In these challenging times, many people are practicing physical distancing which is helping to prevent the spread of Coronavirus. At the same time, it's necessary to keep our businesses going in some way or the other. You may not be able to continue running your business at the same pace as before; all businesses have been hit by this global pandemic in one way or another. Hopefully, you're able to keep your business up and running and your employees working from home. To keep in touch with your team, your clients and your prospects, like many of us, you're likely using video conferencing.
Be In Touch With Employees Everyday
If you're a business owner or manager, it's important for you to stay in touch with your employees. At work, you may be doing this by walking to their desks or sending them text messages when you're not there. During these challenging times, you can do it with video.
The advantage of using video is you communicate better when you see a person face to face. Not only do you hear what they're saying, but you can also see their expressions and their body language which will help you to understand if you're getting through to them.
It can also be reassuring for people who are working at home to be able to actually see and speak with other individuals, even if it's through video chat. So there are many great reasons to keep in touch with your employees every day. You may actually be helping to keep them sane!
How To Organize A Video Conference
It's very easy to video conference for all your employees (or as many as might be needed in a particular conference). There are several software/apps that you can use for this. Most of us have used Skype and Google Hangouts at some point or the other.These days, Zooms seems to be the video conferencing tool of choice. You can even use Slack for video conferencing.
- Skype allows you to do a video conference with 10 members at a time.
- Google Hangouts lets you do a conference with 25 members at a time.
- Zoom allows for 100 participants at a time, in case you need to get a lot of people on board.
- Slack Video Calls allows for 15 people.
There are a number of other video conferencing software which are good for 3-10 participants. So if you don't feel comfortable with one, you can try out a couple until you find one that suits you. And, Facebook is coming out with a conferencing tool inside of Messenger. And Microsoft is starting to publicize Microsoft Teams as a tool for video conferencing.
Keep Your Conferences Small
Although some of the above-mentioned tools will allow you to have many many participants, the best meetings are probably the ones which don't have more than 10 members. So if you have more than 10 employees, hopefully, it's not always necessary for all of them to be present at all meetings. Instead, break them up into smaller groups when you can, according to their function (or use that function in Zoom with a larger meeting). For example, you can have one video conference with your marketing team, one with your HR team, etc.
Meetings With Clients
You can also use video conferencing in order to speak to clients, depending on the type of business you have. For example, if you are a divorce lawyer, you can get your client, the person they are divorcing and their lawyer together on a conference call. This is quite similar to everyone meeting around a desk.
Or, if you were scheduled to do a presentation for a client, you can do it over video. You can prepare a presentation and share your screen over video and then explain your slides the way you would in a conference room. It may not feel as comfortable as standing up in front of a group of people but it can be done.
Keeping Things Professional
It can be quite tempting to work from your pajamas or sweats at home and a lot of people opt to do this. But when you're video conferencing, you have to make sure you keep things professional. So wear something presentable when you go on video chat. At least on your upper body.
And yes, you can ask after the health of your employees and your clients; it's only human to do so. You can also make sure that they're practicing physical distancing and have all the correct information about what's going on in the world at present.
But it's also a good idea not to dwell too much on the issue in a way that can create nervousness and panic or spread false information. Continue running your business and assign as many tasks as you can for people to do at home. This will keep their minds busy on work.
The bottom line is that there are tools we can employ to keep our businesses running and our employees and clients engaged. This is as good a time as any to expand our horizons, learn new things, and be as creative as possible. We must do what we need to do to keep things running as normal as possible.
For more information about video conferencing for business owners, or, to get some help with your digital marketing strategy, call 720.248.8185, or click here to schedule a free digital marketing consultation.
Please note: Our social marketing firm is in Denver, Colorado, and we provide social media support and advertising for businesses throughout the United States, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Brad Friedman, owner of The Friedman Group, was a practicing attorney for 16 years. He has extensive social media and marketing experience and is an expert on inbound marketing.
