and I don’t think I had a single IM during that time. I also use the generic, “busy – priority interrupts only” status, and you can get pretty creative with these to let people know that they really should think twice about interrupting. It is also perfectly acceptable to not respond immediately to an IM. If a friend or co-worker sends you a message on a topic that isn’t going to be critical, ignore it until you get to a good stopping point or when you are ready to take a break and respond when it makes sense for you.

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The survey also found that 67 percent of respondents spend between one to four hours per week just preparing for status meetings, and 59 percent said that preparing for status meetings often takes longer than the meeting itself. In addition, 57 percent of those surveyed indicated that they multitask during status meetings — so maybe there’s more work getting done than one might think!

The survey was conducted online within the United States from June 6–8, among 2,373 information workers. It was undertaken by Harris Interactive on behalf of Clarizen, the project management system that Thursday covered a few months ago. The survey defined a status meeting as one in which team members are updated on progress and completion of tasks. Brainstorming, strategy and planning meetings were not included.

If you’re finding your meetings unproductive, there are a number of tools available to help, including meetin.gs and yaM. Many of the project management apps that we cover are intended, among other things, to help keep team members updated on project status and what their colleagues are doing and so reduce the time spent in meetings. And there are some techniques, like the Google system that Imran reported on last year, for making meetings more productive.

How much time do you spend in meetings? Are they productive?

Photo by stock.xchng user wagg66

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To make using the app as frictionless as possible, users don’t have to log in to use it; attendees are sent a meeting invitation via email that will add the meeting to their calendar and also contains a unique URL to access the shared online meeting space. They can fill out their profile using data from their Facebook account if they wish, but it’s not required.

Each meeting has its own dedicated meeting page, which contains information about the meeting (time, date, location, attendees), as well as allowing users to upload materials (files and documents) as well as access the agenda and share meeting notes. Updates are made in real-time, allowing all participants to see notes taken during the meeting. Materials can also be uploaded to the meeting space without logging into the app by emailing them to special address. A nice touch is that during the meeting the meeting page’s footer contains a progress bar that lets users know how long the meeting has left to run.

Meetin.gs competes with yaM, a similar online meeting tool that I’ve written about previously. It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that yaM does — there’s no online whiteboard, drawing or voting tools, for example — but for many meetings yaM’s extra features aren’t necessary, and Meetin.gs’ simpler interface should make it easier to use.

Meetin.gs is currently in private beta; you can request an invite at the homepage.

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Minutes.io effectively provides a templated online document for storing meeting notes. At the top of the page, you can enter a name for the meeting and (optionally) record its location, while the meeting time and date are recorded automatically. Below that is a field to record the minute taker, while other attendees are added beneath. Most of the page is taken up by space for the minutes of the meeting. Each item is recorded on a new line., and the minute taker can select the type of minute that’s being recorded in a drop-down box (a choice of TODO, OKAY, INFO or IDEA), a description, its owner(s) and, optionally, a due date. The app supports keyboard shortcuts, which is useful for speedily recording notes in fast-moving meetings.

Once the meeting is done, the minutes are then available online, and can be shared with participants and other stakeholders via email. There’s also an option for printing them out. You don’t need to sign-in to use the app; it uses the browser’s local storage to keep track of previously taken minutes, too.

Compared to fancier collaborative meeting apps like yaM (see my review here), minutes.io doesn’t really do anything groundbreaking; you could accomplish much the same kind of thing using a document template in Google Docs, for example. But minutes.io’s simplicity makes note-taking easy and fast, its structure should encourage users to record useful minutes, and its output is well presented and easy to understand. Recommended.

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When you first visit the site, it will present a grid showing the time in your current location, Sydney and Tokyo. Adding more locations is just a matter of typing city, country or time zone names into the text box at the top. You can adjust the date shown by using the calendar. (When using time zone conversion tools, it’s important to always input the correct date to account for unexpected daylight saving time changes — I’ve been caught out by that in the past!) Locations can be reordered on the page by dragging and dropping them, and deleted at the click of a button.

