I’ll be honest, My wife sent me the meme, which is the header art for this post, and frankly, it inspired this one, so thank you for that babe! Before COVID-19 hit, we were all having meetings with each other. Meetings were standard. Naturally, lunches, coffees, after work drinks were all commonplace. Now, however, with people working in their homes, getting together for a meeting has become much harder. Thankfully We can do web conferencing, which allows us to meet virtually while staying in our own homes.
1) We needed to have meetings before, and that hasn’t changed – Before the lockdown we would all meet with our colleagues for a variety of different business reasons. Now we still need to meet for those same reasons; we have to adapt to how those meetings happen. It was awesome for me to see how quickly people were able to adjust to this new reality. I will fully admit that I’m not a social person, but I have to admit that I have been enjoying a morning coffee and chatting with one of my best friends every once and a while since this started. Even my parents have decided to have evening drinks with their friends over zoom. It’s meant a great deal to all of us to be able to converse and see each other (even if it’s over video conferencing) to keep a human connection going.
2) Ensuring regular meetings is now a bit more technical – For those of us who used to pile into any free board room to have our weekly or monthly meetings, now making sure that everything works correctly is a bit more of a technical situation. Not only do you need to make sure that everyone can use the program you’re using, but you also need to depend on every participant’s home internet works correctly. With all of us working and conferencing from home, the strain on our home internet can and has been tested to the limit. I have been lucky in that (for the most part) when I have had video conferences with people, and my calls have not dropped. Ensuring that you know how the programs you are working (whichever one you’re using) works appropriately is vital.
3) Web conferencing has some excellent features – Since working from home has started, I have been playing around with some of the features that each program has. For the most part, they have a lot of the same features, which makes it easy to use different ones if needed. You can use your computer’s camera and microphone to have the conference; I also like the ability that these programs have to share your screen. This means that you can still give presentations and work on things with others. While the buttons for these various programs may be in different spots, they are all relatively the same. The one feature that I do like about Zoom is that you can have a different background overlaid over whatever is behind you. Suffice it to say I definitely took advantage of this (You’ll have to pardon my COVID beard);
No matter what service you use for your teleconferencing needs, they are all able to help you connect on a face to face level. It’s vital that, while we are isolating, we can maintain that human level of communication. All the programs that people can use, Skype, Go-to-meeting, Teams, and even Zoom, are all great tools that can help you connect to others. For those of you who are concerned about the security issues behind Zoom, I spoke to someone at Zoom, and the reason that people were able to “Zoom-Bomb” into a meeting that they weren’t invited to was that people in the meeting were putting the meeting ID and passwords on Social Media. That being said, they are putting in other security protocols to keep people safe in the future.
For now, stay healthy, everyone!
Do you like your Web Conferencing Service?
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