If you ever working in a distributed Team, even the team is called as 'Agile Team', It would be quite difficult to hold efficient meetings which have to communicate through IM tools such as Skype. Constantly loosing time is quite annoy, but it seems not too much you can do. However, as our experiences, there's still some practises that can make it more efficient. Maybe you can have a try.

Our practice experiences are :

Remove Unnecessary Meetings

Whether it is a high efficient team can be judged by the Meetings. If there's always a lot of Meetings and each meeting cost a lot of time. You know how things is going on.

Release Unessential People 

More people, more chaos. And only essential people will try to save time instead of waste it. But usually we always invite too many people who shouldn't be there. Keep participate group smaller is the most import practise you should try.

Prepare Meeting Related Stuff Earlier

Is there a published Agenda for everyone ? Is the Meeting Room booked ? Do we need prepare any tool, such as cards, computer or projector ? Do we need print any document, such as specification ? ... The more you prepared, the meeting is more smooth.

Meeting's Time Must be Limited

Usually one hour is the most, some people can't keep attention any longer. We prefer to do more small meetings than just one big monster.

Video Meeting is the Best

Of course, it would be more easy to communicate with others than blinded.

Need Some Kind of Ceremony

Specify a Host

Free discussion leads to chaos, and if without video at the same time would be a  disaster. If you don't clearly specify the Host for the meeting, people will be confused should listen to whom when chaos happened.

Following some kind of process

The job for Host in fact is quite easy, usually he only has to say several simple sentences. Take Estimation Meeting for example, the host may talking about :

• "Let's start the Estimation Meeting for Sprint ... "
• "Today we are going to estimation following stories ... "
• "We are estimating story XXX right now, please let PO describe the requirements first  ... "
• "Is the team already clear about the requirements? Do we have any questions for PO? "
• "Ok, if there's no more question for PO, let's estimate !"
• "Ah, the estimated  story points are quite different, shall we talk about it ? ..."
• "Let's go to next story , the id is ... "

Making clear of the responsibility

• Who should update VERSION ONE for the changes
• Who should make notes
• ... ...

Improving Communication Language

The meeting can only be successful when people join actively. Thus the most most most important thing is always : BRAVE TO TALK!!  However, when using a foreign language, such as English, would always be difficult for some people.

This Achilles heel will finally kills you, and you can never bypass it. It's also hard to improve for a whole Team. But we are already trying some practices right now, hoping can share some day when we succeed.