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Continuing our discussion on effective meetings, Patrick Lencioni in his book “The Advantage — Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business” said, “The highpoint of being a leader in an organization is wrestling with difficult decisions and situations. Truncating those high points just doesn't make sense.” Lencioni makes a strong case for the utilization of adhoc topical meetings where management digs into the critical issues that can have a long term impact on an organization or that require significant time and energy.

According to Lencioni, managers should separate their tactical conversations from their strategic ones. Combining the tactical and strategic conversations just doesn't work and leaves both set of issues inadequately addressed. He further states that if leadership goes more than a month without a strategic meeting, something is probably wrong.

In his book “The Advantage — Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business” author Patrick Lencioni boldly states, “If someone were to offer me one single piece of evidence to evaluate the health of an organization, I would want to observe the leadership team during a meeting.” He then makes a compelling case for the use of daily check-in meetings where management teams briefly review schedules, events and issue alerts.

Lencioni advises the team get into the habit of gathering once a day, for no more than ten minutes, to clear the air about anything administrative that would be helpful to know. He further advises that there be no agendas and no resolution of issues, just an exchange of information. Two Rivers Conferencing's toll free reservationless conference services perfectly complements this healthy organization strategy!

International business is exploding across all industries as new technology makes the world a smaller place. Although more international business opportunities exist than ever before, communicating effectively with parties in different countries can be a challenge. Different physical locations, different time zones and long travel durations combine to create strong barriers to communication. Audio and video conferencing are powerful ways for geographically distributed groups of people to collaborate effectively. They allow multiple participants to communicate as a group and create real time teamwork where it otherwise could not exist. They can also allow sharing of documents, drawings, spreadsheets and even full motion videos, which aid the communication process.

As significant as the benefits of international conferencing may be, challenges to effective communication do exist. Accents from non-native English speakers can be difficult to discern. Some words and phrases have different meanings in different countries which can lead to confusion. With that in mind here are some do's and don'ts for international audio/video conferencing:

It is a challenge to connect professionals suspicious of sharing information with other professionals in the same industry — even though sharing expertise could benefit both parties. Conference calling technology provides an effective way to bridge this need for shared professional expertise. A real estate agent program provides a strong example of the benefits of sharing information at a distance using conference calling.

A sales representative from a large conference service provider (CSP) attended a real estate sales seminar hosted by an acknowledged industry expert on the best practices for achieving success in residential and commercial real estate. His seminars were attended by some of this country's most successful real estate agents. The sales representatives were told that surveys taken by the seminar's attendees indicated that the agents strongly valued the information obtained from the program's presentations and educational events. Surprisingly, the survey data showed attendees gave even greater value to the information shared among fellow sales agents during the many social and business networking events that occurred over the course of the three day conference seminar event.

Web conferencing is important for sharing information, effective collaboration and active communication. It is efficient and saves both time and money while bringing groups together from all over the world. An excellent collaboration tool for law firms, corporations and other organizations, web conferencing allows organizations to tap into expertise that is geographically dispersed. In the future think of web conferencing for increased interactivity, engagement and accessibility from any device (Smartphones and tablets), improving presentation tools, simplifying shared documents, and enhancing Q and A.

While the users of web conferencing systems (WCS) are most concerned about how the system works to meet their communication needs, the IT group has an important interest in how well the system operates and the amount of effort required to maintain it. To find out more about IT requirements for a good system, several members of a small company IT department were asked about the important considerations for selecting a good WCS.

Meeting the important user requirements was the primary goal for the change in systems. The previous system did not provide a quality user experience, with audio issues and occasional delays initiating meetings. Network speed at each location impacted the quality of video and VoIP, so any new system would need to operate efficiently. High quality and reliability are at the very top of the requirements list. The top of mind considerations for a new WCS were the ease of configuration and set-up of the new system. There is a desire to have a system with easy administrative procedures to minimize the work for entering new users and modifying the user base. Having the capability to link directly to the company directory for system access maintenance is very useful.

Web conferencing is a powerful way for geographically distributed groups of people to collaborate effectively. Not only does it allow participants to see each other onscreen if desired, it also allows sharing of documents, drawings, spreadsheets and even full motion videos. A picture is worth a thousand words and the ability to share the actual materials that are being discussed in the meeting is extremely effective. It is useful to show participants in onscreen windows because their expressions and gestures give context to their statements which could otherwise be misconstrued. Web conferencing is also commonly used to share desktops in order to demonstrate software for remote viewers, be they customers or colleagues.

Using a web conferencing solution to aid in customer support can be very beneficial in providing high quality service to clients. Web conferencing allows customer support representatives to assist customers with tools that can make them as efficient and effective as they would be on site, thus saving travel time and costs.

With the ability to conduct interactive training and support, a customer service representative can take over the customer's desktop, share instructional documents, and even provide video clips. These web conference tools are specifically designed to allow technical support teams to diagnose and resolve customer problems online quickly and effectively.

