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Giving an effective meeting is a matter of planning and practice. When done correctly, a video conference is one of the best ways to bring teams together and actually accomplish something. When meetings are done wrong – and they can find so many ways to go wrong – it’s a demoralizing, work-blocking mess that everyone hates. Take some tips on structuring your next video conference, and you’ll find that your meetings have momentum. With IT, you usually don’t have to remind people to test their connections beforehand, nor are reminders to update the app generally needed. However, for meeting novices, it’s a good idea to put some structure in place.

 

Structure

The Harvard Business Review notes that effective meetings have effective agendas, whether they are videoconferences or location meetings. Designing an effective agenda takes several steps.

 

  • Decide on the purpose of the meeting. Whether you will be running an informative meeting, are seeking input, or coming to a decision needs to be made clear.
  • Invite only those who have something to contribute to the meeting or something to gain from meeting and seek their input.
  • Keep the meeting to topics that affect everyone in attendance allocate a reasonable amount of time in the agenda.
  • List a definitive start time, the amount of time that will be devoted to your topics, and question and answer periods. You should also list a definitive time that the meeting will adjourn so that people can schedule the rest of their day.
  • Specify topic leaders and discussion moderators in advance. These people will be responsible for leading the discussion of their assigned topic.
    Image source Wikimedia

    Image source Wikimedia

 

Setting

When you are running a business video meeting for IT, you may have multiple participants signing in and attending from remote locations using the BlueJeans app. Sometimes the locations from which they will be less than ideal. Here are a few tips when talking about appropriate settings.

 

  • Ideally the locations should be quiet, well lit, and free of noise and distractions. Conference rooms are ideally suited for this purpose, however riding the Wi-Fi at your local coffee house may be more distracting to other participants than you think. If you have absolutely no other place to sign in remotely, consider using your car – it’s quiet and well lit.
  • Your background should be stationary, especially if you are the one speaking. A mobile background such as a curtain or street scene will distract from what you are saying.
  • Make sure that the lighting shows the speakers faces clearly and without distracting shadows. Glare and uneven lighting can be fixed by pulling the shades and removing any glass framed wall art. Northwestern University also recommends not mixing sunlight and fluorescent light in order to protect the quality of images.
  • Do make sure that the camera is positioned in order to show the speaker’s face. Weird camera angles distract viewers. The point of a videoconference is to get that face time, not to look up someone’s nose.

 

Etiquette

  • Make sure that attendees know when to arrive and sign on. Make it clear that past a certain point latecomers will not be admitted. This is to avoid disrupting speakers and the meeting schedule in order to catch someone up. Advised that a video copy of the meeting and appropriate documents will be archived.
  • When hosting a meeting with people in multiple locations, speakers should introduce themselves both by name and location.
  • Ask that everyone keep their microphones muted unless they are speaking at the time. Otherwise everybody will hear coughing, shifting, paper rustling, and other distracting noises.
  • Dress appropriately for the crowd. For meetings with the CIO or a new client, office attire is appropriate. For less formal meetings, one may go with office casual. Only those who know each other very well should show up to a meeting and what they would wear to a beach barbecue.
  • Pay attention. Don’t check your email. Don’t text. Don’t play Candy Crush. Take notes. Participate. And ask questions.

 

After the videoconference, the meeting video should be archived and made accessible to participants for follow-up. This includes all documents used in the meeting, as well as any minutes or transcriptions that are made. Follow-up with an action plan that is emailed to all participants, and check that everyone is doing their appropriate follow-up. Appoint someone to take the lead in doing the follow-up and making sure that everyone is on track.

 

Successful meetings mean that the topics discussed, and the actions planned are actually followed up on and carried out. It’s easy for team members to lose momentum once they are back in their workspaces and catching up. Making meetings effective, easy to attend, and easy to follow up with is the key to giving great meetings that motivate and even inspire. Get your team on the same page by using video conferencing in the most effective manner possible.

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Building a business from the ground up is remarkable. It’s not just about reaching for your goals and sticking to a vision. Rather, it’s about knowing how much hard work you still need to do and what problems you must learn to deal with to keep the company going. That’s how growth happens. Growing pains, though, can hurt a young company if they aren’t managed properly. Not sure how to keep the company growing without spreading your resources thin? Here some some of the most common challenges startups get that you can easily solve with video conferencing:

 

Lack of Talents

Plenty of companies in the U.S. have trouble sourcing for the right talents. U.S. News says America’s lack of STEM students spring from the fact that the education system focuses more on basic proficiency instead of training students for academic excellence. That leaves a lot of low-ability talents with nowhere to go, contributing to the country’s unemployment rate, while job vacancies for high-skill positions in many industries remain. One way companies are circumventing the gap is by widening their talent pool through online video solutions. By interviewing and getting talents from all over the globe, Human Resource teams can now have their pick of qualified applicants without needing to shortchange their hiring goals and standards.

Go Big with Videoconferencing

Go Big with Videoconferencing

 

Managing Offsite Teams

The apps also make it easy for you to handle all your remote teams. You can set up your management team anywhere in the world—so long as there’s steady, reliable internet to back you up—and hire the rest of the team from all over. Daily face to face meetings or huddle sessions can happen online. If you need to beef everyone up on new security protocols, have a town hall meeting or do a quick one on one with a staff member, you can easily do all these things via handy communication tools. Wherever your team is, you won’t have a problem getting and staying in touch with them.

 

Stress for Your IT

Enterprise video for IT from Blue Jeans is one of the best things to happen for your IT team. Remember the days when IT experts had to deal with everything—from keeping your communication channels running without a hitch to setting up a phone patch for you? These days, using online conferencing for your business doesn’t mean you have to use up all your IT resources on installing and managing the system. With easy to use solutions, you can even download, install and use the app yourself, all with little to no assistance from your resident experts. That means you can deploy video at your company, all without having to add more work and stress for them. This gives your startup incredible advantage, allowing you to do so much work for less.

 

Lack of Trust and Teamwork

It makes for an excellent way for your teams to meet and see each other regularly. That helps tremendously. After all, everybody knows people work better when it’s with someone they trust. And they trust people they see more than they do a name off their email contact list. A likely reason for that seems rooted in how we communicate with each other. Susanne Jones, University of Minnesota’s associate professor of communication studies says that about 65 to 75 percent of what we say is non-verbal in nature, Small Business reports. So there is a huge loss of non-verbal messages and cues when people resort to emails, chats or calls. That’s what the system’s face to face contact brings back to the table. With online interactions, you help foster camaraderie and teamwork among your staff, essential to a lot of companies and exceedingly vital for startups. Because startups start small, there’s a need to rely on a core group. If yours is strong, then you have a much better chance at lasting long enough in the business to gain success. Helping trust develop among your staff allows you to move a few steps closer to your goal.

 

Storage Problems

Companies of yore used to rely on expensive servers to store and manage data. These can come at a hefty price tag. Hardware upgrades, too, could cost an arm and a leg. That posed a lot of problems for many startups, at least until online storage was invented. With cloud applications, it’s easier to store and keep your data protected. There’s no need for fancy hardware or costly upgrades, and there’s less stuff to worry about. With an efficient solution, rendered at incredibly low cost, you can keep your startup’s operating expenses low, allowing you to leverage your capital in a better way.

 

Conclusion

Startups have a ton of challenges to overcome, but these video conferencing apps help you deal with those challenges in the best way possible: one that’s efficient and cost-effective. It’s a great start.

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