The Biggest Challenges of Virtual Meetings

In order to be able to ensure your virtual meetings flow smoothly, it’s important to be aware of the most common challenges that are specific to the platform. We’ve touched on a few of those in our introduction, but it’s worth diving deeper into them to understand how they can affect engagement and participation. Here are the most common and biggest challenges that you face when it comes to virtual meetings.

Too much freedom

When communication is done online—as is the case of virtual meetings—people are generally more relaxed as they’re insulated by the distance from the people they’re meeting with. This often makes it very easy for people to start talking over and even through each other. This problem increases proportionally in direct relation to the number of participants that you have in the meeting. The difficulty here is that it’s easy for confusion to reign and difficult to regain control.

Poor information retention

Modern human attention spans are already ridiculously short as they are—the average attention span of an internet user is 8 seconds! Virtual meetings can often run long, especially if everyone participating is comfortable where they are. This often makes it very difficult to keep people focused on the matters at hand, and just as difficult to have anyone pick up on the most critical information that your virtual meetings are trying to push.

Lack of social cues

One particular big challenge when it comes to virtual meetings is the general lack of social cues. These are the subtle non-verbal actions that we subconsciously or consciously look out for to gauge the reactions of people. Perfect examples include facial expressions and body language. A quick narrowing of the eyelids can signal doubt and disbelief while a crossing of the arms can be a sign of defensiveness. They make up 60% to 90% of our conversations with anyone and they’re very difficult to see in virtual meetings.

Misunderstandings

Because of the lack of social cues, it becomes surprisingly easy for misunderstandings to develop. A touch of sarcasm or even a well-meaning jab takes on a whole new dimension of meaning when you take the social cues out. All this can lead to arguments over what is essentially nothing. Even silence can be taken the wrong way with much difficulty for others in discerning what it means. After all, silence in virtual meetings can be caused by anything from focused attention, to tuning out, and even problems with the technology.

Trust is more difficult to build

There’s a power to face-to-face meetings that is lost in virtual meetings. Apart from the social cues that we just talked about, personal encounters help quickly identify common ground and parallel mindsets. These, in turn, become points around which your employees might find kindred spirits to get closer to and develop trust with. The distance inherent to virtual meetings takes away many of these things, making the team feel more disconnected.

Virtual Meetings Done Right

Virtual meetings, in a lot of ways, might seem like at a major disadvantage to face-to-face meetings, but they’re not without their advantages. For one thing, you can connect people across vast distances who might otherwise be unable to meet. Another reason is that it’s a key cornerstone of implementing a remote work setup that studies have shown increases overall productivity, satisfaction, retention, and profitability. The trick is to be smarter in your approach.

Take charge and set proper guidelines

The first thing you need to do to get your virtual meetings flowing smoothly is to take charge from the start. In your very first virtual meeting, start by setting clear ground rules on how the meeting will proceed. Key rules include only one person speaking at a given time. Anyone with something to present should be able to do so without interruption. Others can raise their hands—or an alternative custom action—during or after to be heard. Once they’re done, it will help you a lot to call on each attendee to ask if they have anything else to add.

Of course, if you have a lot of participants, that isn’t feasible. Just be encouraging and still ask if anyone has further questions. To facilitate better communications, make sure to offer to have your own comms channels open for those who might not want to share their thoughts with everyone during a meeting. On top of setting rules, you need to enforce them. When people start to talk over each other, step in! Being firm in this way imposes much-needed order to virtual meetings.

Give people nowhere to hide

Research has consistently shown that participation decreases in direct proportion to the number of people involved. While you may not be able to get everyone talking and jumping in at a single virtual meeting, you can certainly increase this across several meetings. The reason behind this need to involve others is because some employees will be not as outgoing as others—while still wanting their voices to be heard.

Sure, some people might be taken aback by being asked to participate—and you should certainly not try to force people—they’ll come to appreciate being given opportunities to speak out. The keys there are to be supportive as opposed to forceful, understanding as opposed to being persistent, and consistent in your encouragement. If you keep doing this, people will eventually get used to the system and start opening up on their own.

