If you work from home, you want to make the most of your time, be productive, and keep committed to your daily duties. Holding video conferences from your motivated home office is a part of most remote work. While it may appear to be straightforward, there are a number of things that may go wrong.
Here are 5 tips for holding productive work meetings from your home office.
- Incorporate interactive features and chat tools
Encourage attendees to use the chat option if your online webinar platform offers one. The chat box is a great opportunity to take notes and ask questions without disrupting the presentation. You could even request your remote conference participants to activate the video component of their device. This is a great method for keeping participants on track and participating successfully in a remote home meeting.
- Adopt the right technology tools
Your staff might not have all they need to participate in a successful video conference. Consider standardising computer devices, or at the very least establishing a baseline standard to ensure clear and successful video conferencing.
You should have many forms of technologies agreed upon for remote meetings so that staff can be productive and understanding. This might also include investing in high-quality mics to help filter out background noise and prevent feedback from other people in the video meeting.
- Remember to socialize fully
Remotely placed teams who have staff working from home must form social relationships in order to collaborate more effectively and avoid employees feeling separated from one another. A virtual introduction or icebreaker or exercise can also allow you to start the remote meeting on successfully and will facilitate a more natural transition into the main focus of the meeting than just chatting away.
- Limit the size of the meeting
Hosting smaller meetings, whether online or in person, encourages more participants to engage, therefore keeping the number of workers involved in each meeting to a minimum is a smart practice for productivity. Although keeping your meeting’s participant maximum at a small number is desirable, your meeting’s maximum capacity will mostly be determined by your business and team’s size.
A great method to ensure meetings are kept small is to invite only the people that need to be there and avoid inviting those who don’t need to be there as much as others – perhaps host a separate meeting for these people. Staff and individuals who are not invited to meetings that they aren’t necessarily required to attend will value having fewer meetings, and those who attend are more likely to reap the advantages of a more productive meeting that’s more suited to them.
- Prohibit phones for meetings
While it may be so simple and convenient to easily attend a meeting from anywhere using your smartphone, it is difficult to stay fully engaged and focused in a meeting when you are watching it on a small screen which you usually use for entertainment. Simply encourage employees to join a meeting through a larger device such as a computer or laptop to limit distractions.