You can select a time by moving the black rectangle shown in the screenshot above; you can drag to select meetings lasting longer than one hour. Clicking the mouse then highlights your selection, as shown in the screenshot below.

You can then click a button to be given a unique URL to share with meeting participants that lists the meeting time in all the selected locations. It’s nicely designed app that’s a joy to use, which is not something you might expect to say about a time zone converter. It’s much more intuitive than Timeanddate.com’s app, and while it’s probably not quite as pretty as Every Time Zone, it’s more useful. Recommended.

(via The Next Web)

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1. Decline meetings. I don’t accept every meeting. If I don’t see real benefit resulting from my attendance, either for me or someone else, I decline the meeting. By only going to meetings you need to attend, you free up some time to do something productive.
2. Have effective meetings. Strive to have shorter, more effective meetings by being organized and always having a definitive end time. Spending a few minutes preparing for a meeting and send out an agenda and other materials in advance; it will mean that you get through the meeting faster, with less floundering around figuring out what you need to accomplish. I also try to keep people on track during the meeting and attempt to end on time or early when possible.
3. Schedule work. We all have certain tasks that require uninterrupted time where we can focus. For those activities, I try to free up big blocks of time on my calendar, and I schedule those tasks the same way that I would schedule a meeting, which allows me the time to work uninterrupted.
4. Schedule recreation. I also schedule my workouts just like any other meeting on my calendar. This has a couple of advantages. First, I get a reminder when it’s time to work out, and second, it discourages other people from scheduling over my workout and makes it more likely that I will be able to find the time for staying fit.
5. Take advantage of off-peak times. Try to schedule activities at times when you can do them in less time. When I need to drive to work (a 45- to 60-minute commute), I get up early to beat some of the traffic and schedule my workout after work, so that by the time I’m done exercising and ready to drive home, the traffic isn’t as heavy. I also try to avoid grocery shopping right after work or going to the bank at lunch.
6. Group and combine. Where possible, I take advantage of logical groupings to minimize travel time, such as scheduling afternoon meetings downtown when I know I need to be there for an evening event. I also try to combine meetings where possible, and I often meet with people for informal discussions at local tech events or prior to meetings. By combining meetings with meetups, I can get more done.
7. Be flexible. I try to be flexible with my schedule to maximize productivity. On days that I work from home, I start work at six or seven in the morning and then take a slightly longer lunch with a workout, which helps me start the afternoon refreshed. I also tend to move things around on my schedule and be flexible to take advantage of unexpected, but productive conversations with coworkers or to stay “in the zone” when I’m really being productive on a chunk of work.
8. Take breaks. When we get really busy, we tend to turn into workaholics and attempt to power through the work even when we aren’t being productive. While taking a break sounds like you will lose time, in many cases, it can help you get a new perspective on a difficult problem. A short walk can help, as can taking a break to accomplish something else, like running an errand or getting in a workout. After a little break, your brain will be refreshed and ready to be productive again.
9. Turn off the television. I used to watch a lot of television in the evenings until I realized I was spending too much time watching other people and not enough time experiencing my own life. I was surprised at how much time I had for hobbies, reading, fitness or even just getting a little work done in the evening when television wasn’t sucking hours out of my day.
10. Block out time for you. I block out my calendar from 4:30 to 5:00 every afternoon to give me a few minutes to reflect on the day, double-check my task list and wrap up any last-minute projects. In a past job where I often had back-to-back meetings all day, I used to block out my lunch hour just to give me time to eat! I know others who block off some time in the morning or afternoon to have time to take their kids to and from school. Think about what is important for you and make sure you find time in your schedule for what you want to do.

