How to Keep Your Remote Workers Engaged in Large Conference Calls
Stay at home workers are becoming more and more common nowadays. Not only is it more convenient for the employee but the company is able to benefit from it as well since it gives them a wider selection of talented individuals. Of course, hiring remote employees also comes with some disadvantages including becoming disconnected from other people in the workplace due to lack of communication and people find it harder to stay focused as well. There’s also the possibility that productivity will decrease. In order to resolve this, companies have opted to use conference calls.
Large conference calls have started to play a huge role in aiding remote employees with their teamwork while raising their efficiency at the same time. More and more companies have started to use this method of communication due to its convenience and it helps cut back on costs in the long run. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to encourage remote employees to join these calls as well as keeping them engaged since unlike face to face meetings, remote meetings are a lot more difficult to handle. In lieu of this, here are some tips on how to make large conference calls more engaging and efficient.
Invite only the people you need.
It starts by making sure your large conference is not crowded. Therefore, you should only invite the necessary people for the call. If it’s with a specific team or an important decision-making session, make sure the people that will be on the call are those that matter for the subject or agenda at hand. Having too much unnecessary members on the call will only derail your conference and result in being counterproductive.
Avoid interference as much as possible.
A good way to make sure that a call will go smoothly is by ensuring that you have a large call conference service that has the essential features that would aid in preventing interference from happening. If the call includes a large number of people, it might be necessary to have a feature that automatically mutes everyone aside from the main speaker.
Promote interaction between participants.
In a good conference call, participants should be able to ask questions, provide suggestions, and receive feedback. Remote employees are more likely to engage in discussions if they are assured with the fact that their words are taken seriously. A good way to promote interaction is through a question and answer segment after a discussion. You can also try starting the meeting with small talk as an icebreaker in order to help the others become more open and engaging.
Use of Visual Cues.
One way to keep the participants’ attention is through the use of visual cues. This can be done through images, videos, graphs, and the like. Additionally, making these files downloadable and having space where they could share files will greatly benefit the people involved.
Online training for new hires.
Most large conference call services include a feature called screen-share. Through this feature, training new hires online is made possible. This greatly benefits remote employees especially those that live far away from the main office for they would no longer have to physically attend training. Not only is this more convenient but it raises productivity at the same time.
Proper Management of Participants
Handling a large number of participants in a conference call is difficult especially when there are people who have no interest in contributing to the discussion. In order to avoid this, make sure to choose the right kind of participants. You should also learn how to figure out when to remove someone from the discussion if they go too far.
In conclusion, facilitating a large conference call is truly difficult at first but with enough practice and through keeping employees engaged, this could benefit the company and play a vital part since it aids in increasing efficiency and productivity in the workplace while saving thousands of money in the process.