Improve Your Remote Employee Experience With Video Conferencing Software
Whether by choice or necessity, many teams are shifting fully to remote work, so video conferencing software has become a necessary software purchase for many businesses. If your company has never done remote work before, shifting to online meetings can be difficult at times, and your workforce might feel a little fatigue without the familiar cadence and communication of in-person meetings.
However, there are many features of video conferencing software that will make this workplace transition easier on employees—and even make virtual meetings more efficient than in-person ones.
For instance, features that improve the brainstorming process, the ability to record meetings, and meeting moderation tools make meetings more productive and useful, all while helping your employees feel like they’re contributing more to the success of your remote workforce.
Brainstorming is easier with video conference software
Most video conferencing software comes with some form of collaboration functionality built in. By offering employees a couple features like virtual whiteboarding and polling, video conferencing tools give teams more control over their brainstorming.
Virtual whiteboards provide a simple space on the screen where meeting participants can write notes or draw simple diagrams to share with other meeting attendees. These are typically viewable by all meeting participants.
Manual whiteboarding during in-person meetings can be time consuming and sloppy. Writing takes more time than typing, and, often, not everyone can participate, and louder voices might drown out less outspoken members of your team. During virtual meetings, each employee member can participate and everyone can see what everyone else is doing at the same time.
Brainstorming using Vectera’s wideboarding feature (Source)
Example: Let’s say the product team at your company is in a meeting to discuss what feature they want to work on next. You have four options on which your team needs to come to a consensus. With video conferencing software, every member of your team can participate in listing out pros and cons for each of the options. Once you have your list of pros and cons, you can have a discussion then create a poll directly inside the video conferencing software so everyone can vote on what they think is the best option to move forward with.
In-person brainstorming can take much longer than virtual brainstorming as you physically write out options on a whiteboard. You also run the risk of less outspoken team members failing to get their voices heard. Video conferencing software results in more efficient and productive meetings which, in turn, leads to much better remote employee experience.
Real-time polling in Adobe Connect (Source)
Recording meetings improves the remote employee experience
Watching a recording of a meeting that you have missed is not exciting, but having the ability to record meetings for those team members who weren’t present is vital to distributing important information to everyone.
Recording important meetings is pretty standard for larger companies who have been using video conferencing tools for years to connect various offices around the world, but if you’re a small business going remote for the first time, you’ve likely never had a reason to record a meeting before.
Zoom video conferencing interface with a recording option (Source)
If someone missed a meeting, you’re probably used to sending important notes or catching them up on what went down at another time. But without the real-time discussion during the meeting, a lot of important context and communication gets lost. Having the ability to rewatch a missed meeting will lead to better results and engagement because you will better understand how decisions were reached.
And let’s be real. If you’ve been involved in virtual meetings while working from home yet, you’ve likely had to step away to deal with a child or pet, so being able to go back and rewatch a recording is always helpful.
Nobody likes to be left in the dark or feel like they don’t have all the context necessary to do their job, so one surefire way to make sure your employees are thriving in an all-remote work environment is to have important meetings readily available via recording.
Moderating larger meetings is crucial with remote work
While not relevant to most meetings, the ability to moderate larger town-hall style meetings is incredibly important for a positive employee experience and improved employee engagement.
It always happens: one person is unmuted and doesn’t realize it. In smaller meetings, you can simply politely ask someone to mute themselves, but if dozens of people are all on the line, it is both time-consuming and difficult to pinpoint which user might be causing the disturbance.
Luckily for you, most video conferencing software has moderation features that allow conference hosts to do things such as add, drop, and mute participants as they work.
With moderation tools, you can also save bandwidth by turning off everyone’s camera and disabling the ability for participants to turn their microphones on. If you plan on running webinars or expect to have large meetings to distribute important information, you’ll want to find video conferencing software with moderation features.
Video conferencing software will help augment your video meetings
The features listed above aren’t the only ones that can be useful for your team. You might find certain collaboration tool that help improve employee morale and productivity that can integrate with your video conferencing solution as well.
Finding tools and software that augment your video meetings and integrate with your software stack is more important than any one feature, so take the time to really dissect what it is you and your team need in order to succeed if you’re moving to being remote-only for a while.
It’s possible for video conferences to be more productive than an in-person meeting ever could be. It just takes some readjustment and a little help from some useful software.
Additional resources to help you during your software hunt:
DISCLAIMER
The software applications referenced in this article that were cited by the interviewee in context are not intended as endorsements or recommendations.
The applications selected in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations. They have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.