Check the time

Apart from the people, another thing you need to carefully look out for is time. It’s very easy in virtual meetings for things to drag on longer than they should. This can be frustrating for many employees who’d feel that time is taken away from their workdays to sit in on an overly long meeting. Much of this is due to how information is presented. Prior to any virtual meetings, it’s important that you take stock of exactly what needs to be discussed.

You should review what you need to present in order to cut out what’s extraneous and unnecessary. Streamline any presentations you are to give to the absolute essentials. Not only will this cut down the time for a meeting, but it will also aid in clarity and comprehension. The best presentations for virtual meetings use bullet points to highlight the most important bits. While there’s no hard, fast rule for the number of slides, less is always better.

Follow up to ensure understanding

While it might be common for people to send out minutes of the meeting after virtual meetings, you need to be especially attentive to the content. For one, a summary of points discussed (or the full document if you did a summary) should be sent out. Another check is making sure you take note on the summary of key points raised, who raised them, and whatever response was given. This lowers the chances of any confusion and misunderstanding happening.

Should there be cases where you couldn’t address a particular point for lack of information, make sure you make note of the time frame that you gave for providing an answer—then follow through accordingly. This, in particular, helps to create an atmosphere of trust and reliability that will work wonders for any future virtual meetings. Seeing questions being answered and issues being dealt with in a timely manner also does much to encourage others to participate.

Be attentive to your specific needs

As a final point, it’s just as critical that you pay particular attention to the specific needs of your business. The tips and suggestions here are only as effective as they are applicable to your specific company needs. If you require longer meetings, that’s fine. Just make sure that you call on everyone to share their views and create an open and free atmosphere of sharing. If longer meetings have proven effective for you, go for it by all means. What matters is what works.

A rough guide for virtual meetings is the three P’s: people, presentation, practice. Understand who your participants are, get to know those who need to be given more voice, and adapt accordingly. Tailor your presentation of information to fit what has worked and what does work in your experience. Finally, keep evolving the setup and execution of your virtual meetings to match what works and get rid of what doesn’t. You’ll soon come up with a system that works best for you and your company.

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Microsoft Teams Versus Skype for Business

There’s some confusion for some as to what the differences are between the two products. After all, there is a lot of overlap in the two platforms when it comes to functionality—both allow for chat, calls and conferencing among individuals and teams. The deeper difference lies in the focus of Teams on all-round collaboration. Sure, you can use Skype for Business to host meetings and share files, but if you want full integration with the rest of your enterprise Office 365 programs, Teams is the way to go.

The clearest difference between the two however is that Skype for Business is coming to the end of its life. Support from Microsoft for Skype for Business Online is end in July 2021, with Skype for Business Server 2019 (the version the majority of medium to large enterprises use) receiving support through October 14, 2025, but with limited updates in comparison to Microsoft Teams.

Understanding the Core of Microsoft Teams

There are two very important core capabilities when it comes to Microsoft Teams. The first of these is the communications platform. This is the capability people who have used Skype for Business are familiar with, with it functioning in essentially the same way. People can send chat messages and initiate voice and video calls or conferences with colleagues and external users also using the software. Much like Skype, you can add emojis, images, videos, and even customised memes to your chat if you wish.

The second capability is the hub. This is a shared collaborative space that integrates all of Microsoft’s other Office 365 programs directly into Teams. This hub allows you and your employees to use everything from Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, SharePoint, Power BI and more, natively within Microsoft Teams. This does away with the hassle of having to switch from one application as you get your work done.

Microsoft Teams for the Modern Workplace

Microsoft Teams is highly adaptive in a world where the workforce is increasingly diverse and organizational structures flatter than ever before. It caters to the need for quick flowing communication and integrated workspaces. At the heart of Microsoft Teams are three S’s: security, sharing and segmentation. ‘Security’ refers to the fact that Teams complies with the strictest security and associated governance protocols. ‘Sharing’ refers to the easy way in which content can be found and shared with others. ‘Segmentation’ refers to the native organization of groups and colleagues within the software.

