Research Brief: Virtual Team Meetings
Chantel Piper
University of St. Thomas

Abstract
Emails, text messages, chats, and phone calls are the many ways to communicate effectively in today’s business world. Virtual meetings are necessary when it comes to collaboration amongst disbursed teams. All too often, information is not distributed properly for reasons that can prove detrimental to Virtual teams. Virtual meetings can either be a huge success when conducted properly or a miserable failure with without proper planning. To prepare and run an effective virtual team meeting, it is important to follow certain steps to reach desired outcomes. This paper explores three published articles that focus on virtual team meetings. These three articles vary in concentration on producing effective virtual team meetings. Simoneaux and Stroud (2015) suggest in order to have a productive meeting participant’s, need to come to a “meeting of the minds”, following very essential steps in order to produce efficiency and desired meeting outcomes. The other articles by Washington, Okoro, Cardon, focus on civility during team meetings and Halbe, differences in conference calls and face to face meetings.

Research Brief: Virtual Team Meetings
In today’s business world virtual teams are becoming more indispensable to their organizations. In the past, companies had to invest significant amounts of resources in weekly project meetings Companies just don’t have that kind of money or time any longer. Virtual teams represent the call to for low cost solutions to very complex organizational project goals. Virtual teams enhance the organizations competitive edge and performance. A vital component of virtual teams is the virtual meeting. Virtual meetings offer convenience for employees and cost saving effects for the organization. Virtual meetings can consist of a single meeting or several different meetings where participants link up from different locations. A virtual meeting can be held in real time where all members of the team are participating at the same time. This is often accomplished by telephone/video conferencing. Virtual meetings can also be asynchronous; meaning participants are working on the project at different times according to their time zones.
Meeting of the Minds: The Art of Planning Productive Meetings Sarah Simoneaux and Chris Stroud explore facilitating and fostering productive meetings whether traditional or virtual. Although most meeting can prove to be boring and unproductive, Simoneaux and Stroud (2015) believe team meetings have the ability to be lively, energetic and productive. The basic premise of this article is on the concept created by, Karen Leland and Keith Bailey’s PAL system (2015). The PAL system stands for Purpose, Agenda, and Limits. This system has the possibility to create a mindfulness that can be valued by team members.
Meetings are the anchor of team collaboration. If not facilitated or conducted well most team meetings are useless. A productive meeting begins with participants knowing why they are there and ends with clearly defined goals and outcomes for the future. Meetings that have a purpose will most certainly have clearly defined mission, goals, and outcomes. Purpose is very important; otherwise you are aimlessly stabbing in the dark to accomplish project goals. Often times, this is where teams fail when facilitating or conducting meetings. In my own experience, when a Director calls a mandatory meeting and the mission, goals, or outcomes are not clearly understood; it becomes a complete waste of time and energy.
Another important characteristic of a productive meeting is the agenda. Time can be one of our most precious commodities and once it’s gone you can never retrieve it again. Having an agenda is important in a traditional meeting, but more so in a virtual meeting. The nature of most virtual meetings sometimes they can be straightforward, and short. Beforehand knowledge is