Ten ways in which meeting online might save you from going out of business.

Business Continuity Management is about how to stay in business when disaster strikes. Most organisations do it by choice; some are compelled to do it by law.

Since the beginning of 2009, Europe has endured a severe winter, a flu pandemic, the threat of industrial action and the vomiting of fine ash from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano.

It makes a massive impact upon an organisation’s prosperity when people can no longer come together to communicate as normal.

Wherever you choose to look, the evidence shows that face-to-face meetings are a fact of life, no matter if yours is a one-person business or a plc. You must connect with customers, suppliers, colleagues and managers.

In the USA it would common for a person in business to take part in 3 meetings every day and make 4 or 5 business trips by plane each month. Cost is a good indicator too. Speaking in 2008, a prominent strategic meetings management firm calculated the annual spend on meetings to be €350 billion globally.

So let us bring together four ideas:

1) Companies are not going to stop holding meetings

2) The risk of disruption to travel is ever-present

3) Every business has to have a contingency plan to allow meetings to happen when it is not possible to bring people together

4) If companies are to use online conferencing, then they need to plan it, and do it properly

Over the next few weeks, with recent disruptions in mind we are going to offer ten X factors that may make the difference between mere survival and gaining a competitive edge. They may even show how you might both reduce the cost and at the same time raise the effectiveness of meetings. If that became a reality, you might be tempted to let your Plan B become your Plan A!

Here are the topics to look out for:

1) Be clear about your business case

2) Re-engineer meetings and so do them better

3) Select the right tools, making best use of what you already have

4) Set up your meeting

5) Manage the change, manage expectations and up-skill users

6) Design your meeting, using the right combination of media

7) Run your meeting mastering the available forms of interaction

8) Manage group dynamics online, keeping everyone involved and on-track

9) Keep a record of the meeting and its outputs

10) Follow up after the meeting

We hope you will contribute your own ideas too. An active discussion, fed by your own views and experiences, will be far more useful than a monologue from us.