Video Conferencing Best Practices to Improve Remote Team’s Productivity

In the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations now allow employees to work from home. However, if you supervise a remote workforce, you may have to change and adapt some appropriate and suitable approaches in the office environment to enhance virtual team productivity, especially in virtual conferencing. 

We’ve listed some video conferencing best practices to help improve coordination and boost your remote team’s productivity. Keep reading.

Video Conferencing Best Practices: 8 Tips to Boost Remote Team Productivity 

1. Use a Collaboration Platform

   Effective communication and collaboration are convenient when teammates work in the same office. Text messages, phone calls, and emails are sufficient for collaboration and keep everybody engaged and updated. But when the teammates are dispersed around different locations and working remotely, managing projects and coordination between the workforce becomes a little complicated.

   An online collaboration platform helps manage remote workforces. You can track work progress quickly, connect with teammates, maintain work schedules, and ask for responses, all from the same platform.

2. Conduct Virtual Meetings

   While many organizations now allow their employees to work from home, remote employees may feel detached from teammates. Virtual meetings could be a perfect solution to keep everyone together. Video conferencing platforms will make remote employees feel more connected by allowing coworkers to see and interact with their teammates.

   They can also share work progress or seek peer input and guidance. Check our blog post on keeping meeting participants engaged and interested to find more tips to make your and your team’s remote work more productive.

3. Daily Check-in Meeting

   While working remotely, monitoring your team members’ progress and performance is often difficult. Although remote work management is essential, finding an alternative to watch the team’s activities without administering them at the micro-level is also crucial.

   Daily checking in with your team could be an easy way to keep track of their work progress, assign tasks, and provide guidance as required.

4. Restructure and Reschedule

   You may need to restructure existing processes if your workforce is working remotely or outside the office for the first time. Some approaches and practices may not be appropriate and suitable while working outside the office. Take feedback from your teammates to restructure your work processes to adjust to this new norm.

   Being ready to restructure and reschedule daily work will boost your team’s productivity.

5. Maximize Your Mornings

   You may prioritize and allocate essential tasks in the morning as it leaves the rest of the day to finish homework. Although your team members aren’t going to the office, encourage them to adopt a work-oriented approach at the beginning of the day and start working at regular office times.

   You can accomplish this by holding a routine check-in meeting in the morning to discuss work progress, assign a new task or provide feedback to the team. Also, maintain a daily work schedule and adhere to it as much as possible for a productive day.

6. Maintain Communication

   Commonly, our minds may seek excuses to delay performing the assigned tasks and enjoy relaxation when working remotely without supervision. To overcome this problem, keep in touch with your team members. You can create a chatroom or group on a social platform where everyone can discuss work progress, share updates, or chat casually to feel socially connected. This encourages your team’s productivity and keeps them accountable, and they will feel more obligated to accomplish tasks on time.

7. Use Screen-Sharing Tools

   While employees work remotely from different locations, discussing project details through phone calls and emails is often challenging, particularly if it is associated with data visualizations, PowerPoint presentations, graphic designs, etc. Screen-sharing tools are helpful in this case. When discussing something complex, sharing your screen allows all your teammates to see the materials being discussed and to participate in the conversation. Thus, it speeds up decision-making and improves productivity while everyone works remotely.

8. Send Well-Defined Meeting Agenda

   While online meetings and video conferences have become the standard for most organizations as offices have spread around various locations, it is essential to keep everyone aware of the agenda so that participants feel engaged and interested and make the meetings more productive.A pre-determined and specific agenda is vital to keep participants involved in the discussion. Share the agenda with the participants before the meeting so that everyone is aware of their responsibilities and can respond accordingly. After the meeting, send a brief meeting note to everyone summarizing decisions, instructions, and anticipated timelines, which is more meaningful and effective than comprehensive meeting minutes.

Final Words

Every team in an organization is different. The management approach may need to be different and unique to boost the productivity of a remote workforce. Also, you need to be innovative and take feedback to restructure and reschedule work processes that will improve the remote team’s productivity.