Remote work isn’t new anymore — it’s just how we work. But even years into the distributed work era, virtual meetings can still feel disconnected, exhausting, or downright ineffective. The numbers back this up: employees spend an average of 11.3 hours per week in meetings, and 71% of senior executives say meetings are unproductive and inefficient.
When you’re meeting in person, you can read a teammate’s body language, make eye contact, and connect more naturally. Remote meetings present different challenges (and we’re not just talking about spotty internet). But with the right approach, virtual meetings can be just as effective — sometimes even better — than face-to-face conversations.
Common Remote Meeting Types for Distributed Teams
Different meetings serve different purposes. Here are the most common types of remote meetings and when to use them:
Level 10 Meetings™ – We love L10 meetings around here! They’re your weekly team meeting for solving problems and staying aligned. These follow the framework laid out by EOS®: segue, Scorecard review, Rock updates, Headlines, and Issues (IDS). They’re called Level 10s because you rate them at the end — you’re shooting for 10s all around.
1:1 Meetings – Weekly check-ins between managers and direct reports. 1:1 meetings are crucial for performance management, catching issues early, and building trust on remote teams. Use a consistent agenda to track progress on goals, discuss challenges, and provide feedback.
Quarterly Conversations™ – Individual performance reviews held once per quarter between managers and team members. These go deeper than weekly 1:1s to discuss overall performance, career development, alignment with core values, and progress on annual goals. In EOS®, these often include reviewing the person’s role on the Accountability Chart™ and ensuring they have the right skills and capacity for their seat.
Project Check-ins – Regular syncs to review project status, unblock issues, and adjust timelines. Keep these focused on specific deliverables rather than general updates.
Sprint Planning & Retrospectives – For teams running agile or sprint-based work, these meetings set the roadmap for upcoming work and reflect on what went well (or didn’t) in the last sprint.
All-Hands Meetings – Company-wide meetings for major announcements, celebrating wins, and keeping everyone aligned on the big picture. These work best when they’re infrequent and truly meaningful.
Event Syncs – Pre-event planning meetings to align on logistics, responsibilities, and success metrics. These ensure everyone knows their role before launch day.
Event Postmortems – Post-event debriefs to capture what worked, what didn’t, and lessons learned while everything’s still fresh. Document these well — future you will thank you.
Quarterly Planning Sessions – Longer strategic meetings to set Rocks (quarterly goals), review progress, and adjust course for the next quarter.
Standup Meetings – Quick daily or weekly syncs (15 minutes or less) where team members share what they’re working on and any blockers. Keep these tight and focused.
No matter which type of meeting you’re running, the same principles apply: have a clear agenda, document decisions as you go, and create action items with clear owners.
So: you have the structure down. You’re tracking your goals, you’re documenting action items, and you’re taking notes in a centralized hub. That’s a great start. But if you’re used to meeting in-person, hopping on a video meeting can still make you feel like something’s missing. Using our template for virtual meetings will help you address existing pain points, but it can be trickier to read someone’s body language to understand what’s not being said.
The best meetings preempt issues before they turn into problems. To do that virtually, you need a blend of communication best practices and the right systems for automated team management.
Why Intentional Remote Meeting Practices Matter
Getting virtual meetings right matters more than ever. Here’s why you should be thoughtful about how your distributed team connects:
- Meeting overload is real. Remote employees attend 50% more meetings than in-office staff, and without good practices, this leads to burnout and disengagement.
- Time is money. Poor meetings aren’t just annoying — they’re expensive. Organizations that don’t run effective meetings waste significant resources every year.
- Remote team cohesion requires effort. When you’re not running into people at the coffee machine, you have to create intentional spaces for connection and problem-solving.
- Performance management depends on it. Regular, effective 1:1s and team meetings are how you spot issues early, provide feedback, and keep people aligned with company goals. Tools like Strety’s 1:1 meeting agendas help you stay consistent with these crucial conversations.
- Async can’t do everything. While asynchronous communication is incredible for documentation and transparency (more on that later), some problems need real-time discussion to solve efficiently.
How to Read the (Virtual) Room
Structuring a meeting is pretty straightforward — if you’re using a meeting software like Strety and have a set agenda, the meeting almost runs itself. (Almost.)
Understanding team dynamics and preempting issues that employees haven’t yet voiced is trickier. Reading people can feel like a talent you either have or don’t. Luckily, it’s a skill that can be learned. To have an effective remote team meeting that catches issues before they become problems, add these communication best practices to your meeting practice:
Default to Video
We’ll get this out of the way: it can be annoying to hold a video call instead of a phone chat. If you’re on the go, or multitasking, or just haven’t showered (we won’t judge), a video call can feel disruptive or frustrating.
However, much of the way we communicate is non-verbal, and picking up on those cues is crucial to connecting effectively with teammates. Without video, it’s impossible to read someone’s body language. Make video calls the rule and an audio-only call the exception. Nearly half of professionals believe that turning cameras on during virtual meetings leads to better focus and engagement.
