What we've learned about virtual meetings at Juniper Square

With the situation unfolding now around the COVID-19 coronavirus, many people are avoiding travel and working from home. 

For the past 6 years, Juniper Square has leveraged video conferencing to build a tightly-knit culture of people working together productively across multiple locations. I’ve spent the past few years working from my home office in San Diego, and have team members doing the same from Orange County, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and New York City in addition to those based in our San Francisco and Austin HQ's.

Our sales team has learned a lot by running the majority of our meetings virtually over the years and wanted to share a few things we hope you find useful during this time.

• Choose the right technology. Find a modern video conferencing solution that will meet your needs and standardize it across your company. We use Zoom and love it. It is the most popular product in the category so it's more likely the people you’re speaking with outside the company will have it. We think it does a better job than other options in supporting meetings with visual content like a webinar or client presentation. There’s also a virtual “hand raise” feature that’s useful in large group calls to indicate you want to talk. GoToMeeting and BlueJeans are other popular options. 
• Prepare in advance. Just as you would for an in-person meeting, prepare and send an agenda and any related resources beforehand. We use a shared Google document to do this - both in our 1:1 and team meetings - which helps when you don’t have the benefit of swinging by someone’s desk in the same office. Since you won’t have a whiteboard in the meeting, it’s often worth spending time creating some slides or illustrations to explain more complex concepts. 
• Minimize distractions. If you are working from home, let people know you will be on video so they don't interrupt or walk behind. If your kids visit you, embrace it and introduce them. It will humanize you and it’s inevitable. 
• Turn video on when possible. It really does make for more engaging meetings, and the more you do it the more natural it feels. Front facing, high-resolution cameras are best to optimize for engagement and make the meeting more personal.
• Think about lighting. Make sure your face is well-lit. Be aware that white shirts can look high contrast and opaque if light is bright.
• Follow best practices. If everyone is connecting via computer audio, you should follow suit as the sound quality is typically better. Configure your video conference technology to set this as the default. If sharing your screen, mute notifications and only share the relevant browser window or screen to minimize distractions. 
• Do a test run before your meeting. Especially if you’re connecting to a video platform you’re unfamiliar with, make sure your audio and video work and that you have the right camera and mic hooked up if you using external devices. 
• Don’t skip the small talk. Just as you would before a meeting in person, take a few moments to check in with each other before you begin. It’s even more important for virtual meetings.
• No multitasking. Get the most out of the session by focusing as you would during an in-person meeting. If you use a Mac, turn on “do not disturb” so that emails and messages don’t pop up and distract you. 
• Leverage technology to focus on the conversation. Where appropriate, call recording and transcription software can act as a virtual note taker. Zoom has a native recording tool built in or there are more advanced tools you can purchase and integrate. (We like a tool called Gong for this.)

For larger groups, a few other things we’ve found helpful: 

If one person is joining the meeting from their laptop, have everyone join from their laptop. This puts everyone on equal footing and avoids the group in the conference room unintentionally giving more weight to folks in the room.

Ensure everyone has a chance to speak. Especially important if some are meeting in person and some are remote.

Go on mute if you aren’t talking. The more important the larger your group is!

As we all closely monitor the situation and take steps to safeguard our teams it’s important to know how virtual meetings can allow you to build relationships and maintain productivity. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me and I'd be happy to share best practices we have learned. I'd love to hear your best practices as well.