Handling meeting impact from High tech

As I mentioned previously, high tech brings more convenient for our daily life and enable us to contact with people all over the world. We can hold an online meeting with our partners located in different countries, and needn't waste time and money for a travel. Voice conference, video conference and web conference enable us to conduct a meeting and exchange ideas with your colleagues across the country, or around the world easily.

But we also face more challenges due to these high tech. Meeting holder finds it is harder to control a meeting today. Hereby I would like to share my experience when I worked in a global company.

Today, Notebook is popular in office and people always bring their notebooks to attend meeting. They can use notebook to do presentation, easy to read online meeting deck. However, many people will use it to deal with their email during the meeting if they think the topics are not relative with them. It causes attendee's distraction and wastes other's time to repeat some topics. So for those attendees in the meeting room, meeting leader can clarify the ground rule - use computer only for meeting or ask everyone to close their notebooks. Meeting leader shares the meeting deck via projector and makes sure everyone can see it clearly. Otherwise, hardcopies should be prepared for attendees. For remote meeting, meeting leader can assign an coordinator at remote site to book a meeting room for local attendees and  lead deck sharing. Through these methods, meeting leader will control the meeting easily.

Video conference is the best channel for remote meeting because it enable real-time interaction in special viewing rooms. But the cost of video conference is expensive and equipment is not popular. So that video conference always limits in high level management meeting. For normal meeting, the popular channel is voice conference which enables people to collaborate by telephone. From previous video "  ConferenceCall Goes Out of Control"(you can click it to view the video), we learned that conference call often goes out of control when attendees don't focus on meeting or are late, their environment is noisy and so on. Meeting leader is only able to learn everything from telephone but the noisy from one attendee' phone also distracts the meeting. Firstly, outlook and IM provide live meeting which can make up the shortage of conference meeting and is free cost. Meeting leader can ask attendee mute their phone during meeting to avoid any unnecessary distraction, get a clear picture of attendees' status, share deck from different computer when there are multi-leaders in meeting, and control the meeting progress. Combined conference call with live meeting enable us to achieve the result of video conference without any additional cost and equipments.