How to Behave during Video Calls: 9 Rules for Communicating with Colleagues

These days most companies have asked their employees to stay at home and change their office work for a remote one. In such conditions, the issues of organizing video calls have become especially relevant. It seems that online conferences for dozens and even hundreds of people are a step towards a digital future without borders when people can work from anywhere in the world and get together for negotiations literally by click. But in reality, video calls are often not as good as you might imagine. Someone cannot install the necessary program, someone is nervous  because of the relatives in the background, and someone appears at an important conference call in his pajamas and using the nickname “DimonKiller666”. We have put together some simple rules for making video calls that will help make them comfortable for yourself and your colleagues.

First, decide on a platform that will be easy to use for all team members. Perhaps your company prefers old school methods and continues to use Skype, but now there are more convenient services that do not require you to share your phone number and provide many more functions. So, in Zoom, you can hold free conferences for up to 40 minutes, demonstrate your colleagues your computer screen and automatically record video and audio. Last year, an application found a glitch that allowed users to connect a person to the conference without his consent and turn on his camera, but Zoom replied that they had fixed the problem in the updated version. Now, the share price of Zoom is growing as well as the number of employees who switched to remote work and started using the service.

Discord, the love of all gamers, can be used for work conferences too. The service allows you to create your server for all registered users with an individual structure, for example with several channels, configure different levels of access for participants and even change the design of the interface. In the chat, you can listen to music, see the participant’s screen or add a bot that will automatically search and display pictures. Due to the threat of spreading coronavirus, Google Hangouts Meet now offer some useful features for free. It is now available to immediately invite 250 people to the conference - the number of employees of an average company. Live streaming and video call recording features have also become free.

Register on the selected platform, install the program or application for calls in advance, learn the interface and functions. Also, it will not be amiss to test the microphone, headphones, and camera so as not to do this already during a call. In a large team, where not all employees are familiar with each other, it is better to make an understandable signature - name, and position, and not use a nickname, especially if it has some kind of irony or other hidden senses that are not known to all participants in the video call.

A working conference with the camera turned on is a kind of small intrusion to your home. Your colleagues will be able to see your apartment for the first time precisely as a background during a video call. Therefore, make sure that there are no clothes or a pile of dirty dishes near you, because commonly you clean the house when expecting guests. If you are too tired to make the cleaning, you can use a special Zoom function - a virtual background. Then a starry sky, Golden Gate Bridge or green grass will appear behind your back in the video communication window.

It goes without saying that one should follow a minimal dress code during working online meetings. It is better to choose something monochromic and neutral, without dots, so as not to look like a color spot or one big glitch effect on the screens of your colleagues. Do not forget that anything can happen during a video call: someone rings the doorbell (and you have to go and open it) or you need to go to another room and bring a glass of water. So it’s better to think beforehand about all your clothes and not to forget to put it on.

If you don’t have an opportunity to have a video call in complete silence and isolation, inform your family about the planned online meeting to avoid background noises. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to calm down your dog, so, the best solution will be to buy a new toy or hide food in some boxes. 

It is worth checking in advance how to turn on and off the sound in the selected service so as not to distract colleagues with odd noise, such as keyboard clacking or crinkling of the documents. In Discord, you can set the activation by voice or by pressing a button, and in Zoom, you can simply turn off the sound while you are listening to the other person.

When you have finished making your point or asked a question, wait a few seconds for your interlocutors to answer. Sound delays can occur due to the quality of communication, especially if a colleague works remotely from exotic islands.

It is better to sit so that you are approximately in the middle of the video communication window. In this case, it is worth looking into the camera so that the interlocutor has a feeling of eye contact. 

A video call should be treated the same as a live meeting with colleagues, therefore, the basic rules as usual: not to be late, not to interrupt the interlocutors, not to peak one at a time, and not to digress from the subject of the talk to save your colleagues' time. But often, during online meetings the conversation goes to a completely different direction. Therefore, it is better to pre-select a person who will ensure that all participants speak out, ask the relevant questions and make an audio recording if necessary.

In order to avoid the spreading of coronavirus it is extremely important to stop any contacts with people for some time. Video conferences are a perfect solution nowadays when people have to spend almost 24/7 at home.  They can help to continue the working process and avoid big financial losses of the companies.