Tips On How To Make Your Virtual Meeting Memorable

With the sudden boom in virtual meetings taking place daily, many companies have decided to move all of their meetings online since it has proved effective. Unfortunately, however, this new practice of virtual conference calls has given birth to a new phenomenon known as ‘Zoom Fatigue’. This is when someone is forced to attend back to back calls and virtual meetings and, just like if they were attending them physically, they are getting burned out and fatigued.

It is important to remember that just because employees are working from home, this does not mean they are not susceptible to exhaustion. In an effort to help your meetings to a minimum while also making the information provided stick out, here are a few tips on how to make your virtual meetings more memorable.

Make Use Of The Tools Available

Most of us are probably used to video conferencing by now and know the basics when it comes to applications like Zoom, Skype, and Microsoft Teams. They do, however, all have extra features that are a little less known but extremely useful. Virtual whiteboards are a great example of this and they function just like an ordinary whiteboard, except people around the world can see and interact with them.

Another great tool available is the ability to share screens with members of the conference call, using screen sharing you can share your whole monitor or just specific applications to selected participants. Finally, another feature that is often overlooked is shared documents. Shared documents allow multiple people to work on the same thing at the same time, automatically updating it as you go.

 This may sound dangerous but you can also set it to save backups and to track who made each change so you will always be able to recover information if the worst happens.

There are of course other tools available but these are the ones we found most helpful and felt as though we should include. We do, however, encourage you to jump in a test call with a co-worker or a friend and try out the other features available to see if anything else can be of use to you.

Make Use Of Emojis

Emojis have been around for years in our phones and are typically brushed off as things to only use in casual text conversations with friends. However, during a conference call it can be hard to express emotion as we can no longer rely on body language to get our feelings across, in addition, you may want to express how you feel at a certain time without interrupting the current speaker. Emojis are a great way to get around this and are the perfect tool when you are forced to work online.

Play Around With Your Background

Whether you have something behind you that you want to hide, distractions such as children or pets running around, or even if you just want to lighten the mood with a change of scenery, virtual backgrounds are an essential tool for modern video conferencing. With the wide variety of options available, if you pick a virtual background Zoom can integrate it directly into your video feed, meaning you do not have to buy a physical green screen to maintain privacy over a video call.

Services like Hello Backgrounds work great with Zoom and over time they have garnered a huge library of virtual backgrounds to choose from. You can keep things serious with a city skyline or a generic office, or you can think outside the box and add some humour to your meetings by using something like the seafloor or the cockpit of a spaceship, there really is a background for any occasion.

Consider Recording Your Calls

Recording your meeting may not make your meeting more memorable directly, having a video copy of what was said and done is a great way to keep accurate notes that anyone with access can refer back to. Additionally, recorded meetings are especially useful for anyone who was unable to make it to the meeting on time. People who have responsibilities such as child care, or even those who were unfortunate enough to get sick, can quickly and easily catch up with anything they missed simply by watching the meeting back, almost as if they were there at the time.