Hasta La Ideas

Video conferencing is a simple and cost effective way to “bring” many people together for a meeting without physically bringing people together. Unfortunately, many digital meetings end up wasting more time than traditional meetings — and most traditional meetings are less-than-stellar points of productive comparison.

Productivity501’s recent article “9 Tips for Effective Video Conferences” provides considerably more than nine tips for how to run productive digital meetings. I particularly enjoyed the advice:

Assume that the technology is going to be a problem and give yourself multiple options and enough time to get everything right … Reboot your computer ahead of time. If you occasionally need to reboot your computer to keep it from getting bogged down, do this ahead of the meeting. You don’t want to force everyone to wait while you reboot your machine.

One of my biggest pet peeves during video conferences is that many people don’t treat it like work. A spouse will come on screen and wave at everyone or one person will take a call on his cell phone or it becomes obvious that someone is surfing the web, checking e-mail, or playing a video game. A good rule of thumb is that if you wouldn’t conduct yourself that way during an in-person meeting, don’t do it while on a video conference.

What advice would you add to “9 Tips for Effective Video Conferences?” I’m eager to read your suggestions. I’m also interested in hearing which video conferencing programs people prefer to use. I’ve never organized a video conference, just participated on them, so I use whatever program the coordinator chooses. I’d like to hear if some of the systems are significantly better at helping users be more productive.