Versatility is a watchword when it comes to Microsoft Teams with conversations threaded and readily updated in real-time to match the flow of conversation within your company. Each of these conversations is also tagged for the key components to allow users to easily go back and draw out information that they need. For those who value security in higher-level discussions, there are of course options to ensure privacy for only those selected to be part of specific conversations.

Time Matters in Microsoft Teams

One key differentiator between Microsoft Teams and the similar Skype for Business, is the inclusion of much improved time management capabilities. First of these is the built-in calendar function. This allows you to schedule meetings with all the fine details built-in. For example, apart from selecting the time and date of the meeting, you can set the channel within which it will take place. The automatically sends invites from within Teams without having to go to Outlook.

If you’re one whose work calendar tends to fill up, Microsoft Teams has a Scheduling Assistant – similar to the one available in Outlook – that can find the best times available for everyone involved. This saves you time you would normally spend manually trawling through your own calendar and having to reach out to ask how everyone else’s calendars are looking like. The application itself sends out notifications prior to the start of the meeting depending on the time threshold you set yourself.

A second key function useful to companies with shift workers is the ability to create, communicate, and manage work shifts for employees. Everything is intuitive in this regard. Managers are able to create work schedules for their teams which are then added onto a calendar for easy reference. These schedules can be customized to reflect different time zones for remote teams should you have them. These set schedules and any further changes can readily be shared to the entire team or specifically impacted employees.

For the employee, they have control over when they clock in and clock out. More than that, the Shifts functionality allows them to easily submit leave requests which can be reviewed by managers who can then approve or deny as necessary. If allowed, employees can even submit shift swaps with their colleagues. It’s a feature that truly empowers a remote workforce looking to stay organized in spite of the distances involved—one that certainly contributes to a strong schedule and – ultimately – improved productivity.

Bringing Automation Into the Workplace

Automation is becoming very popular in terms of workflow processes because of the efficiency it brings to repetitive tasks. There are two ways in which automation is applied to Microsoft Teams. First is the easy way in which you can integrate bots into your set up. There are a lot of options available here covering a wide range of needs. The most commonly used are calendar bots that make scheduling even simpler, and secretary bots who help collect key information for you, take messages when you are away, and more.

One of the most effective of these bots from a communication standpoint are survey bots that can assist in gathering much-needed feedback on anything and everything with less input required from your end. Not only can these bots be trained to proactively share important surveys, but they also collect responses, send reminders to those who haven’t responded, and organise data as well. They’re great examples of accessible artificial intelligence and automation that fit seamlessly into a platform like Teams.

The second application is through Microsoft Flow. Workflow process automation is something that has long been popular for people in the smart home. Known as IFTTT (short for If This Then That) These are sets of executable commands working off different applications and programs designed to trigger when a specific action is taken which then flows to a desired automated output. This does away with repetitive tasks—freeing you up for the work that matters and requires your utmost attention.

For example, you can create a flow that takes attachments sent from a particular channel in Microsoft Teams and automatically places it in a curated folder in your company’s SharePoint. That same flow can then send a notification to your Outlook that it’s done—and later send follow-ups should you ignore the notifications. The configurations are limited only by the imagination and—like the bots—creating them up can be done entirely within Microsoft Teams.

A Complete Collaborative Work Hub

The true power of Microsoft Teams comes when you have a full enterprise Office 365 subscription because then you really get benefit from its full collaborative potential. Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that form the foundation of many people’s daily work can be accessed, shared, and natively edited in real-time via Microsoft Teams. All of these can then be organised—still via Teams—into SharePoint or OneDrive for easier aggregation. The built-in search function within Teams makes retrieval at a later date easy.

