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Communicating with your teams over the internet is just a fact of life in 2020. Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit and sent everyone to work from home, the internet was a critical part of how we organized our workplaces. If you’re looking to up your web conferencing, we’ve got you covered! Here are some tips to help you teleconference effectively.
Make sure you’ve got your content ready for a web conference in the same way you would for a normal work conference. If you called everyone in for a meeting and didn’t have your remarks prepared, that would be weird, right? So, treat web conferences with the same respect you would an in-person meeting.
Make sure everyone you need to participate is informed ahead of time. Agree on the time and double-check that everyone is prepared. If other people are speaking, make sure they also have their remarks or figures prepared. In short, treat web conferencing like the real thing.
It can be easy to get a little off-topic when you’re having a teleconference meeting. After all, everyone is working from home. It’s harder to see people on-screen as being immediate the way they are in person. However, the whole team needs to fight the urge to get off-topic. Stay focused and keep with the meeting!
If you’re organizing the meeting, make sure it is engaging. Be open to questions and be ready to repeat things if the topic is complicated. It’s important that your audience stays engaged.
We’ve brushed over this briefly, but it bears repeating. Treat a teleconference with the same respect you would any other meeting. Likewise, make sure the others on the call know that this is the expectation.
Dress codes aren’t mandatory when you’re working from home, of course, but maybe suggest everyone wear something decent. Even just “not pajamas” can go a long way towards making meetings feel a little more formal.
Don’t just jump straight into the task at hand. Take a moment to catch up with the room. In normal office settings, there’s a chance for cross-talk and conversations. That’s completely missing when working from home, which turns off a lot of the social interaction of the office.
Take a moment to have everyone give a brief introduction. Maybe you could ask people to share how their weeks are going. Just little ways to keep everyone engaged can go a long way during these types of meetings.
