CHAPTER 26

Making Global Meetings Work

by June Delano

Running a virtual team is an interesting challenge, especially if people are spread across countries and time zones and have different levels of language proficiency. At one time I had a team of about 17 people spread across 10 countries, and we needed to have a meeting weekly or at least every other week. The challenge was that somebody was always in the meeting in the middle of the night, somebody was always the only person in a room while other people were in small groups.

So we experimented and came up with a model we called “inconvenience everybody equally.” That meant that we rotated our meeting time so that at some point, everyone—whether they were in London, Berlin, New Delhi, or New York—was up in the middle of the night or in the middle of their normal workday. And it meant that everybody got a chance to be drowsy and falling asleep, as well as wide awake and full of energy at the peak of their day.

We also came up with a rule that, at first, was very hard to enforce: Even if there were several people in one location, each needed to be on the phone separately—not in a room together. It completely changes the dynamic of a meeting if some people are together in one place and can see and talk to one another off-line.

So although several of us were sitting in a row in cubicles in the same office, we made sure that we all got on the phone equally with everybody else. That meant no side conversations and that everybody needed to put their expression into their voice rather than rely on facial expressions.

We also learned that it was really important to have an agenda go out ahead of time, particularly when you have people who are speaking a second or a third language. Seeing the agenda in advance gave them a chance to read and get familiar with the content and what was going to be discussed.

Finally, we made sure that we kept the agenda to those things that really mattered to everyone who was on the phone. If there are 17 people on the line, you don’t want to have people getting bored and losing their sense of involvement and engagement in the meeting.

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June Delano is a managing partner and cofounder of The ClearLake Group.

This content originally appeared in the Virtual Teams module of Harvard ManageMentor (product #6789AR).