Listen With Your Eyes
Have you ever gotten halfway through a video call and realized you’ve been watching your own face the entire time? We all do it. While it’s human nature to watch your own thumbnail on Zoom, try to resist the urge. Instead, watch other faces for reactions and nonverbal cues. That’s the magic of defaulting to video: you have a way to see those nonverbal cues instead of just relying on tone (which can be misleading).
Watching to see how your employees’ faces change when things are discussed will help you understand where friction lies, what people are really excited about, and what could turn into a big problem down the line. If you’re using at tool like Zoom, try switching to the Gallery View instead of Active Speaker View. You’ll see more faces at once and will be able to “read the room” more quickly.
Make Time to Check In
When you’re meeting in-person, there’s time in the margins to chat about your weekends, talk about your lives, and generally catch up. It happens when people are milling about or walking to the conference room. While idle chatter can sometimes feel like it’s delaying the important stuff, idle chatter has a crucial purpose: it warms people up to meet.
If you’re meeting virtually, make time for some idle chatter. We recommend allotting 5 minutes to catch up at the beginning of a meeting. Some teams have success sharing personal good news one at a time, and others do well just chatting for a little while before moving onto action items. Try a few formats and see what works best for your team — but don’t skip it.
This segue time becomes even more important for distributed teams where people might not have talked to each other all week. It’s not wasted time — it’s relationship-building time that makes the rest of the meeting more effective.
Follow Up Privately — and Immediately
If you noticed a nonverbal reaction from a team member that hinted at a potential issue, follow up after the call. Asking a team member about their body language outright during a video call can derail the conversation and potentially bring up resentment that someone might prefer not to discuss in front of everyone. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk about it at all — it’s just more effective to do so privately.
Message your teammate privately after the call and leave it open ended. Vague is better; “how are you feeling about X” will go a long way.
This is where performance management and meeting practices overlap. Regular 1:1 meetings give you a natural place to follow up on these observations and have deeper conversations about what’s really going on. In Strety, you can use the same meeting framework for your 1:1s that you use for team meetings, making it easy to maintain consistency across all your conversations.
When Async Communication Is the Better Choice
Here’s a secret that can save your team hours every week: not everything needs to be a meeting. In fact, 55% of remote workers think that a majority of meetings “could have been an email” — and they’re often right.
Asynchronous communication — where you send information without expecting an immediate response — is powerful for distributed teams. It gives people time to think through complex issues, it creates automatic documentation, and it respects everyone’s deep work time.
When to use async instead of meetings:
- Sharing updates that don’t require discussion
- Collecting input from multiple people on a non-urgent issue
- Documenting processes or decisions
- Getting feedback on work that people need time to review
- Communicating across multiple time zones where scheduling is difficult
When meetings are the right choice:
- Solving complex problems that benefit from real-time discussion
- Making time-sensitive decisions
- Addressing interpersonal issues or tension
- Building team connection and trust
- Brainstorming new ideas where building on each other’s thoughts matters
The best remote teams use both synchronous and asynchronous communication intentionally. They document discussions in tools that support threaded conversations, they solve issues async when possible to save meeting time, and they use meetings for what meetings do best: real-time connection and collaborative problem-solving.
We’re big believers in async communication at Strety (we’re a fully distributed team ourselves). Our asynchronous communication approach helps us get more done without the chaos of constant meetings.
Making Remote Meetings Work in Your Operating System
Whether you’re running on EOS®, Pinnacle, Scaling Up, or another business operating system, effective remote meetings are crucial to your implementation. Your operating system gives you the framework — meeting structure, accountability rhythms, goal-tracking processes — but you need the right digital tools to make it work smoothly for a distributed team.
This is where an integrated BOS platform makes a massive difference. When your L10 Meetings™, Rocks, Scorecards, Issues, To Dos, and 1:1s all live in one place, connected to the tools your team already uses, everything flows more naturally. You’re not jumping between five different systems trying to remember where you documented that decision or who owns that task.
In Strety, we’ve built the platform to support pure EOS® implementation (or any business operating system) while adding the flexibility remote teams need. Your meeting agendas automatically connect to your scorecards and rocks. Issues can be discussed asynchronously in comments before you even meet, saving valuable meeting time. To Dos created in meetings sync with your project management tools. And everything’s documented in one place, so remote team members always know where to find what they need.
Running effective remote meetings takes intention, the right communication practices, and tools that support how distributed teams actually work. Get these things right, and your virtual meetings can be just as productive — and a lot more flexible — than the conference room ever was.
Ready to make your remote meetings more effective? Strety helps distributed teams run better meetings while managing people, projects, and performance in one integrated platform. Try Strety free for 30 days or book time with our team to see how much easier running your business operating system can be with Strety.