More businesses and educational institutions are realizing the cost and time-saving benefits of using web conferencing for training and instruction. Utilizing a web solution for training or educational purposes eliminates the time and cost of travel, yet allows the entire team or class to be in one place at one time.

In the business world, web conferencing solutions have built-in collaboration tools that allow participants to share documents, chat, and take polling questions in order to gauge where everyone is at and what further processes need to be put in place. Team leaders and instructors can present Power Point presentations to employees, supply team members or trainees as well as leave them with fact sheets when the training concludes.

Contacting participants after the webinar is important and it should be done within 24 hours. Create follow-up emails within this time period and, if possible, personalize them (for example, one way to personalize is to include an answer to a question a participant had). You should also follow up with those who registered but did not attend. Provide what you promised: for instance, slides, a link to the event recording and any other relevant material. You can further leverage the event by providing a link to the webinar recording on your web site, embed it in your blog, and incorporate it in your social media efforts. Invite attendees to follow you on social media.

You should critique the webinar for lessons learned and identify improvement areas for future webinars. Review any attendee feedback for ways to improve. Do a post-webinar evaluation with presenters to ID what worked and what didn't.

Registration for your webinar is complete. The date for the webinar is near, and any technical surprises on the day of the event will compromise the success of your webinar. You need to understand the technical restrictions of your web conferencing platform and be trained on the software. During the content planning phase, you should have communicated any restrictions to presenters so they understand the technical requirements regarding materials they will be using. You should have enough bandwidth to avoid buffering and presentation delays. You want to maximize the audio quality, following a few simple recommendations:

• Use a handset if possible (otherwise a headset)
• Don't use a speaker phone
• Be on a landline, not a mobile phone
• Consider background noise
• When a speaker is not presenting, mute their lines

A Webinar is an online presentation and communication tool for your target audience. It is cost-effective and can be highly beneficial to your organization if properly planned. Benefits include:

Prior to launching its Conference Service Provider business, the founding executives at Two Rivers Conferencing conducted a substantial number of interviews among a wide variety of other service providers' customers. The information gained from these interviews guided us in almost every aspect of our operating technology and service provisioning processes. We took special note of the almost unanimous dissatisfaction expressed about recurring monthly fees and hidden costs that appeared in every new CSP invoice! These included:

We at TRC made it our mission to address these concerns by delivering all of our services on a price per minute basis without requiring the use of additional charges for features and services that were already an integral part of our operating service platform. As a result, our customers use our services with the confidence of knowing their monthly invoice will contain only those charges that are directly based upon the actual number of minutes of usage for our audio and web conference services with no frills and no hidden charges.

Meetings held on audio, web and video conference calls are one of the common ways that many of us get work done on the job. We may discuss issues, share new information and make important decisions in meetings. However, conference calls can also be one of the ways that time is wasted in the workplace. A timed agenda can be a great way of keeping meetings on track and making sure that meetings not only begin and end on time, but that each topic also gets its just allotted time. We believe that the use of a timed agenda can also serve as a helpful training and recognition opportunity that can remove the burden placed upon the conference call moderator or host for developing and managing the conference meeting's timed agenda. These opportunities are highlighted in bold print below.

We often describe Two Rivers Conferencing LLC as a Conference Service Provider that is, “large enough to serve you but small enough to care!” Recent survey responses show one hundred percent (100%) of our respondents report they are “highly satisfied” with our services in the past year with a substantial percentage (87%) indicating they are “very likely” to continue using our services in the future. The combination of these positive responses confirms TRC's service capacity and range of service features meet our customers' needs.

Why such high customer satisfaction? We believe it's because we provide our customers with direct access to a knowledgeable staff of conference service professionals having substantial backgrounds in telephony and/or conference calling since TRC's founding in 2005:

Most people don't give a lot of thought to participating on a teleconference call. Aside from putting it on your appointment calendar and making sure you have the information available for joining on-time, there's not much else to think about, right?

That's true if you are on the receiving end of the teleconference meeting as one of the attendees, however there are a few more things you should consider if you're the one responsible for arranging an online business meeting. After all, the purpose of a typical teleconference is to arrange a meeting of multiple individuals so that a specific business purpose is accomplished within a scheduled amount of time. Therefore, to achieve a successful online meeting on a teleconference call, it can be very helpful to consider the following concerns most good meeting arrangers would address when scheduling an in-person meeting or event:

We encountered an interesting perspective on how one IT consulting firm uses video conferencing or more specifically, how it determines when to use a video conference versus a traditional teleconference call or web conference.

Earth Day is an annual event that has been observed on April 22 every year since 1970 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. Don't worry, that isn't a setup to preach about the importance of doing your individual part in observance of Earth Day, although there's nothing wrong with that.

Earth Day is one of those events that most of us have heard about, but find easy to forget until someone or something brings it to our attention again. Let's face it — every day we all have to prioritize the competing demands for our attention and energy. And lately, there certainly hasn't been a lack of important challenges and issues confronting every person and every business.