A competently arranged online meeting provides an opportunity to increase employee efficiency, reach an understanding with partners, and show off in front of the competition. Here are five valuable recommendations for coordinators of online business meetings.

The present-day video conferencing equipment enables people to hear and see each other in any part of the world in real time. Online meetings are common practice among federal agencies, commercial companies, and educational institutions. Let’s examine the opportunities provided by web conferencing in business.

How video conferencing software simplifies business communications

Video conferencing is an important communications element in companies whose offices or partners are located in different cities or countries. Video conferencing enables employees to coordinate their activities, dynamically resolve ongoing issues, and undertake strategic planning. Remote participation in an online meeting saves significant amounts of employees’ time and company’s money. Online meetings successfully replace “live” meetings with foreign partners; this also saves time and money for both parties.

To conduct an efficient business video call several simple rules should be taken into account.

Five recommendations for conducting an effective video conference

1. Create an agenda for the video call. Write out a list of issues that need to be discussed using the video conferencing software and let all future participants of the video conference have access to the list. Video conferencing equipment, such as CommFort, will allow video calling with several dozen users or more, so it is advisable to get a clear idea from the conference participants who is planning to make presentations and for how long. This will help to plan the flow and timeframe of the online meeting.

2. Accurately inform the participants when the video call starts. Don’t forget to take the time zone into account – after all, the participants might be connecting to the online meeting from various cities and countries. For participant convenience you might show the time in this format, for example: “3:00 PM Moscow Time (UTC+4).” If you know from where the other participants are connecting to the video conference, show the time in their time zone. For example: “2:00 PM Kyiv Time, 12:00 PM London Time.”

3. Prepare electronic materials in advance: documents, tables, illustrations. Your video call will be more effective if the participants both talk and show. The CommFort conference calling system allows you, for example, to drag a graphic file to chat, and this file becomes immediately visible to all online meeting participants. Also using CommFort you can provide folders with electronic hand-outs to the users of the video conferencing software.

4. Check the equipment and the video conferencing equipment. Before the beginning of the web conference make sure that you have a laptop charger on hand. Check that the web camera and microphone work. Start the program that you plan to use for video calling: if you have not used this particular application to participate in an online meeting before, study its features. If you are using the CommFort program for web conferencing, this should only take a few minutes.

5. Conduct the online meeting just as you would a “live” meeting. The only difference of the web conferencing is in the physical absence of participants in one room. The rules of business etiquette are just as valid at an online conference as they are at any other real one. Using the CommFort conference calling system you and your associates can quickly become used to the new format of business communications.