It isn’t just these programs that are fully integrated either, you can enjoy the full functionality of Microsoft’s other enterprise Office 365 programs right from within Microsoft Teams. You can use Power BI, for instance, to better collate and present key company data in a meaningful and easy to digest format. You can also use Planner to better visualize your work allocation and schedules within your company to make it easier to coordinate specific plans and projects—again without needing to leave Microsoft Teams.

Even if a lot of your workplace ecosystem is outside of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of products, you can utilize Connectors to incorporate popular third-party applications into Microsoft Teams. You can integrate Twitter and get updates to your company Twitter page in a channel in Teams. You can connect Github to allow your developers to track their projects. There are even many CRM-integration options so your marketing and sales teams can keep tabs on that while communicating with Microsoft Teams.

Even more potent than Connectors are Tabs. Where the former allows snapshots of activity, Tabs give you a full dashboard view of specified third-party services in a separate window within Microsoft Teams. While the process to create a tab is a little more difficult than using connectors, it’s worthwhile if the function is critical to business processes. For example sales teams can track key outstanding tickets for review within Teams if set up in that way.

Safety is a Priority in Microsoft Teams

With all the sensitive and proprietary information passing through Microsoft Teams, it’s great to know that security is a standout feature of the platform. Data is always encrypted whether it’s being passed back and forth or is just sitting in a channel. That’s because the platform meets crucial compliance standards like ISO 27001. There’s also Advance Threat Protection (ATP) that analyses content for potential malware to keep your company safe.

All in all, Microsoft Teams is one of the most convenient and feature-rich enterprise communication and collaboration tools out there. It might come with a somewhat steep learning curve given the complexity of its system, but it’s worth it considering what you can ultimately get out of the platform. It’s the perfect central hub for businesses that are already deeply embedded in the whole Office 365 ecosystem as its integrations and co-operability are unmatched in utility and functionality.

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Microsoft Yammer: Guiding Principles

Before we delve deeper into what else Microsoft Yammer has to offer, it’s important that we understand the main principles that guide the move towards a newer version—as well as the key areas of focus and emphasis. There are three concepts that guide the recreation of Yammer: communities, knowledge, and engagement. A lot of the changes are guided in the quest to strengthen these three principles.

It’s no surprise, of course, that these three are currently dominant in the enterprise. What Microsoft Yammer aims to empower is the development of communities within companies that drive culture and proactive action among colleagues. Within these communities, the platform aims to promote easy knowledge sharing internally. Ultimately, all of these elements create a deeper sense of employee engagement and a richer employee experience.

On a more practical level, these principles are also reflected in the cross-platform compatibility that Microsoft Yammer now strives for—not just with different Office 365 programs and applications, but also access points . As of this writing, much of the changes can be seen in the web versions of applications—such as with Outlook—but the design team has already said that a roll-out towards mobile and desktop applications is currently in the works.

They have also recently released a standalone Teams integration called Communities, which lets users have a fully interactive Yammer experience natively interact with Yammer directly from the popular collaboration platform.

Social Media With a Twist of Enterprise

Its own designers have billed it as an “enterprise social tool for community sharing” which is essentially social media for businesses. The closest comparison to an already familiar platform would be Workplace from Facebook. With the overhaul of the platform first being announced towards the end of last year, the similarities to Workplace from Facebook are striking. Just as a key component of Workplace from Facebook’s success is its familiarity, Yammer is treading the same path to good effect with a fresh focus on user experience.

For one thing, interacting with posts and announcements throws up options for rich text formatting. This allows users to put emphasis on responses however they see fit with options for bold, italic, and underlines. GIFs are easy to share with an embedded carousel to choose from. Perhaps the strongest feature is a dropdown highlighting your recent work on Word, Excel and even PowerPoint which you can readily share to any relevant thread or post.

All of these are presented in what Microsoft Yammer calls “social cards”. It’s a subtle but integral design choice that ties directly to the aim of cross-platform compatibility.  Each post is an entity unto itself. When shared via Teams and even Outlook, they look and act exactly as they would were they viewed in Yammer. It’s a critical feature that enables users who are more deeply embedded and involved with other Office 365 programs to enjoy full functionality as though they were viewing it directly on Yammer.

