There’s a right way and a wrong way to phone it in. With a simple Smartphone, you can phone it in and show your teams just how stellar phoning it in can be. There are apps galore that managers can use to bring everyone into the room and keep up with your teams and office even when you are separated by geographical distance. Even full scale meetings get easier with the right tools. Create and foster a culture that engages your people with creativity, collaboration, and communication.
Do Meetings Right
Everyone has had the meeting from hell. Interminable. Pointless. You might as well be on a merry go round. You play Candy Crush on your phone, daydream, and according to a Verizon white paper 39 percent of meeting attendees have actually taken a nap. If you look around the meeting and see blank stares, you are dealing with a bunch of people who have simply checked out. Their butts are in the seats, but they are gone baby gone. Even in a video conference, there’s going to be people who just clock out the second the lights go down.
This is because most meetings are run in a format that despite the PowerPoint slides is right out of the last century. Top down, mono directional, and not taking into account that the people with their butts in the seats can contribute, too. A culture of ineffectual meetings can even turn toxic and dysfunctional, kneecapping an organization that needs to adapt to the digital age. It’s 2015, not 1985, and everyone needs to evolve past the shoulder pads and big hair era of management. Make the technology work for you, with apps that work on any platform or device.
Get Your Droid On
Pew Internet’s recent survey of smartphone use notes that 64 percent of Americans in 2015 own a smartphone, and that is up from 58 percent just in 2014. Odds are that your team members own a smartphone, and use it daily. If you can incorporate that mobile phone into your communications policy, you will have a flexible platform for reaching out to your staff and giving them the face time they need with you and each other. Android video conferencing with Bluejeans is not limited to Android, this application can connect with so many other platforms, including room based systems from Cisco and Polycom, and other apps that will make collaboration easy and intuitive.
Getting On Board
Unlike room based systems, you will find that using a cloud sourced application is much simpler and much less expensive. Previously, the hardware and the software deployed in many video conferencing systems required its own staff to operate. While you may want to appoint a meeting moderator, the interface, whether it is on a smartphone, a tablet, or other device is simple to use. Collaborative tools include document and video sharing, meeting recording, text chatting, and even a command center that will help you by providing valuable information about how you are conducting your meetings. Participants can access their meetings directly from their browser, and anyone from anywhere can be invited to join in.
Give Good Meeting
It can take some effort to build a culture in which everyone participates, and one of the chief complaints about meetings is that they are dominated by individuals and seem to go exactly nowhere. By deploying Bluejeans, meetings are always fresh. Participants can refer back to the recordings, notes, documents and other media that were shared during the meeting and implement the decisions that were made immediately. A meeting is productive only when acted upon. Meetings that go nowhere, have no agenda, and serve little purpose should be decisively eliminated.
Many meetings can be eliminated by deciding how best fulfill communication needs. For instance, calling a meeting with nothing as simple as a status update is a waste of time, disruption, and can slow productivity if a meeting does need to be held considering a certain subject within the status update then those who are most affected can be summoned to a video-conference to discuss solutions. Another complaint about meetings is that people who have the most to offer, are not usually invited to participate, there can be many reasons for this, but those who speak the least should be offered some time in front of the camera. When you are creating the meeting agenda give everyone a set amount of time to offer their contributions and points of view.
Final Words
You cannot change a culture overnight. Re-engaging with employees who are detached and alienated will take time. When a 2015 Gallup poll showed in excess of 68 percent of workers uninvolved, and unenthusiastic about their work, it should alarm any manager or stands the impact of soft costs on the bottom line. Reengage them, give them something to be enthusiastic about, and allow them to develop creativity and passion that will benefit your organization.
