Crash Course on Virtual Meetings Through Livestreaming
Virtual meetings have taken up a fair share in the lives of many employees due to the recent large-scale adaption of remote work culture. Organizations throughout the world have taken the initiative to adapt this work culture to prioritize the safety of their employees. There are many possibilities that this work culture would remain even when the ongoing pandemic would end.
Hosting a virtual meeting is quite an easy task, all you have to do is choose a virtual meeting platform that suits your needs and add your employees to the meeting room. A virtual meeting is a process that involves people from different parts of the world, cities, or any place, to connect using the right online event-creating technology.
Virtual meetings have become an important part of the life of most employees. Whether the objective is hiring a new employee, presenting a new workflow chart, providing training sessions, or discussing the aims and objectives of a task, all of such tasks can be carried out with the help of virtual meetings.
Types of Virtual Meetings
Many modifications can be made in a virtual meeting room, depending upon the virtual room creating a platform that you have chosen. These functionalities are there due to the different kinds of virtual meetings that are held with the use of such platforms. These different types of virtual meetings are as below.
1. Virtual corporate meeting: A virtual corporate meeting room is made for conducting a business-oriented meet between the attendees who belong to the same organization, join-venture, corporate society, or a client association. These are mainly organized to discuss the future plans of a topic that concerns all of the attendees of the meeting.
2. Virtual Sales meeting: This is a meeting that accumulates the necessary processes and technologies with the help of which salespeople interact and present their products or services to buyers all around the world. This can increase the reach of yours as well as increase the possibility of earning more profits through sales.
3. Virtual Annual Genera Meetings: These are the necessary meeting held between important entities of a business in order to discuss the ways with which everyone can be satisfied with the workflow of the business. it is required to be done for making sure that there is no internal retaliation.
4. Virtual Townhall meetings: These types of meetings received a huge amount of positive popularity. It is a meeting that is used by different people, that are located in diverse locations, for connecting with each other.
5. Virtual Team meetings: Virtual team meeting rooms are held the most all around the world, but not because of preference, but because of compulsion. The recent pandemic made all of us work from our houses, leaving these virtual team meeting rooms as the only option to work alongside our team members.
The Benefits of Virtual Meetings
Virtual meetings provide us with many benefits. Some of those are given below.
1. It saves our money: When you go to a meeting, there are many expenses, such as transportation, food, accommodation, catering, and even traveling, that you have to pay for. Holding an online meeting from a virtual room takes all of those expenses away.
2. Increase the number of participants: There are many times when you’re not able to attend an important meeting due to the difference in location of yours at that time. But attending a meeting from a virtual meeting room doesn’t need you to be in a specific location. But still attend the meeting in real-time, without any time gap.
3. More opportunities: A business can only achieve its maximum potential where all its employees participate to share their ideas and thoughts. But when we talk about on-site meetings that are held far from the location of employees, many of the employees are not able to attend them. Whereas, in a virtual meeting room, anyone can attend from anywhere that they want.
4. It benefits the environment: Going to a meeting requires you to use a vehicle, along with staying in another place. This makes you create a lot of unnecessary carbon footprints. On the other hand, virtual meetings run with the help of green technology and leave little to a negligible amount of carbon footprints of yours on the place where you are working from.
Ways to host a virtual meeting
After knowing about what kind of virtual meeting rooms you can create and what are the benefits of using a virtual room for hosting your meetings, let’s know how you can host a virtual meeting. Hosting a virtual meeting is quite easy but keeping all its attendees constantly engaged is the tricky part. Some ways are given below with the help of which you can host a meeting better and keep all its attendees engaged at all times.
1. Be clear about the why: Making sure that you have a clear agenda for holding a meeting is necessary for engaging your attendees in your discussion. Stating the main motive of the meeting at the start of the meeting allows you and our attendees to focus on a topic and take interest in it.
2. Hold it in a platform that suits you: Holding a virtual meeting in a platform that you know about lets you be confident about everything that you do while being in the middle of the meeting. Using an unknown platform for holding your meeting can make you do a mistake while trying to use a function of the platform.
3. Invite your desired audience: For a virtual room to become a virtual meeting room, some amount of people are required along with you too. Your audience can be anyone that you want to include in your meeting room.
4. Schedule it: If your audience includes people from different time zones, then make sure to look into their time zones and yours. This will allow you to schedule your meeting at a time of a day that is possible for everyone to attend.
5. Provide some guidelines; Providing the attendees of your virtual meeting room with some specific guidelines can help in maintaining order and professionalism. If the meeting is about idea contribution, then make sure to tell everyone in the room that proper participation is compulsory.
6. Increase engagement: Sitting in the same and staring at the display when everyone else is doing the same can be quite boring. If you have to make sure that the attendees of your virtual meeting room don’t lose their interest, then make sure that you engage them in some way. Some things that you can do to increase engagement among the attendees is to include things like quizzes, surveys, and polls, some games too, if possible.
Roles of a Virtual Meeting Platform
Aside from the efforts that you and your attendees are making, there are some efforts that your virtual meeting platform has to make too. One of the main highlights of a virtual event platform is to provide the users with the ability to customize their designed brandings. If the virtual event platform consists of the required technology, then it can help you in customizing your brand logo, colors, representation, etc. This can help in leaving a long-lasting impression on the mind of the attendees of your virtual meeting room.
Along with this, your opted virtual meeting platform should be able to provide you with a mixture of different sorts of user engagement tools. This can help you in promoting your audience to share their opinions, make efforts to form relationships and converse with others in real-time.
If the setup and the hosting of a virtual meeting room are done properly, then it can do miracles for you and your team. It can decrease unnecessary expenses, increase the productivity and efficiency of the team, save time, and help the environment, all at the same time.
Conclusion
From the time that the pandemic hit the whole world, all of the companies were forced to make their employees work from their homes. This forced working culture is now a preference of many employees. One of the main contributors to this is the virtual meetings. Both the employees and the company heads have found virtual meeting rooms way more efficient than the usual on-site meetings.
This is mainly because of the ability that it provides, such as gaining a better reach and an increased number of attendees. But to make sure that you host successful virtual meetings, you have to keep the points stated above in mind and make sure that you execute those points properly. Always make sure that you choose a virtual meeting hosting software that provides you with all the features that you deem necessary.