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Here are a few of tips to help you overcome those issues and make your international meetings more successful:

1. Find a suitable time. If you only need to accommodate a couple of major locations, this can be relatively easy, but it can get ridiculously complicated if you are trying to co-ordinate attendance with people around the world. However, there are some great tools that can help you visualize working hours in various time zones. The World Clock Meeting Planner is one of my favorites: you can input up to four cities, and it produces a chart showing how the times vary in the various locations, helpfully color-coding the times shown with green for working hours, yellow for non-working hours, and red for times when people usually sleep. When you’ve determined the time for the meeting, it can be useful to include a link to a tool like the Event Time Announcer in the meeting invitation to ensure that attendees don’t make any time zone conversion mistakes.
2. Rotate meeting times. If you regularly have a meeting involving participants from spread of time zones where it is impossible to find a time that suits everyone, try rotating the meeting time (also known as “sharing the pain”). You rotate the meeting around, so that everyone gets convenient times sometimes, and also gets the terrible times sometimes. For example, my company recently moved a meeting that had been at noon my time for about a year to 11 p.m. to better accommodate Asian participation, and we’ll probably keep this new time for a while before moving it again six months to a year from now.
3. Send materials in advance. You should still send materials in advance even if you are using a meeting tool that allows people to access them during the meeting. I’ve been that lonely participant in a remote hotel room with a terrible Wi-Fi connection unable to keep me online and logged into the meeting tool. If you want everyone to participate, make sure you’ve sent the materials in advance so they aren’t relying on an Internet connection.
4. Allow plenty of preparation time. Whenever possible, you should send out an agenda and materials 24 to 48 hours in advance of your meeting, especially for international meetings where not everyone is a native speaker. This helps to ensure everyone receives the materials with enough time to review them. With non-native speakers of the language, having some time to review the materials and come prepared with questions can make the difference between a successful meeting and one that doesn’t really accomplish much.
5. Speak slowly. This is hard for me, so I appreciate it when someone asks me to speak more slowly. For participants who aren’t native speakers, speaking slowly helps give them time to process what you are saying, but it can also help people with poor audio quality over cell phones, or on international phone lines with delays.
6. Pause for questions. Leave plenty of time for questions, and provide lengthy pauses to give people time to think about their questions. Too many people rush through presentations without giving people time to respond with questions. This is especially true in international meetings, as in some cultures, interrupting is considered rude, and also some participants may need a little extra time to think about how to translate their question into your language before asking it. If your pause for questions doesn’t feel uncomfortably long, it probably wasn’t long enough.
7. Send minutes. Don’t forget to follow up after the meeting with detailed minutes, materials and any action items people are responsible for accomplishing. This means you should assign someone to take notes during the meeting, so the same person isn’t trying to present and take notes at the same time. Having detailed minutes is a great way to make sure you can follow up with people and gives people who had a hard time following along a little more information to review.

Photo courtesy Flickr user leoplus.

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Today’s acquisition is the latest in a series of acquisitions in the collaboration and web communications arenas, including Salesforce’s acquisition of the email contact management company Etacts, and Skype’s announcement that they are buying mobile video provider Qik.

Salesforce says that it plans to follow “the proven Facebook model of combining collaboration and communication into an integrated service.” With consumer sites like Facebook and Twitter creating expectations of real-time social sharing, it is important to incorporate such capabilities into the enterprise. A Dimdim acquisition seems to fit logically into that vision.

It appears likely that Salesforce will use the acquisition to add Dimdim’s presence and on-demand meeting and collaboration tools into Salesforce’s internal systems. At the recent GigaOM Net:Work Conference, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff discussed how they are using their Chatter tools internally to flatten the structure of their own organization, and to allow collaboration and communication across all parts of the company.

We’ve been fans of Dimdim as an easy-to-use and affordable screen-sharing and meeting service, and we’re sorry to see it being lost as an option. New account creation has already been disabled, and it appears that existing monthly accounts will only be available until March 15. Annual accounts will remain active until the current subscription period ends.

Have you used Dimdim? How will the acquisition affect you?

