In recent months remote meetings have quickly become a staple on how many businesses are running, being forced to work from home has made their popularity skyrocket as they are by far the most effective method of team communication outside of a physical meeting.
However, because most people have not hosted or even attended a remote conference before, there can be issues when it comes to communicating effectively and running a viable meeting. Below are a few tips on how to run your conference successfully in order to maintain a certain level of communication and productivity.
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Use Virtual Backgrounds To Keep Things Professional Or To Lighten The Mood
Typically, you will see people using or advising to use virtual backgrounds to maintain a certain level of privacy. This can be in an attempt to hide sensitive information or simply because they would rather not have their co-workers and strangers peering into their homes, but virtual backgrounds are not strictly there for privacy.
There are plenty more to choose from, like virtual zoom backgrounds, and using them can help you in many ways, if your home is untidy you can set your background to something like a sunset or a city skyline to maintain a certain level of professionalism from your bedroom. Alternatively, you can also use a fun background to lighten the mood and even help to hold your attendee’s attention, for example, something like a space shuttle’s cockpit.
Decide How You Will Communicate Effectively
One of the most significant issues with remote meetings is the fact the people tend to talk over each other. While most video conferencing services include a text chat feature that can be helpful, you want to avoid having people overuse it, defeating the point of a video conference in the first place. Additionally, general technical issues like delays and connectivity problems can exacerbate the problem and cause even more cross talk.
Thankfully, many applications also offer the ability for attendants to mute themselves, and the host typically has the power to mute anyone. To avoid a hectic remote conference, be sure to communicate with any participants in advance to ensure that they know to keep themselves muted unless prompted to prevent interruptions.
Set Some Basic Ground Rules
As we’ve mentioned, many people are still unfamiliar with remote conferencing and so may have either the incorrect settings on their device or they may just expect to act in the same way they would in a physical meeting. This can cause issues and interruptions so be sure to set some ground rules, preferably in the form of a list, and send it out to any attendee’s well before the conference is due to start.
These ground rules should include basic etiquette for the call as well as a list of things to check such as settings and hardware testing. Having this forwarded to anyone attending the meeting will greatly reduce the chance of someone coming in and causing confusion, and will ensure that everyone carries the same expectation of the conference.
Record Your Meeting
Finally, a great feature of remote conferencing is the fact that you can record your meetings. This is not only a great way to document what was said in order to reference it later, but if you have any members who are unable to attend, they can easily remain up to date with what is going on. Unless you are dealing with very sensitive information, recording your meetings should be commonplace as you can always delete them later if you find that you don’t need them anymore.
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