Enhanced Features for an Enhanced Experience

The features mentioned above are found within competitor software, but there is also a whole stack of new features unique to this new version of Microsoft Yammer itself. First among these is the Office 365 People Card. These are the equivalent of profiles in other social media and are tied directly to users added into your organisation Active Directory. These are useful for situating a person as they show where they sit in the hierarchy, who they collaborate with, events that you share with that person, and even messages and files shared between the two of you.

Another great innovation resulted from listening to their customer’s requests. The new Yammer now features AI curation when it comes to content in the feed. What it does is to filter and prioritise the content you see based on what is relevant to your job role, your position, and your interests so that they’re top of the screen. This adds a layer of relevance to what you get before you each time you check Yammer. This also applies to what is delivered to your Outlook inbox should you enable such notifications.

Other improvements sourced from users include improvements to the community section. For one, there’s the ability to post a cover photo to a community page. This can be used to better brand and can even be used to keep key announcements front and centre. Conversations too can be pinned within communities for above the fold attention — especially useful with key discussions. Within these conversations, users have the same rich options to customize responses as they do with social cards.

Microsoft Yammer in a Crisis

In times of crisis communications take centre stage in maintaining order amid the fear and uncertainty that can easily spread. Microsoft Yammer has acknowledged the critical role it plays and has incorporated crisis thinking into its reinvigoration of the platform. Empowerment is the name of the game and the platform allows for key information sharing at scale.

The ‘communities’ within Microsoft Yammer form an effective and safe gathering place for the fielding and answering of key questions and answers before, during, and after a crisis — regardless of where your employees and your HR/Comms personnel are located. The relative ease-of-use and simplicity of the platform make it easy to monitor, and the built-in AI makes focusing on common, critical issues so much easier—including mobile accessibility.

When Hurricane Irma ravaged the United States in 2017, Johnson & Johnson utilized Microsoft Yammer among other platforms. In particular, Yammer was used to create a community to facilitate communications with affected employees — even those employees that opened their homes to displaced members of the public. Key documents and files were also easily shared to employees and stakeholders. Yammer was also used by their senior leadership to talk directly to their employees and take charge of the situation.

Johnson & Johnson’s Employee Home Share initiative was a success – in part – because of Microsoft Yammer, and the team was quick to point out the simplicity of utilizing the system as a cornerstone of success. It allowed the creation of a centralized, global, and wholly online safe haven for their people. The company came out of the crisis relatively unscathed and much stronger for it. A culture of caring and mutual support emerged from the crisis revolving around the platform.

Outlook Integration Explored

Based on their own internal research, Microsoft has found that Outlook is still its most widely used service. After all, email remains relevant to employees and employers the world over. At present, in its web version, Microsoft has empowered Outlook users with a Microsoft Yammer integration that can be best described as near-native. Posts and announcements, as we already mentioned, appear exactly as they would if they were viewed in Yammer.

How you interact with the post is completely the same as what you get in the Yammer application also. For example, viewing images on a post throws up a pop-out gallery that you can scroll through. When checking on who liked or interacted with an announcement, a slider pops up from the right listing the information. You can like, respond, and even mark ‘best’ answers for reference. Polls created in Microsoft Yammer and shared to Outlook can be acted upon and monitored in real-time.

On top of that, you can easily shift to the classic, standard email view should you want to share an announcement or poll to anyone else in the ecosystem. One great feature that works in the background is that analytics work regardless of whether engagement was through Microsoft Yammer or Outlook. This makes it easy and accurate to track key data points that guide communications planning. Again, it’s on the web version for now, but they’re looking to roll it out to the mobile and desktop versions of Outlook come April to June of this year.

Microsoft Yammer Leverages the Power of Video

A study by the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) has found that employees are more likely to recall and retain over 95% of any particular message when it comes at them in video format. That same study has found that a whopping 93% of internal communication experts consider video to be a key tool in their arsenal. On the other side of the coin, 59% of those in senior leadership prefer watching video content over reading it in text format.