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1. Double-check time zones. Heck, triple check them — there are all sorts of strange situations you can encounter. Different countries start daylight savings time on different dates, certain areas don’t participate in daylight savings time (and there are inconsistencies on the country, state and county levels), and the international dateline can be tricky. The best bet is to confirm the time of the meeting with each attendee.
2. Don’t start with a brand new tool. If you haven’t used the software you’re planning to run your next meeting with, do a dry run with it before the day of the meeting. Every tool has its own quirks and the middle of a meeting isn’t the best time to figure them out. If you can run a test with a few of the people who will be attending your meeting, so much the better.
3. Plan for a back channel. In every meeting, there are people who are trading knowing looks, passing notes or planning to track someone down right after the meeting. If you build in a back channel where your meeting attendees can pass information privately, you can make sure that any problems or questions can be handled in the moment.
4. Offer a transcript or minutes. With many online meetings, there is a certain sense that taking notes isn’t quite as necessary, especially if there is a recording of the meeting available. But no-one ever sits through the recording of the meeting after the fact, so having written notes or  a summary is important to ensure that people act on any decision or plans made at the meeting.
5. Have a follow-up plan in place. With a virtual meeting, you can’t exactly count on bumping into someone in the hallway the next day. Making concrete plans for follow-up is necessary to making sure that any plans or decisions actually get carried out without having to schedule yet another meeting.

These rules may seem like common sense, but they are often among the first things to get missed when you’re in a rush.  (Interested in learning more about how to work effectively with a remote workforce? Come to our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9 — Ed.)

Image by Flickr user Kate Sheets

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Here are a few tips for meeting organizers to help make sure that they have a great meeting over the phone (with “phone” being loosely defined here to include Skype and other online real-time audio):

1. Give people plenty of notice for the meeting, if possible. Ideally, try to schedule your phone meetings with plenty of advance notice to make sure that people have time to prepare. I know this isn’t always possible, but a little planning ahead of time can really help. Keep in mind that what seems like two days’ notice to you might be considerably less for international participants who won’t see your request until their morning, which could mean they have considerably less time to prepare.
2. Keep time zones in mind. In cases where people are spread out across time zones, taking the time to find out where people are physically located so that you can pick a time that is most convenient will help your attendees be alert and prepared for the meeting. With phone numbers becoming less tied to your location, don’t assume that you know where people are based on a phone number. Take the time to ask where they are and find out if they have a preferred meeting time. For example, I work with one person in Finland who prefers 10pm calls to 5pm calls, so he can have meetings after his kids are in bed.
3. Send a written agenda and materials out via email (or post them online) when you schedule the meeting, or no later than 24-48 hours before the meeting, when possible. This gives people plenty of time to prepare for the meeting, especially for people who primarily speak other languages. Giving people who are less fluent in your language a little extra time to assimilate the information can make a big difference in their level of participation. Don’t forget to include the phone number or other logistics for the meeting with local dial-in numbers in other countries, if they’re available.
4. Send a reminder about an hour before the meeting with any last minute updates. This reminder gives people one last chance to prepare for the meeting and can help forgetful participants, especially those for whom the meeting is at a non-traditional time.
5. As people join the meeting, make sure that they announce themselves so that you know who is attending the call. A quick prompt like, “welcome, who just joined us?” can help people know that they should announce themselves. I do this even for Skype calls where you can see who joined because it gives you time to make audio adjustments for anyone who can’t be heard clearly.
6. Double-check that everyone has all of the materials for the meeting. Start the meeting with some introductions (if needed) and a quick review of the agenda and what you plan to cover. This gives you a final check that people know how the meeting will be conducted, and you can make sure that they have all of their materials before the meeting.
7. Consider using online meeting tools. There are many tools that can be used in real-time to manage the content during the meeting and make sure that people are all looking at the same pages of the materials (GoToMeeting, for example). You should make sure that the solution you pick will work for most people given their bandwidth rates and system configuration. For example, if you have some people running on Macs, don’t pick a tool that only works on Windows. I always consider this an optional step for international meetings, especially if you have people located in countries where maintaining a stable Internet connect can be a challenge for people calling in from home outside of the work day. Using these tools doesn’t replace the need to send materials out in advance, since you want to give people time to assimilate the information and have a copy as a backup in case they can’t get connected during the meeting.

Meetings held over the phone where you can’t see the other people are challenging enough, but add international participants, time zones and language challenges into the mix, and you can end up with a seriously unproductive meeting. Taking the time to prepare and keeping a few of these tips in mind can help your meeting go much more smoothly.

What are your tips for making sure that your international phone meetings are successful and productive?

