Best practice for conference calls

Ensure everyone knows the technology

Make sure everyone familiarises themselves with the technology before using it. This will not only eliminate the risk of accidentally videoing yourself naked or on the toilet, but also save time during calls and keep the focus on the meeting.

Everyone should test their audio and visual settings before the day’s calls, and leave time to fix any issues. There should be a designated techy person, whether IT staff or simply someone knowledgable in the platform, who team members know they can go to with questions.

They should also have a solid understanding of the platform used. Keep to one, consistent platform for all teams and provide access to online training and help videos, while letting people block out a time period to go through them. Zoom provides a how-to video library with quick answers to questions, and Skype has an extensive FAQ, as does Google Hangouts.

Have one meeting host who takes charge

Team management is important when people are remote, and meeting management even more so. The meeting host’s responsibility should be to set a clearly structured agenda which they share at the start of a meeting, to keep everyone focused on the meeting outcomes instead of the inevitable distractions of pets, partners, children and checking out the interior decorating taste of colleagues.

Keep audio to a minimum

Staying on mute in large meetings is good practice and eliminates distracting background noise and interference. Most platforms will enable you to hold down the space bar or another key to talk.

There are also ’raise your hand’ features in most platforms that allow people to indicate through an animated on-screen emoji when they want to speak, preventing everyone from talking at once.

Use collaboration tools

Features like on-screen sharing and virtual whiteboards can bring creativity to meetings and aid in the collaboration of ideas. They can be used in conjunction with shared document editing programmes like Google Docs or Microsoft Sharepoint, where everyone can edit the same document in real-time.

While whiteboarding can be difficult from most devices without a touch screen, consider joining the meeting with an iPad or tablet.

With Skype, meetings can also be scheduled using integrations with Outlook.

But make sure you know the privacy settings

A word of warning: make sure you’re only sharing things you want to share. As a heads up, Zoom saves private chats as meeting minutes that anyone from a meeting can download at the end. So ensure anything you communicate on the platform, even if its 1-to-1, is appropriate for all.

Incorporate team bonding time

Video conferencing doesn’t have to be all work and no play. Scheduled social time without a specific agenda helps everyone feel like they’re still part of the same team.

Zoom has tips on fun ways to incorporate community and workplace culture into working from home, like ’bring your pet to work’, virtual coffee breaks and lunches.

Limit video time

The potential downside of video is that staff might think they have to be constantly available, and this can both cut into productivity and affect stress levels. Working from home can blur the boundaries between work time and downtime where the end of a day’s work can start to creep up later and later.

Have a defined cut-off period for conference calls, eliminate ad-hoc ones by planning regular ones into the calendar, and promote self-care strategies for teams like taking regular screen breaks, having a set routine and going for walks, yoga breaks and other exercise.