Top Tips to Conduct Successful Meetings

Studies have shown that there are at least two mid-level management meetings held within the week that will have disruptions because of issues with technology or malfunction of conference room equipment. It may happen that certain data does appear on the screen, or there will be disturbances and distortion in the teleconference connection. If one has issues with video and audio, the people at the back of the conference room will have issues with understanding the content in the meeting. People spend around half an hour on average fixing these issues, and this cost a company roughly a quarter of a million dollars every year, due to such technical failures. There are some very easy ways to ensure that one doesn’t have these issues or at least minimize their occurrence.

Issues with Remote Connections

Having the video get pixilated or freeze altogether is a sad yet common experience that people go through in a number of meetings. Screen sharing may suddenly stop working, or there may be issues with the audio in video calls.

The Tips:

• You must take some time to perform a few test runs with a couple of attendees before the meeting. If there are to be people who control the remote in the meeting, you must ensure that at least one of them must be there in the test. It is also good to include one of the people from the outside organisation if there is going to be one attending the meeting.
• Make sure that there is a backup platform to use for video conferencing, in case the primary platform fails. Also, it is a good practice to have all the required members already logged into the secondary platform to save on time during the switch.
• If the equipment in the office keeps moving between rooms, a resource calendar can be set up to keep track of which equipment is in which room on a particular day. This way, you can always find the equipment that is required at any time.

Issues with Connecting to the TV/Projector

You may find yourself in a situation where you have all your slides for the presentation ready, but for some reason, they aren’t showing up on the projector or the TV. Or perhaps your video is working alright, and there is no audio.

The Tips:

• First and foremost, you must make sure that there is a strong Wi-Fi signal in the location that you are going to be presenting. If there are no wireless capabilities in the conference room that you have to use, then you should make sure that before the meeting begins, you have a set of the required adapters and cables. These can be easily done if you hire conference equipment.
• Ensure that you check and cross-check every single connection that is required for the video and audio. Check if the switch is turned on. More often than not, it is the very basic thing that one forgets to do that can have a huge impact on the atmosphere of the meeting.
• It is a good habit to make all these cables and peripherals routed in such a way that it is hidden well. The cables shouldn’t make a mess of the space in the room.
• You should have connection boxes that pop up from the table in the meeting room. This removes the need to have wires all over the floor or table, coming from various corners of the room.

You can install boxes for wire-management under the table. They can also run along a table leg, placed vertically.