Since more and more people work from home or on the road and deal with multiple suppliers, contractors, and business partners in different parts of the world, the face-to-face meeting is being replaced by the conference call. Here are some tips for making the most of your conference call...
First tip: Send out an agenda.
An agenda is the key to a successful meeting. This is true for any kind of meeting, not just a conference call. Make sure that the instructions for how to join a conference call are always at the top of the agenda, preferably in a box or some other way that makes the text stand out.
You can also send a meeting request from your calendar programme, such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple's iCal, or some other tool. The meeting request is sent as an email with a special format, but you can still add attachments like you would with any other email. Attach the agenda, and in the body of the email, repeat the instructions for how to join the conference call.
Most conference service providers require participants to call a special number, which may be different depending on where the user is or may be a national number, then enter a conference "room" number and a security code or PIN. Make sure that the meeting request and the agenda both have all the important information.
If the conference call is a regular status report, make sure you send out the meeting notes from the last call as well. The first thing on the agenda should be to remind people to do the things they agreed to do.
Tip No. 2: Take care of the housekeeping.
At the beginning of the call, make sure everyone is there by calling the roll. Introduce any new people to the rest of the group and ask them to take a minute or two to talk about who they are and what they will be doing on the call. If someone isn't on the list of people who will be on the call, call them right away (preferably on their cell phone) to get them on the call as soon as possible. If they can't get on the call in a few minutes, you should go ahead without them. Making everyone wait at the beginning of a good conference call is the worst thing that can happen.
Next, make sure that everyone has a copy of the schedule and can hear each other well. If you won't be the one taking notes, make sure everyone knows who will be. This helps in two ways: first, the person taking notes will be careful and responsible, and second, everyone will get the same set of meeting notes after the call. If this isn't clear, you might end up with more than one version, which is both unnecessary and confusing.
Lastly, explain how people should act during the call. Because it's only audio, we can't use the usual signs to show that we want to speak. So, it's important to say right away what the rules will be. These can be as simple as "Please write down any questions, and we'll take care of them one by one after each agenda item," or they can be as complicated as writing down the order in which each person will speak and asking each person to only speak at their time. This last method is called "round table" conferencing, and once people are used to it, it works very well. It does two things: keeps everyone interested and speeds up the time it takes to get through each point.
People can't be expected to follow the interaction rules for the whole call, but laying them out at the beginning will help things go quickly and smoothly.
Turn off the speakerphone, which is the third tip.
If most of the people on the call are not in the same room, you should turn off the speakerphone. If you don't have a high-quality dedicated speakerphone, a speakerphone and a conference call are not a good idea. To stop audio feedback, speakerphones automatically mute the speaker when a loud enough sound is picked up by the microphone. Unfortunately, most speakerphones don't do this very well, and the speaker often goes silent because its own sound is getting back into the mic. This means that annoying words and sentences will be skipped.
Because it's a conference call, these dropouts can sometimes last for a few minutes before someone says, "We missed all that!" It goes without saying that having to repeat yourself over and over again can be very time-consuming and annoying for everyone who doesn't have a speakerphone.
Even if you and the other person are in the same room, it may be better to use two handsets instead of a speakerphone.
Tip #4: Send out notes from meetings.
You should make sure that everyone on the conference call gets a copy of the meeting notes no later than the next morning, while the call is still fresh in everyone's minds.
There are many helpful guides on how to take good notes on the Internet, but in short:
Don't try to write down everything; just write down the things that need to be done.
Keep track of who has agreed to be in charge of each task.
Keep track of when each action item needs to be done.
Don't forget to write down the meeting's time, date, and who was there.
If the conference call is a regular status report, write down the time and date of the next meeting in the meeting notes. If possible, deadlines for action items should match the dates of status meetings, so that notes can be quickly scanned (or even sorted) to find things that need to be followed up in a given meeting.
Tip #5: Don't go on and on.
Studies have shown that when people hold a phone receiver to their ear for more than an hour, they start to feel a number of unpleasant things. In any case, most people can only focus for about forty minutes at a time.
If the call is going on for more than an hour, it's best to end it and pick up where you left off later that day or, better yet, the next day. If this happens often, it could mean that the agenda needs to be changed or that the group needs to be split up into smaller, more focused groups. Having engineers and business people on the same conference call is a waste of time. A better way to handle this is to have three shorter meetings: one with just the engineers, one with the businesspeople, and one with a single representative from each group to present the results and take any feedback to the next department meeting. With a little bit of practise, you can keep each meeting to about twenty minutes.