A Study in Effectiveness

It’s really a clear trend, especially on social media, with many companies and even news outlets pushing out video content for their key releases over any other — both internally and externally. One great example of this is the Alzheimer’s Society. They pushed out a new five-year plan via the launch of their own internal TV channel. This channel featured a film that expertly explained the key policy changes on top of explaining why the changes mattered. It was very successful among their 2,500 employees as well as their 9,000 volunteers.

The Video Advantage Applied

For Microsoft Yammer and its design team, their goals in improving video capabilities within the platform include building trust and authenticity in their leaders, meaningful information dissemination, and full employee engagement towards the company vision. Towards those ends, they focused their work on optimizing their work-flow through every event cycle’s natural touchpoints. All this through a platform that supports everything from professional on-site productions, semi-professional broadcasts from anywhere, and even ad-hoc mobile videos as would be the case with some executive blogs.

Professional videos are those that result in high-quality output as is the case with explainer videos, roundtable discussions, town halls and the like. Semi-professional options include coverage in the field — as would be the case in product launches or new office openings. Finally, ad-hoc can be as simple as the CEO sharing his thoughts and opinions casually and on-the-go. While each has value on its own—they can come together in a natural flow to push a full-fledged campaign.

An Example in Action

Say you wanted to run an outreach program where employees reach out to local kids to help teach them how to read. A professional video can be created to get the whole company aligned with the ideals of the program. You could even go for a live event set up for launch. At the organizational level—with the use of semi-professional setups like webinars or even local live videos—you can then reinforce the message or go deeper with tutorials on the most effective techniques for teaching reading.

Ad hoc videos can then be those on the ground—employee-made videos showing them and their experiences with the kids that they teach. Or even videos where they share their experiences and emotions as they undergo a program. There really is no need to have each tier mutually exclusive. They, in fact, work best in support of one another. That’s just one example. The central idea behind videos on Microsoft Yammer is to create meaningful connections that facilitate shared knowledge.

Towards that end, Yammer can be used to host webinars that are crafted and launched in Microsoft Teams. It’s currently set for internal users only, which makes it a powerful tool for internal comms efforts. A great thing about webinars set up through Teams and funnelled through Microsoft Yammer is that it enables for deeper engagement via company-wide chat and comments. All of the video content is stored in Microsoft Stream for easy access. Note the mobile videos are still stored in SharePoint for the moment — something that their team is looking to fix in the future.

Microsoft Yammer Compliance and Security

A final point worth looking at with the rollout of the new Microsoft Yammer are its compliance and security measures. A lot of these new integrations are to run parallel to Office 365’s existing Security and Compliance Centres. These improvements centre around Native Mode. This includes the assignment to one Tenant to one Yammer set up. It also implies that users are mapped in Azure’s Active Directory, that all groups created are connected to a single Office 365 Group, and that — eventually — all Yammer files will be stored in SharePoint.

Another important aspect worth touching on is smarter eDiscovery. Integration with Microsoft Yammer means that you can not only search by user and view their full Office 365 profile, but all their messages through Yammer are now visible alongside any others that they have sent via other platforms. These messages can be filtered based on key parameters like author, recipient, and even community. This makes it far easier to search for content as needed.

Lastly, minimum and maximum data retention parameters will also feature in the newest iteration of Microsoft Yammer. Users will have two options when getting rid of content. Archive mode will put things away into long-term storage. Delete mode will completely erase content after 30 days’ time. Also, it is important to note that deleting any groups will then result in the deletion of messages therein. All this allows finer control over the lifecycle of your content.

A New Microsoft Yammer for the Future

All of these changes represent not just the future of Microsoft Yammer, but also Microsoft’s commitment to integrating features that its user base has long clamoured for. It’s a promising move for a platform that seeks to fulfil a popular comms niche in today’s world from within Office 365’s already impressive Enterprise Suite.

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