As more employees work from home and on the go, video conferencing has become a key way for colleagues to connect. Online meetings are becoming an increasingly important part of our daily business communications and collaboration.
Working with your IT team can put employees at an advantage by ensuring they are well equipped for virtual meetings and know how to best use the technology available. Doing so can also save your IT team valuable time by helping employees set up their video conference calls for success.
Check settings in advance
Before the call, employees should confirm with IT that they have the necessary plugins and most up-to-date technology. Additionally, several minutes before the meeting, employees should take it upon themselves to check that all camera and microphone inputs and outputs are channeled through the call.
Prevent unnecessary slow downs
Lagging, out-of-sync video and audio can be common, often due to network connectivity issues. To ensure that this doesn’t impact their meetings, employees can request that the IT team configures the quality of service to prioritize network traffic toward your video conferencing solution for employees making calls from within the office. The number of dial-ins can also slow the connection. With this in mind, employees should include only key participants or group multiple attendees on a single dial-in when possible.
The ultimate meeting guide
Learn how to effectively and efficiently create the best possible meetings for your organization.
IT insights can enhance the meeting experience
With so many features available in today’s virtual conferencing solutions, employees aren’t always aware of the extent of capabilities available to them in their online meetings. Your IT team can give employees guidance on using in-app live chat rooms, collaborative whiteboards and direct file-sharing tools to enhance their next call.
Develop and share a checklist of tips
A great way to bolster success is for your employees and IT team to work together to develop tips that can be shared throughout the company and used to help ensure that virtual meetings run as efficiently as possible. Every organization is different and each will have its own unique considerations, but here are a few tips to help start an IT checklist for your employees:
- When using an external microphone, meeting organizers and attendees may need to switch from default, “built-in audio” and select the microphone as their audio device.
- To avoid accidental background noise throwing off the flow of conversation and decreasing speed with which participants can communicate, employees should encourage their meeting participants to remain muted until speaking.
- For those planning to share their screen, cuing up everything in advance helps avoid mid-meeting surprises. Pulling up tabs or trying to open files during a meeting can slow down the call and may cause the screen to lag.
Empowering both the IT team and your employees to understand the technology they use helps everyone work more productively. For detailed insights on how to produce compelling virtual meetings and broadcasts, check out the “Host Large-Scale Virtual Meetings Like a Pro” eBook.
The post What employees can learn from your IT team to ensure better online meetings appeared first on Office Blogs.