Photo by Flickr user StephenMitchell used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

While in some cases a face-to-face meeting is an absolute necessity, sometimes you can get by using technology. If you’re grounded this week, give these apps a try — they’re all available for very low cost (and some of them are free).

• Skype – For a quick teleconference with a few participants, VoIP service Skype is great. You can use a webcam for video calling, and the latest versions of the software enable screen sharing. The basic Skype service is free, and the client software is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and many mobile devices.
• Dimdim — For larger meetings, you’ll need a more robust web conferencing tool than Skype. My personal favorite is Dimdim, as it’s got a great feature set for a good price. Other tools available include WebEx and GoToMeeting.
• SocialText — Corporate social networking tools are useful for communicating with colleagues and keeping them up-to-date with what you’re working on. SocialText is very full-featured (it’s kind of like Facebook for businesses), but there are other, simpler tools, such as Yammer and present.ly.
• 5pm — A good project management tool can go a long way toward keeping stakeholders informed about the progress of a project, reducing the need for update meetings. I like 5pm as it’s well-designed, but other good options include Basecamp and Wrike.
• OffiSync — The latest version of OffiSync (a nifty little program that allows you to sync Office documents using a Google Docs account) allows for document co-authoring — which means that two or more people can work simultaneously on the same document. While it’s never going to be as good as being in the same room with your co-workers, if you need to collaborate on a document remotely, it’s worth trying. Free.
• Tungle — Need to reschedule your meeting? Free app Tungle will help you find a time that’s convenient for everyone.

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Photo courtesy Flickr user thorvaldurkarl, licensed under CC

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ScheduleOnce integrates with your Google Calendar to create a more seamless way to discover availabilities and block out time for the actual meeting. It now also has a Google Calendar gadget that sits to the right of your calendar and gives you a view of pending and scheduled meetings. You can click directly to your ScheduleOnce dashboard from the gadget.

It also now has a Gmail gadget for easy access to the ScheduleOnce scheduling tool. And there is also a gadget that integrates into Google Apps as the company was one of 50 companies signed up for the original beta of the Google Marketplace. (Note that if you are integrating ScheduleOnce into Google Apps, you will need to take additional steps to add gadgets to your calendar and Gmail.)

ScheduleOnce’s goal is to raise the probability of identifying and booking a meeting time that works for everyone who should be at the meeting.

Time Zones Are Critical

If you read my post about my recent scheduling fiasco at SXSW, you’ll know that I need effective tools to help me with scheduling. Time zone differences and confusion caused me miss appointments (ironically, one of them was a demo with ScheduleOnce). ScheduleOnce has several features for dealing with time zone confusion:

1. It auto-detects your time zone based on your IP and prompts you to change it if you are traveling (you can refuse);
2. It lets you manually switch your time zone to override auto-detection (which would have helped me while scheduling interviews in Austin while I was still in Alaska and the reps I was meeting with were from around the world).
3. Daylight Saving Time is taken into account

ScheduleOnce, however, would not have been an ideal product to use to schedule my appointments with different individuals at SXSW. It is designed to schedule a single meeting with multiple parties.

Not Like Doodle

The basic functionality of ScheduleOnce feels a bit like Doodle. However, Doodle is a schedule engine based on discrete time suggestions, offering you just a series of checkboxes to determine times. The ScheduleOnce engine is based on greater availability areas, and you can select calendar areas in 15 minute increments, which offers a better utilization of attendee availability. At the end of the day, the better scheduling apps are the ones that have a higher chance of identifying the best meeting time the first time you send out a notice, right?

What About Recurring Meetings?

According to the company, there is no demand from users for a recurring meeting function. The tool is being used for discrete meetings and calls involving a number of people with diverse schedules who are potentially in different locations.

I may try out ScheduleOnce for certain occasions, just like I reach for Doodle at times (I use Doodle when I’m needing to schedule multiple parties on a single call or meeting and some of them are less technically inclined). I still am looking at other meeting schedulers, but at the moment I’m sticking with TimeBridge because of its a more complete scheduling solution.

What meeting scheduler do you use and how’s it working for you?

Image by stock.xchng user jan-willem

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