Work & Business

How to organise successfully a video-meeting

With most of the world required to stay at home, many companies now rely on remote working and keep connection with staff through instant messages and emails. Face-to-face meeting can no longer take place and instead managers are asked to organise video-conferences.

You might think that attending (or even organising) a video conference won't require too much efforts. However, while having sleepers to cover your feet won't be noticeable, many things need your attention to avoid turning the meeting into a total cacophony, or letting you down during a professional presentation (remember this interview that went viral on social network following a famous incident).

Those are a few tips that can help to work successfully you video-calls.

1. Test it: make sure your microphone and camera work. Maybe call someone before in order to test it and make sure you won't have a technical issue during the meeting. It includes making sure that you have enough light so people will see you and you fit in the frame of the screen when runing the video.
2. Be careful with sound: When participating to a meeting, it's better to be on mute when you are not talking. Thus, the more the participants, the less background noise you will get (that includes the kids shoutings, the doorbell, etc). Similarly, it's probably not a good idea to flush the toilet or run water while having your microphone open.
3. Use headphones, so you can better concentrate on your call and other people in the house cannot hear what is the conversation.
4. Think about your background: While it's perfectly fine to have a plain wall, some books, plants, window... showing the bathroom or untidy bedroom is not going to look good for a professional meeting. With some video-conference apps, it is possible to hide unwanted features with a virtual background.
5. Think about what you are wearing: your dressing gown or pyjama is not recommended. You'll need to look presentable, at least from the waist up.
6. Smaller group meetings: Always remember that if more than one person speaks at once, which is very common in normal face-to-face human interaction, it can rapidly become unintelligible by video. As simultanous conversations are difficult impossible to manage online and it's probalyy better to have smaller meetings. Therefore, make sure that participants to meetings are only those who need to be there: it will avoid most of the problems above.

Check our previous article for more tips to work remotely during the coronaviru crisis.

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 Author: Cyrilexpat |  2020-04-08 09:00:31

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