Recently in Workplace Efficiency Category

We all cringe at the thought of sitting through yet another weekly meeting in which we hash out the events of the seven days and discuss what each team member feels is top priority moving forward. These meetings can seem mundane and tiresome as can the time spent creating an agenda leading up to them. In “The Advantage” Patrick Lencioni addresses how to eliminate the fuss and capitalize on time to ensure your dreaded weekly meeting not only serves purpose, but makes it enjoyable.

According to Lencioni “there is no more valuable activity in any organization than the regular staff meeting of a leadership team.” He has designated weekly or bi-weekly meetings for tactical purposes. These meetings are to quickly create a real-time agenda and assess top priorities. The challenge is evaluating the importance of each priority brought up by team members while eliminating topic distractions.

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.

In our April 24th blog, we discussed conference call techniques for meeting managers, where we emphasized knowing your conference call provider's features and options. This will help you manage your calls more effectively. Last week's blog (June 24th) on conferencing etiquette provided guidelines for the moderators and participants. This week we want to add more ways for improving your conference calls.

We would recommend having your conference calls at a regular, recurring time. The conference call can be scheduled daily, weekly or monthly. The key, however, is to schedule the conference call at a consistent day and time. This allows your team members to plan their schedules and emphasizes the value you place on the participant's input. Having this fixed schedule shows respect and helps to maximize the success of your conference meeting for all involved.

Many business people have questions about the proper etiquette to use when hosting or participating in a conference call. While many have weighed in on this issue, there is no one set of definitive rules governing proper conduct of a conference event. We would like to offer the following suggestions as guidelines for consideration by anyone required to host/moderate or requested to participate on a conference call.

Guidelines for hosts / moderators:

In a sales environment where representatives need to keep meetings with people in Arizona at 11am and then with others in New York 30 minutes later, webinars and web conferencing are king. On a daily basis we meet with decision makers to go over contracts, clarify customizations and demonstrate industry leading software solutions — all from our offices in Chicago.

Recently we took on a new strategy with our webinar technology and began hosting mass webinars on a regular basis. With these events we are able to:

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.

Video conferencing continues to gain currency as organizations are forced to constantly wring more efficiencies out of smaller and geographically distributed staffs. Conferencing in general is an effective alternative to travel because it eliminates cost and time lost in transit. Video conferencing provides some benefits that other types of conferencing (audio and web) do not, particularly the added intimacy and sense of expression that comes from the participants actually seeing each other onscreen.

Video conferences are an extremely effective form of communication when they are conducted well. Conversely, they can be an unintelligible mess of distraction and garbled communication if best practices are not followed. There are several forms of video conferencing available in the marketplace today including handheld and desktop device based methods as well as room-based video conferencing. The best practices below are intended for room-based video conferencing although many of them apply to the other forms as well.

Best practices are as follows:

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

Whether you need to host recurring meetings or organize something last minute, setting up a conference call efficiently allows you to bring people together. Although conference calls make meeting convenient, they can get complicated when you involve multiple people.

There are many things that can negatively impact a conference call, such as background noise or interruption by late participants. You can also face the issue of people having the wrong dial-in info or bad connectivity to the call.

Know Your Conference Call Provider's Features and Options

Hosting a successful conference call is much more manageable if you make yourself familiar with all of the features and options available in order to alleviate any issues that may arise. For instance, you can mute all participants in order to avoid background noise. You can even lock your conference so that late participants don't have the option to join and interrupt. If a participant has an issue dialing in to the call, you can actually dial out to him/her for inclusion into the call. Another option is to record the call for people who may have missed the meeting all together. It is also helpful to notify participants of how you plan to conduct the meeting by sending an email ahead of time with an agenda and details of how you plan to conduct the meeting, such as your plan to lock the conference 5 minutes after the meeting starts.

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:

Two Rivers Conferencing, LLC's management team has over 25 years of conferencing expertise, specializing in our country's premiere law firms of all sizes and legal specialties. We know how important conference calls are to legal professionals and we provide superior quality audio, video and web conferencing that is easy to use while backed by personal real-time assistance. Our clients value us most for our ability to improve the profitability, increase the security and enhance the image of their law firm's conference events.

Profitability is improved by our advanced invoice and billing system that allows every conference event to be associated with the correct client matter number. Further improvements are realized by reducing the amount of staff time taken to process the information provided on each invoice into its most usable format for the firm's data tracking requirements.

Improved profitability starts at the beginning of each conference call. Our clients have the option of being prompted to input the client matter number assigned to the conference event. Our system then confirms the number prior to launching the conference call to eliminate the possibility of number entry errors. These assigned numbers are carried forward onto our monthly billing statements sent electronically as email attachments. The same information can be provided more quickly via conference reports sent to designated administrators within moments after the conclusion of each conference call!

Two Rivers Conferencing's inventive mobile app for Reservationless Conference Calling is a full-featured approach to conferencing on the go. Called SmartMeet, this app will give you the power to start, join and schedule meetings with seamless and complete call management. In addition, you can avoid high roaming charges when you travel internationally and conduct meetings with carriers that do not support simultaneous talk and data.

Surprising your conference call participants with questions can result in embarrassing delays as they search for an appropriate response. Fortunately, these awkward moments can be prevented entirely and for all time by having conference event moderators adopt the practice of alerting participants in advance of their required contribution to the group's discussion. Like all good habits, adopting this practice requires discipline and practice. One respected approach identifies seven basic steps that we have applied to the circumstances of a conference event moderator:

In its early days, teleconferencing industry technology required that Conference Service Providers schedule their customers' conference calls in advance then greet each arriving participant before placing and announcing them onto the conference call. All that changed with the arrival of “Toll Free Reservationless Conference Calling” in the mid-1990s! Conference users can initiate a conference event today at their earliest possible convenience and allow participants to join the event immediately after entering the correct conference code.

The importance of receiving a detailed invoice when using conference calling services is an often over-looked and undervalued aspect of the Conference Service Provider's (CSP) capabilities. The complexity of conference call detail records can pose serious challenges to accounting specialists charged with the responsibility of assuring the legitimacy of the charges billed by the CSP and allocating those costs to specific individuals or departments within the client organization. At Two Rivers Conferencing LLC we place considerable importance on our process for providing our customers with timely, accurate invoices that provide all our customers with a well-organized invoice that allows for easy verification and assignment of conference service related costs.